How can one summarize this bit of news, and leave out the fact that Iran refers to this UAV as "The Ambassador Of Death?" I mean, come on. That's the best part.
Dr. Kissinger is filing a DMCA copyright violation on his trademark.
But the viability of a zombie apocalypse depends upon the rules the story has in place. Romero zombies are animated by an unknown cause and are purely supernatural with no explanation given. The modern take is to try and explain it away with a virus or something but trying to explain things invites debunking. There's no way for a zombie to work. Leave the mechanism unexplained or even better show scientists explaining why the zombies simply cannot exist while still looking at the inexplicable walking dead, that's some good horror right there. No, the world is not operating the way you thought it should and no, it's not stopping to offer an explanation.
The argument goes back and forth as to whether a zombie outbreak could be contained or is the end of the world. Is it all unburied dead who reanimate or just the people who have had direct contact with a zombie, a bite or scratch? That really changes the game. Given a general societal collapse, the post-apocalyptic scenario is difficult enough without the need of introducing zombies. Zombies just make it all the worse. Just imagine a Captain Tripps pandemic.
There's any number of interesting stories that can be told ranging from isolated outbreaks to the end of the world and everything in between. The most interesting stories will be in scenarios that haven't been explored as frequently.
Unlike Slashdot where everyone agrees 100% with everyone else, the republican party is made up of many individuals with differing opinions, and those opinions sometimes conflict with each other.
When I first learned about mud dauber wasps and how they fed their young I said "Holy crap, that's where they got the idea for Alien." Similarly I realized the inspiration for the Blob when I learned of ameobae. When I read about zombie ants and saw the video of the fruiting bodies I couldn't believe nobody used this as a movie monster threat yet. Person gets infected with death fungus, behavior becomes erratic and violent until he dies. Once the body collapses the fruiting bodies burst forth and anyone who comes near risks infection. You have the fear factor of violent craziness that's the equal of any Romero movie along with the contagion factor of the spore-covered corpses.
Could you imagine the terror of going into a city hit with the death fungus? Spore dust everywhere worse than pollen in the deep south, scientists picking their way through in hazmat suits. Human-shaped lumps all over the place, limbs twisted in horror and pain. And then from around the corner comes a late-bloomer, infected but still live and moving, screaming obscenities while trying to hit the scientist with a pipe.
And you can come up with an easy explanation for where this shit came from. Government weapons lab wanted something a bit more effective than anthrax. What if dosing the enemy soldier didn't just kill him but turned him into a weapon that killed other soldiers before he died? And he also becomes a mobile factory for producing more biological agent to boot. Only they miscalculated just how effective this weaponized fungus would be.
Sure, ipv4 addresses were a little cumbersome but at least they were numbers and dots. 192.168.0.1. I can type that out on the numeric keypad. 2001:0618:71A3:0801:1319:0211:FEC2:82DC is just awful. Yeah, I know you need to have more characters in there to represent the value and a larger address space means it's going to be a larger number. Keeping the old ipv4 decimal scheme would make addresses look like 128.91.45.157.220.40.0.0.0.0.252.87.212.200.31.255. But I don't really see the hex as an improvement!
This isn't the general public you know. We're talking about convicted criminals who actually drove on public roads while actually drunk. Likely more than once, since they're only convicted if they're caught.
I'm all for liberty and etc, but I have exactly zero patience for letting anyone that's been anywhere near alcohol drive next to me at 70mph. Driving isn't something to mess around with, you can go out to get some milk one day and never come back.
I agree. I have a problem with installing these things on every vehicle but no problem installing them on the cars of DUI-convicted people. You commit a crime, you take your punishment. You keep your liberties until you break the rules. Don't break the rules, remain as free as everyone else. And when the rules make sense, I really don't have a problem with them.
This is not a victimless crime. Someone wants to kill their liver at home, it might cost us money to pay for their terminal care but it's not hurting anyone but the alcoholic. Drunk driving, those fuckers never manage to kill themselves, they just kill others.
Didn't even Hot Coffee help GTA? I'm wondering when they'll have a kicking dogs and raping babies option in a game. That'll make polygonal titties in that unexceptional biking game look like old hat.
Watch "A New Hope", for the scene where Obi-Wan tells Luke he knew Luke's father in the Clone Wars. That's a classic throw away line. The writer thinks, "Where could they know each other from? I know, they were in the army together. Hey, it's SF, do they even have an army? Well, space navy or whatever... Anyhoo, they were in the war together. That oughtta fit with the title. We got this new rebellion, and now I should mention older wars so Star Wars makes more sense. Vietnam? No it's space, so they were in a spacy sounding war together. Hey, how about 'Clone Wars'?"
