That's odd. I've never read the book (though I have read LOTS of other Heinlein) but that movie is one of my favorites.
Your criticisms seem mostly to be based on presentation -- technology, weapons, combat scenes etc.
However, I found the movie to be absoletly wonderful as a satire. What I thought most brilliant about it WAS the fact that the cookie cutter characters are right out of Ken and Barby land. Displaced directly from 90210 into the movie. It was so beautiful. Definately one of the best satires I've ever seen. And of course the gratuitous violence everywhere. You must have noticed how over the top everything was -- that's the point! And how can you miss all the fascism references?
I can understand how you might have taken Heinlein's work and completely warped it to his own means -- since I never read it, I really don't know. It certainly didnt' feel at all like a Heinlein novel when I watched it, I was in a very different mindset. I think I enjoyed more than most of Heinlein's stuff, whose books are more in-your-face on-the-surface, and less satire.
Man, you haven't played many games lately, have you? Not only can you notice the difference, but the difference is MUCH bigger than you think. Try it yourself, and then do a quick 180 degree turn in a game.
Even more importantly, it's important to notice that the rate is an AVERAGE. Even if the game has an average of, say, 100 FPS, in moments of intense action the rate still drops WAY WAY down. I wouldn't dare play an intensive game at 40 FPS -- as soon as the action started, you will be likely to drop into the single digits!
Of course, for single player games, 40 is probably perfectly adequate.
Not to mention, with full screen antialiazing just beginning to take off, all of that extra rendering power can now be used to make the images look better! Right now, only the most powerful video cards can perform any anti-aliasing at all, and it's not even particularly good anti-aliasing. There is still a ways to go yet...
Baldur's Gate is OK, but there is nothign really special or remarkable about it. It wouldn't be a bad buy, but I think you'd be better off with Planescape:Torment.
Truly a great game -- I enjoyed it about 10 times more than Baldur's Gate, which got very hack-and-slash tiresome after awhile. You know the kind - it becomes WORK to finish the game, but you've already put in so many hours you just keep going.
Torment, on the other hand, I wished would go on forever. Like a great book, it was almost painful to finish it completely.
Re:Now if they only hurried up with Planescape 2..
on
Baldur's Gate 2 Gold
·
· Score: 1
It really is that simple -- Planescape didn't sell very well. It got great reviews, but wasn't nearly as financially succesful as baldur's gate.
I loved PS:T - the only game where adding points to wisdom and charisma is actually useful. One of the very few games I'd compare to actually reading a book, and not just because it had a whole lot of text, but because of its intelectual and emotional heft.
If anyone has any urge whatsoever to play an involved rpg, definately pick this one up. I've seen it going for as little as 20 bucks already!
Re:Thank you for your response; please read mine
on
Gnutella Vs. SPAM
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· Score: 1
I think you have the wrong idea on just exactly what the problem with this company is. The 'how' is very important, it is NOT the same as any other file. The 'how' is this: (quoted from their website)
What is ShareZilla?
"ShareZilla is a quick, cheap, and easy way to promote your products, services and web-sites across the latest and greatest thing on the Internet: Gnutella. ShareZilla intercepts every Gnutella search that comes across its network horizon and re-transmits an ad back to the person originating the request. In addition, ShareZilla can transmit an MP3 file (if that's what the user is requesting), or it can transmit a Movie, Text, HTML, VS, etc.
When the search originator sends out a request like:
"Strawberry Rhubarb Pie"
ShareZilla will return a string like this:
"WWW.FlatPlanet.Net - Strawberry Rhubarb Pie.mp3"
This is very useful if you're on the web to make money. If you're not on the web to make money, this is just a really neat way of finding out about the latest commercial press release about Strawberry Rhubarb Pie."
>The files are being placed on the Gnutella network just like any others.
As you can see, this is very much false. Before the search was sent, there is no file called 'Strawberry Rhubard Pie'. Since the distributed nature of Gnutella means that every search request gets passed through every user eventually, they can effectively respond to EVERY SINGLE SEARCH REQUEST OF EVERY SINGLE USER. This is doing much more than simply placing the files on the network.
I think the library analogy holds, at least in the most important respect. You request a file, you get something which looks like that file, but redirects you to another website. Or, in the simplest case, it just a blank book with the add in the title.
Filterning isn't the issue. To use your phone analogy, imagine if your OUTGOING calls, rather than taking you to the number you dialed, connected you to audio commercials. Of course, to be completely accurate analogy the call would somehow have to return both the commercials and the real number you were trying to reach.
The censoring or information is an entirely different issue, only somewhat sideways related to this. 'They' (being the users, as Gnutella is just a protocal) are trying to stop someone from hijacking all of the searches and the possible collapse of any useful traffic on the network as a result.
It's not so much the what as the how. If someone were doing this with ANY OF THE CATEGORIES you mentioned -- making every search return an exact match to a renamed file which turns out to be child pornography or bomb making instructions every time -- you'd better believe they'd be taking the same heat, and rightly so. But of course, where's the money in doing that?
Legal commercial advertisements are fine, but this delivery method is NOT. They are not being censored. Imagine if you were looking for a book in a library, and you picked a few up and checked them out, only to find that although the cover looked like the book you wanted, ALL OF THE INSIDE PAGES WERE ADS. Imagine that this happened with every book in the library. You can see how this would piss people off no matter what was in the book -- the point was it's not what you requested.
Nah, I used to agree, but lately I've just played through Deus Ex, which has absolutely zero multiplayer, and I still think it was worth the money I spent. To each his own I guess.
I suppose it would be *nice* if it had multiplayer, but the concentration on the single player experience led to a really great single player game.
This is definately one of the better trolls I've come across. It is a bit too heavy handed at the end with the feeding poor children thing, and mentioning Microsoft directly just yells 'Troll!'. I thought it worked better for the first two paragraphs.
Kinda funny too, since Gore's and Bush's financial policies aren't at all the different.
Unfortunately, since it seems to have no connection to the article, it looks like another SPAM troll, though the first instance of it that I've come across.
Come on, can't you at least releventise it for the current discussion, a little, please?
Well, it wouldn't be practical to play with transparency or wireframe on all the time, but these functions can be hotkeyed. In other words, when you come to a wall that you suspect has someone behind it, you can turn on transparency.
From what I've heard, the smaller roms, usualy heavily action based, supposedly perform worse than many of the much larger roms like pokemon.
It's definately not quite there yet speed wise, but if it were just a *little* bit more optimized and if you could just clock the palm a *little* higher than 32... who knows
Errr.... not quite. It appears the subtleties of the English language are lost on you. Quoted from Steven Pinker:
"Consider an alleged atrocity committed by today's youth: the expression 'I could care less'. The teenagers are trying to express disdain, the adults note, in which case they should be saying 'I couldn't care less'. If they could care les then they do, that means that they really do care, the opposite of what they are trying to say. But if these dudes would stop ragging on teenagers and cope out the construction, they would see that their argument is bogus. Listen to how to the two versions are pronounced:
[diagrom omitted]
The melodies and stresses are completely different, and for a good reason. The second version is not illogical, it's sarcastic. The point of sarcasm is that by making an assertion that is manifestly false or accompanied by ostentatiously mannered intonation, one deliberately implies its opposite. A good paraphrase is, "Oh yeah, as if there was something in the world that I care less about."
There is one -- it was posted here actually. It wasn't released due to legal action threatened from Nintendo. Called 'Gambit' I believe.
An early version was leaked -- it played Tetris, although a little slow and laggy, it actually worked. Only Tetris so far though... (don't know if work is actually continuing or not)
Hellooooo....! They DO have a clue. They wouldn't make any money by releasing the MAME roms, but they can get tons of hits on their site by letting people play them with shockwave.
The opposite seems true in my opinion. If anything, video games allow inherently violent people to 'get it out of their system' so to speak. I knew many kids like this growing up --if they destroy something up on a tv screen they'd look around for something real to destroy instead.
Jeez people, I can quote anyone I damn well please -- that's what a quotation IS. I can grab a random, copyrighted book from the nearest library and quote a passage from it for use in MY newest book. That's the way it has ALWAYS WORKED.
It doesn't even matter if the comments are considered 'public discussion' or 'written works' -- you can quote from both!
I suggest you try the two Fallout games -- they are 'unofficial' sequels to wasteland. Much of the same team worked on them and there are NUMEROUS subtle jokes referring to parts of Wasteland. They are, of course, quite good games in and of themselves. Lots of text and non-lineary story, very little cgi, and a great sense of humour.
When Fallout 2 was finished some of the same team worked on planetscape: torment, which sounds like another great one.