At that point. Lucas has no idea who or what the clones were clones of, which side the clones fought on, or anything else about the Clone Wars, just that they give the film a feel that fits his title. Later, when he writes sequels, prequels, and Christmas specials, he goes back to look for hooks that can anchor them into the same universe, and decides to make this one of his hooks.
I have crappy ears and so it sounded to me like he said "Colonial Wars." I was surprised as hell when I found out he really said "Clone War." That sounded damn cheesy to teenage me and even cheesier now. Colonial Wars fits with the setting. You've got the core worlds setting up colonies rimward, demanding tribute, securing the frontiers of the Republic. And later that Republic falls. Yeah, that fits.
And you're so right about the hooks Lucas uses not making any sense. The whole Vader/Anakin thing falls apart in the prequels. Luke keeping his father's name and hiding with his uncle on his father's homeworld? Stormtroopers being clones when they most obviously weren't in the existing movies?
Those hooks you mention, the first rule of using them is not contradicting anything that's been previously established. If Kirk and Spock met at the academy, don't have a flashback to them meeting on the USS Constellation for the first time!
Palpatine knew he was evil. He was a master of deception and was sowing seeds of confusion into Anakins mind. Never once did Darth Sidious think he was on the 'good' side.
My preferred take is that Palpy gained his Dark Side powers and decided to conquer the galaxy because he thought he could do it better. The thirst for power and domination became overwhelming and took over the simple, brutal efficiency that his defining character. With Vader, he should have grown disgusted with the corruption and waste of the Old Republic and felt that the people could no longer be trusted to act in their own best interest, that a strong hand was needed to keep order. He would see Palpy as being exactly on the same level as he, motivated for the same reason, but only through time realize that Palpy is in it for Palpy. But he goes along with it because he still feels the bitterness towards the rest of the galaxy and contempt for the weak-minded fools he terrifies.
Discovering he has a son sparks in him the thought of rebellion. His attempt at recruiting Luke in TESB is genuine. The Emperor's whole "strike me down" ploy in ROTJ is just trying to get Luke's goat, he doesn't really think he's going to die. Telling him to kill Vader is genuine because Luke would make an even more powerful apprentice. Vader's conflict finally boils over when he realizes his only son is about to die. Up to this point he thought that Luke could still be turned and safe in the Emperor's keeping.
Vader's heel/face turn isn't so much becoming a fluffy bunny of light but realizing blood is thicker than water. He can be fine with blowing up an entire planet and force-choking imperial officers but he still has enough humanity left in him to want his son to live. That's the only thing left he realizes he cannot, will not sacrifice.
Making him out to be a fluffy bunny at that point is taking things a little far. Lucas said that the Emperor was not intended to be a force user, was originally meant to be an ineffective figurehead manipulated by his advisors. He later realized that if he wanted a heel/face turn, he needed a greater evil for Vader to turn away from. Vader has to be doing wrong for what may have seemed like the right reasons so long ago whereas the Emperor is black as sin, no nuance.
Given the disorganized bunch of feckless idiots the Expanded Universe presents the New Republic leadership as being, there's actually a pretty good argument for the Empire as being the lesser of two evils. When you've got Hitler breathing down your neck, will you throw in with Stalin? If you're Russian you will.
All the EVE advcotes will boast about how they aren't pussies, and how they love risk and a challenge. But they only love risk and challenge when they are heavily favored to win. What do they do when a stronger force shows up? They run away. God forbid they actually fight something that might beat them. Of course, this is the 'intelligent' thing to do in EVE, so you can't fault them.
That's what I disliked about it. As far as real life goes you never want to be in a fair fight -- if it's fair you didn't pick it right. But games should be about fun and enjoyment, not punishment. And you're exactly right -- the people extolling the virtues of fighting in-game aren't likely to find themselves in a fair fight. The wolf has no idea what the sheep is complaining about.
I'll be more interested in online multiplayer games when matchmaking can actually pair like-skilled players together.
This is slashdot. We don't understand your sports pop culture reference.
Re:Interesting applications
on
The Mouse Vanishes
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You mean like the Minority Report interface. Well, guess what, Spielbergs science advisor for the movie, John Underkoffler of MIT's Media Lab actually further developed the idea.
I've seen those presentations. While incredibly cool to watch, I'm still puzzling over the practicality of it. While everyone assumes that we can improve upon the mouse and keyboard, we still haven't done it yet. I won't be so rash as to say that they cannot be improved on, just that we're going to have to work awfully hard at it. I'd make a comparison to the bicycle. It's one of the most perfect transportation machines ever devised by man. People-powered, easy to operate and maintain. The Segway was pitched as being a bicycle replacement and while being incredibly cool, it most certainly could not be that. Expensive, requires power, would be on the sidewalk with people instead of a bike lane in the road, a perfect case-study in overengineering.
A minority report interface makes you wave your hands around like a conductor in an orchestra. That would have to get old very quickly.
Of the future interfaces, I think they still need a lot of baking.
1. Voice control. Getting better but still balkier than doing it yourself. My cell phone still can't even do hands-free dialing properly. We might finally see this implemented properly with GPS navigators, exactly the kind of tool you want to use without taking your hands off the more important task. And while the latest version of Dragon is amazing, it still can't take the place of
2. Touch screen. I still won't be convinced until they get rid of the grease factor. Would also prefer some tactile feedback. They're supposed to be doing stuff with making the screens buckle or vibrate in response to touch.
3. Pupil trackers. Still far off but has the potential of replacing the mouse if they can ever get it working right. Might still wind up as something useful only in specific cases -- you use a pupil tracker on your handheld but a standard mouse on your desktop.
Those are the only practical improvements I know of on the horizon. Gesture interfaces like for video games, that looks like it may be fun for entertainment but I don't know if it will ultimately be of practical value.
Rather than try and dumb down the internet to what is suitable for 8-year-olds, I would rather raise children to be mature and handle adult content. The irony here is regardless of some law, young kids see crazy hardcore sh*t on the internet every day. So I guess I'm revising my first sentence to say that I would rather raise the maturity of adults to cope with the fact that kids can handle adult content.
So... I don't want to sound like an Apple fanboy, but nobody ever said that the Apple forums on Apple's website are a place of free speech, right? I haven't read the terms & conditions of course, but I'm pretty sure there is a clause allowing them to "moderate" according to whatever values they want. AFAIK, they don't censor all the forums on the web...
So how is this censorship?
It certainly fits one of the definitions of censorship. You end up in a tricky area. A restaurant can choose not to serve hard liquor or beer and wine. That's no problem, you can always go to another one that does. If the government prevents anyone from doing it, that's where you have a dry county. But it's not national prohibition, people just go to the next county over to get their beer. I think the whole dry county thing is silly but it is, strictly speaking to the letter of the law, legal.
Apple's actions are corporate censorship. Not illegal but simply awful PR.
It sounds like they are trying to fix my most hated part of the game, the combat system. I loved the look and feel of the game but the combat system made me give up near the end. Surprisingly even though I hated it so much, pulling a Star Destroyer out of the sky was a novel and creative (if poorly implemented) idea.
No, that's actually a perfect example of why the game was so fuxx0red. Star Wars isn't about Dragonball Z Super-Sayan characters. Force users may be powerful but they're not freakin' Greek gods. Yoda can say size matters not but living an X-Wing with his mind took some effort.
If a Force-user can pull a Star Destroyer out of the sky, he could just as well fly everywhere. And make laser beams shoot out of his eyes. And pretty much be Superman. All he needs is a cape and glasses when he needs a disguise.
The new Star Wars MMORPG looks like it's going to be Star Wars 40K complete with stand-in space marines. It's going to suck.
The computer is just a tool. I'd think it has no direct effect on education whatsoever. Smart kids with supportive parents will gain a great deal from having a computer. Dumb kids with dumber parents will spend hours on Youtube, twitter etc and learn nothing of consequence.
Ding ding ding ding! Exactly what I was going to type. Same goes with having an encyclopedia in the house or any other kind of books. Kids who have an interest will make use of the tools and get some learnin' in their heads. Books aren't a magic teaching machine that instill knowledge through osmosis.
The same kinds of kids who improve themselves with books will take to computers; the same kinds of kids who aren't interested in books won't be interested in computers, or at least not in learning with the computers.
Windows Mobile 6.5 on an HTC is slow, balky, slow, crash-prone and a misery to experience. Apple stepped on it's own dick with the latest iPhone hardware but the OS remains rock-solid. The antenna issue can be fixed but Windows Mobile cannot.
Do I foresee them doing anything smarter with a tablet OS? No, no I don't. I think it's more likely for Apple to screw up their OS than for Microsoft to fix theirs. I think Microsoft is culturally incapable of innovation at this point and it would take a massive crisis to change their corporate culture. I don't think they've hit the point at which they're scared enough to make that change.
Oh, right. I'm taking money out of the hands of the starving artists. You know, the ones who aren't getting any money because their points were off the net and golly gee, the movie didn't make any money.
I love Disney strip-mining the world's fairy tales for ideas and then suing people for intellectual property infringements.