They're are actually MORE creative, complex games out there than ever -- they just often get lost in the crowd since the crowd is so much bigger. Much like the film industry -- plenty of good movies, just maybe not at the local megaplex.
Actually, your brain IS shaped by both Nature and Nurture. There simply isn't enough information in the DNA to form all of the complexity in the brain -- environmental factors have important influences on the normal development of the brain.
It's not really nature VSnurture, rather, both of them play a part in everything. IE, our ABILITY to learn, or to grow new neurons as might be the case here, is part of our heritage and thus affects the ability to form new connections.
MTV has always gotten paid to play videos -- that's how they got started. The videos are basically advertisements for the CDs, so MTV got paid for both its programming AND its regular advertising.
I suppose they might pay for 'exclusive' rights or something now and then, but I'm certain that this is how it worked in the 80's anyway.
this always comes up, and though i haven't read the article i can tell you that he presents a far different view in his books. he has written a bunch of homosexual characters in a very UN-bigot-like manner.
i don't really know how to reconcile these two views -- i suppose he has either changed his mind or (more likely) in the type of magazine in which the article was printed (conservative mormon, right?), the standardview is actually even more bigotted. he couldn't present a directly contrary view to his faith i suppose.
people who correct grammar always irk me -- language follows usage. really, saying 'his' is more confusing if anything. in a sentence like:
The stewardess saw everyone before the devil noticed him.
using him 'correctly' to agree with the singular everyone is nonsensical to my ears.
The stewardess saw everyone before the devil noticed them. is much clearer
i've often found that text-book like 'corrected' grammar is usually far less meaningful and precise than the uncorrected orginal, which had strictly adhered to a sort-of unspoken grammar of far greater complexity.
Re:The Missing Four Minutes from The Awful Truth
on
Bootlegging Buffy
·
· Score: 1
Moore spoke at our school awhile ago, and he showed that segment there. It was hilarious, but even then, way before the Littleton massacre, many in the audience thought that it was too much.
Slashdot Mirror
That's odd. I've never read the book (though I have read LOTS of other Heinlein) but that movie is one of my favorites.
Your criticisms seem mostly to be based on presentation -- technology, weapons, combat scenes etc.
However, I found the movie to be absoletly wonderful as a satire. What I thought most brilliant about it WAS the fact that the cookie cutter characters are right out of Ken and Barby land. Displaced directly from 90210 into the movie. It was so beautiful. Definately one of the best satires I've ever seen. And of course the gratuitous violence everywhere. You must have noticed how over the top everything was -- that's the point! And how can you miss all the fascism references?
I can understand how you might have taken Heinlein's work and completely warped it to his own means -- since I never read it, I really don't know. It certainly didnt' feel at all like a Heinlein novel when I watched it, I was in a very different mindset. I think I enjoyed more than most of Heinlein's stuff, whose books are more in-your-face on-the-surface, and less satire.
Man, you haven't played many games lately, have you? Not only can you notice the difference, but the difference is MUCH bigger than you think. Try it yourself, and then do a quick 180 degree turn in a game.
Even more importantly, it's important to notice that the rate is an AVERAGE. Even if the game has an average of, say, 100 FPS, in moments of intense action the rate still drops WAY WAY down. I wouldn't dare play an intensive game at 40 FPS -- as soon as the action started, you will be likely to drop into the single digits!
Of course, for single player games, 40 is probably perfectly adequate.
Not to mention, with full screen antialiazing just beginning to take off, all of that extra rendering power can now be used to make the images look better! Right now, only the most powerful video cards can perform any anti-aliasing at all, and it's not even particularly good anti-aliasing. There is still a ways to go yet...
Baldur's Gate is OK, but there is nothign really special or remarkable about it. It wouldn't be a bad buy, but I think you'd be better off with Planescape:Torment.
Truly a great game -- I enjoyed it about 10 times more than Baldur's Gate, which got very hack-and-slash tiresome after awhile. You know the kind - it becomes WORK to finish the game, but you've already put in so many hours you just keep going.
Torment, on the other hand, I wished would go on forever. Like a great book, it was almost painful to finish it completely.
It really is that simple -- Planescape didn't sell very well. It got great reviews, but wasn't nearly as financially succesful as baldur's gate.