Sounds like we have similar tastes. I really got drawn into Oblivion's world despite the ho-hum storyline, while Dragon Age failed to grab me at all. Perhaps it's the open sandbox-style gameplay of Oblivion that appeals to me... Dragon age felt like I was on rails, like one of those Disneyland rides, which is why I gave it up after a few hours.
It's funny. I was really impressed by GTAIV and found it quite engaging. A friend of mine who loves gaming and greatly enjoyed GTAIII and Vice City found IV to be tedious and boring. While many times we'll be identical with our likes and hates, sometimes we're so far off from each other it's crazy.
By the way, I'm the same with SciFi and Firefly.
Any particular reason why? Some people couldn't get past the setting, some couldn't stand the actors, some hated the Joss Whedon dialog. I'm always curious about when someone's feelings about something goes against their usual tastes -- hates the romance genre but loves this movie, loves scifi but hates that movie that everyone else thinks is the best thing since Star Wars.
I found the game completely unimmersive. I've played a handful of RPG's that I've really, really liked but have not been able to find any in a long time that feel really engaging. I thought that Oblivion was a tremendously varied mixed bag. The engine was beyond amazing, just completely brilliant. I spent hours just wandering around the damn environment gawking at everything. Top notch! But the storytelling was limp and uninspired. And don't even get me started on the mess with leveling. Good game design should be intuitive and the leveling system was anything but. You had to read up and study on how to do it correctly. You run into the same problem with the quests where you might put your game in an unwinnable state by doing something the designers did not anticipate.
As far as my playthrough of Dragon Age went, the controls were awful, the maps poorly designed, and the storyline was completely unengaging.
I'm the same way with fighting games. It's not that I dislike the genre -- I love the Dreamcast Soul Caliber -- but so few measure up to that. There's usually just a lot of extraneous fluff and BS and the gameplay itself isn't enjoyable or demands memorizing an endless series of button combos.
The whole Dragon Age phenomenon I find rather puzzling. Tons of people like it and it's not a Larry the Cable Guy situation where you can explain it as lowest common denominators with no taste. No, people like it for what it is. I like RPG's and it falls flat. It's weird how subjective tastes can be. Here's someone who loves a given genre, let's show him something that's seen as a classic of that genre, let's be puzzled when he dislikes it. Loves scifi but hates Firefly. Loves Thai food but hates curry. Strange.
There's always been a weird back and forth between consoles and computers. The first computer I ever played on was an Atari ST and it had a slot for cartridges. You could play video games on it like your standard Atari or run software and it all plugged into the same television.
By the time we got to the NES and SNES era there was a real divergence between PC and console games. Consoles had faster and flashier graphics but PC's really had the edge in more complex games. Flight sims, Sierra adventure games, complicated wargames, etc, you really couldn't do this on the console.
By the Playstation era there started to be a real give and take between PC and console. You could get your Tomb Raider on a console or you could get it on the TV. The rule of thumb is a good graphics card would cost you as much as the whole console. If you wanted 3D games, you should stick with the console. The PC might look better but you paid through the nose for it.
The other big advantage of a console is that you are off the upgrade treadmill. A console will play this year's hottest title for several years until the release of the new console. Buy a fancy computer in January and you might not have the horsepower to play the latest game with all the bells and whistles in December.
Having a stable hardware platform isn't just beneficial for the customer, it's a lifesaver for the publishers. PC games have always been a nightmare to support because of the million and one configurations that could be encountered out there.
Can you imagine the nightmare of introducing a gaming PC standard like this and then watching the general public go nuts trying to deal with the result? Computer gamers were typically computer geeks first and foremost so we liked fiddling with all the gnarly little bits to get games up and running. We came to expect complications. It was all part of the masochistic challenge. Would the average console gamer enjoy the thought of coming home with a game and knowing he's going to spend the first night just trying to get the bastard to work correctly?
And like the other poster said, the Activision president is a motherfucker. If he's for something and it makes him happy, it probably involves fucking somebody's mother. You should be concerned.
Moving sidewalks are like flying cars, a staple of futurism that doesn't really work out so well. (Yes, I know about the Terrafugia. That's not a flying car in the traditional sense. People think Blade Runner when they think flying cars, they think Back to the Future. VTOL from your driveway to someone else's driveway.)
Really, a moving sidewalk is like mass transit, requires a certain density to be feasible. You only usually see that in airports. Just like it's unimaginable to run a subway out to my suburb neighborhood, it's unimaginable to bring a moving sidewalk out there, too.
There's also the practical concern of getting people up to speed. I'm always worried about falling on my face with those airport sidewalks.