I loved PS:T - the only game where adding points to wisdom and charisma is actually useful. One of the very few games I'd compare to actually reading a book, and not just because it had a whole lot of text, but because of its intelectual and emotional heft.
If anyone has any urge whatsoever to play an involved rpg, definately pick this one up. I've seen it going for as little as 20 bucks already!
I think you have the wrong idea on just exactly what the problem with this company is. The 'how' is very important, it is NOT the same as any other file. The 'how' is this: (quoted from their website)
What is ShareZilla?
"ShareZilla is a quick, cheap, and easy way to promote your products, services and web-sites across the latest and greatest thing on the Internet: Gnutella. ShareZilla intercepts every Gnutella search that comes across its network horizon and re-transmits an ad back to the person originating the request. In addition, ShareZilla can transmit an MP3 file (if that's what the user is requesting), or it can transmit a Movie, Text, HTML, VS, etc.
When the search originator sends out a request like:
"Strawberry Rhubarb Pie"
ShareZilla will return a string like this:
"WWW.FlatPlanet.Net - Strawberry Rhubarb Pie.mp3"
This is very useful if you're on the web to make money. If you're not on the web to make money, this is just a really neat way of finding out about the latest commercial press release about Strawberry Rhubarb Pie."
>The files are being placed on the Gnutella network just like any others.
As you can see, this is very much false. Before the search was sent, there is no file called 'Strawberry Rhubard Pie'. Since the distributed nature of Gnutella means that every search request gets passed through every user eventually, they can effectively respond to EVERY SINGLE SEARCH REQUEST OF EVERY SINGLE USER. This is doing much more than simply placing the files on the network.
I think the library analogy holds, at least in the most important respect. You request a file, you get something which looks like that file, but redirects you to another website. Or, in the simplest case, it just a blank book with the add in the title.
Filterning isn't the issue. To use your phone analogy, imagine if your OUTGOING calls, rather than taking you to the number you dialed, connected you to audio commercials. Of course, to be completely accurate analogy the call would somehow have to return both the commercials and the real number you were trying to reach.
The censoring or information is an entirely different issue, only somewhat sideways related to this. 'They' (being the users, as Gnutella is just a protocal) are trying to stop someone from hijacking all of the searches and the possible collapse of any useful traffic on the network as a result.
It's not so much the what as the how. If someone were doing this with ANY OF THE CATEGORIES you mentioned -- making every search return an exact match to a renamed file which turns out to be child pornography or bomb making instructions every time -- you'd better believe they'd be taking the same heat, and rightly so. But of course, where's the money in doing that?
Legal commercial advertisements are fine, but this delivery method is NOT. They are not being censored. Imagine if you were looking for a book in a library, and you picked a few up and checked them out, only to find that although the cover looked like the book you wanted, ALL OF THE INSIDE PAGES WERE ADS. Imagine that this happened with every book in the library. You can see how this would piss people off no matter what was in the book -- the point was it's not what you requested.
Nah, I used to agree, but lately I've just played through Deus Ex, which has absolutely zero multiplayer, and I still think it was worth the money I spent. To each his own I guess.
I suppose it would be *nice* if it had multiplayer, but the concentration on the single player experience led to a really great single player game.
This is definately one of the better trolls I've come across. It is a bit too heavy handed at the end with the feeding poor children thing, and mentioning Microsoft directly just yells 'Troll!'. I thought it worked better for the first two paragraphs.
Kinda funny too, since Gore's and Bush's financial policies aren't at all the different.
Unfortunately, since it seems to have no connection to the article, it looks like another SPAM troll, though the first instance of it that I've come across.
Come on, can't you at least releventise it for the current discussion, a little, please?
Well, it wouldn't be practical to play with transparency or wireframe on all the time, but these functions can be hotkeyed. In other words, when you come to a wall that you suspect has someone behind it, you can turn on transparency.
Pretty sneaky stuff.
You've obviously never actually visited mp3.com, go ahead, give it a try.
Here's a link to some roms under 65k, so you can see how it performs with actual games.
http://www.nwnet.co.uk/syko/gb.html
and you can dig up a few here as well:
http://emulation.zone.ru/gbroms_e.html
From what I've heard, the smaller roms, usualy heavily action based, supposedly perform worse than many of the much larger roms like pokemon.
It's definately not quite there yet speed wise, but if it were just a *little* bit more optimized and if you could just clock the palm a *little* higher than 32... who knows
They have the zip, yes, but there's no program file in there! Just the rom converter and the docs!
Anyone who got it before it was pulled -- can you post a mirror somewhere?
Batman - the animated series.
Seriously. It's on the cartoon network, and I'm shocked by how good it is. Great writing, music, and the 'gothic' feel of the animation is great.
Errr.... not quite. It appears the subtleties of the English language are lost on you. Quoted from Steven Pinker:
"Consider an alleged atrocity committed by today's youth: the expression 'I could care less'. The teenagers are trying to express disdain, the adults note, in which case they should be saying 'I couldn't care less'. If they could care les then they do, that means that they really do care, the opposite of what they are trying to say. But if these dudes would stop ragging on teenagers and cope out the construction, they would see that their argument is bogus. Listen to how to the two versions are pronounced:
[diagrom omitted]
The melodies and stresses are completely different, and for a good reason. The second version is not illogical, it's sarcastic. The point of sarcasm is that by making an assertion that is manifestly false or accompanied by ostentatiously mannered intonation, one deliberately implies its opposite. A good paraphrase is, "Oh yeah, as if there was something in the world that I care less about."
There is one -- it was posted here actually. It wasn't released due to legal action threatened from Nintendo. Called 'Gambit' I believe.
An early version was leaked -- it played Tetris, although a little slow and laggy, it actually worked. Only Tetris so far though... (don't know if work is actually continuing or not)
Hellooooo....! They DO have a clue. They wouldn't make any money by releasing the MAME roms, but they can get tons of hits on their site by letting people play them with shockwave.
The opposite seems true in my opinion. If anything, video games allow inherently violent people to 'get it out of their system' so to speak. I knew many kids like this growing up --if they destroy something up on a tv screen they'd look around for something real to destroy instead.
Jeez people, I can quote anyone I damn well please -- that's what a quotation IS. I can grab a random, copyrighted book from the nearest library and quote a passage from it for use in MY newest book. That's the way it has ALWAYS WORKED.
It doesn't even matter if the comments are considered 'public discussion' or 'written works' -- you can quote from both!
I suggest you try the two Fallout games -- they are 'unofficial' sequels to wasteland. Much of the same team worked on them and there are NUMEROUS subtle jokes referring to parts of Wasteland. They are, of course, quite good games in and of themselves. Lots of text and non-lineary story, very little cgi, and a great sense of humour.
When Fallout 2 was finished some of the same team worked on planetscape: torment, which sounds like another great one.
They're are actually MORE creative, complex games out there than ever -- they just often get lost in the crowd since the crowd is so much bigger. Much like the film industry -- plenty of good movies, just maybe not at the local megaplex.
Actually, your brain IS shaped by both Nature and Nurture. There simply isn't enough information in the DNA to form all of the complexity in the brain -- environmental factors have important influences on the normal development of the brain.
It's not really nature VSnurture, rather, both of them play a part in everything. IE, our ABILITY to learn, or to grow new neurons as might be the case here, is part of our heritage and thus affects the ability to form new connections.
MTV has always gotten paid to play videos -- that's how they got started. The videos are basically advertisements for the CDs, so MTV got paid for both its programming AND its regular advertising.
I suppose they might pay for 'exclusive' rights or something now and then, but I'm certain that this is how it worked in the 80's anyway.
this always comes up, and though i haven't read the article i can tell you that he presents a far different view in his books. he has written a bunch of homosexual characters in a very UN-bigot-like manner.
i don't really know how to reconcile these two views -- i suppose he has either changed his mind or (more likely) in the type of magazine in which the article was printed (conservative mormon, right?), the standardview is actually even more bigotted. he couldn't present a directly contrary view to his faith i suppose.
people who correct grammar always irk me -- language follows usage. really, saying 'his' is more confusing if anything. in a sentence like:
The stewardess saw everyone before the devil noticed him.
using him 'correctly' to agree with the singular everyone is nonsensical to my ears.
The stewardess saw everyone before the devil noticed them.
is much clearer
i've often found that text-book like 'corrected' grammar is usually far less meaningful and precise than the uncorrected orginal, which had strictly adhered to a sort-of unspoken grammar of far greater complexity.
Moore spoke at our school awhile ago, and he showed that segment there. It was hilarious, but even then, way before the Littleton massacre, many in the audience thought that it was too much.