If we really want to put some transit options in our cities, I like the personal rapid transit systems people are working on. The idea is to use really light monorails with two passenger cars. The lines only need a telephone pole sized pole and are quiet to run. You could route the line along a highway, out over a field, across a parking lot, zero impact on the space below. It would be computer-controlled so that you could lay out a grid of these lines and get good coverage in a dispersed area, one that wouldn't support conventional mass transit. And you also don't have the headache of starting and stopping a whole train at every stop.
The goal with these systems wouldn't be to completely replace cars but take the single user commuter vehicle off the road. You can still have your car for home for a trip to the store, rent a truck to deliver something bulky, but all the trips that are just one or two people going somewhere could be via one of these monorails. Would also cut down on the tremendous amount of wasted space devoted to parking lots.
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How can one summarize this bit of news, and leave out the fact that Iran refers to this UAV as "The Ambassador Of Death?" I mean, come on. That's the best part.
Dr. Kissinger is filing a DMCA copyright violation on his trademark.
But the viability of a zombie apocalypse depends upon the rules the story has in place. Romero zombies are animated by an unknown cause and are purely supernatural with no explanation given. The modern take is to try and explain it away with a virus or something but trying to explain things invites debunking. There's no way for a zombie to work. Leave the mechanism unexplained or even better show scientists explaining why the zombies simply cannot exist while still looking at the inexplicable walking dead, that's some good horror right there. No, the world is not operating the way you thought it should and no, it's not stopping to offer an explanation.
The argument goes back and forth as to whether a zombie outbreak could be contained or is the end of the world. Is it all unburied dead who reanimate or just the people who have had direct contact with a zombie, a bite or scratch? That really changes the game. Given a general societal collapse, the post-apocalyptic scenario is difficult enough without the need of introducing zombies. Zombies just make it all the worse. Just imagine a Captain Tripps pandemic.
There's any number of interesting stories that can be told ranging from isolated outbreaks to the end of the world and everything in between. The most interesting stories will be in scenarios that haven't been explored as frequently.
Unlike Slashdot where everyone agrees 100% with everyone else, the republican party is made up of many individuals with differing opinions, and those opinions sometimes conflict with each other.
Then the party whip straightens them out.
When I first learned about mud dauber wasps and how they fed their young I said "Holy crap, that's where they got the idea for Alien." Similarly I realized the inspiration for the Blob when I learned of ameobae. When I read about zombie ants and saw the video of the fruiting bodies I couldn't believe nobody used this as a movie monster threat yet. Person gets infected with death fungus, behavior becomes erratic and violent until he dies. Once the body collapses the fruiting bodies burst forth and anyone who comes near risks infection. You have the fear factor of violent craziness that's the equal of any Romero movie along with the contagion factor of the spore-covered corpses.
Could you imagine the terror of going into a city hit with the death fungus? Spore dust everywhere worse than pollen in the deep south, scientists picking their way through in hazmat suits. Human-shaped lumps all over the place, limbs twisted in horror and pain. And then from around the corner comes a late-bloomer, infected but still live and moving, screaming obscenities while trying to hit the scientist with a pipe.
And you can come up with an easy explanation for where this shit came from. Government weapons lab wanted something a bit more effective than anthrax. What if dosing the enemy soldier didn't just kill him but turned him into a weapon that killed other soldiers before he died? And he also becomes a mobile factory for producing more biological agent to boot. Only they miscalculated just how effective this weaponized fungus would be.
Sure, ipv4 addresses were a little cumbersome but at least they were numbers and dots. 192.168.0.1. I can type that out on the numeric keypad. 2001:0618:71A3:0801:1319:0211:FEC2:82DC is just awful. Yeah, I know you need to have more characters in there to represent the value and a larger address space means it's going to be a larger number. Keeping the old ipv4 decimal scheme would make addresses look like 128.91.45.157.220.40.0.0.0.0.252.87.212.200.31.255. But I don't really see the hex as an improvement!
Flash is the savior of the universe. Sending it away would be ungrateful. Flash aaah aaah ahh.
This isn't the general public you know. We're talking about convicted criminals who actually drove on public roads while actually drunk. Likely more than once, since they're only convicted if they're caught.
I'm all for liberty and etc, but I have exactly zero patience for letting anyone that's been anywhere near alcohol drive next to me at 70mph. Driving isn't something to mess around with, you can go out to get some milk one day and never come back.
I agree. I have a problem with installing these things on every vehicle but no problem installing them on the cars of DUI-convicted people. You commit a crime, you take your punishment. You keep your liberties until you break the rules. Don't break the rules, remain as free as everyone else. And when the rules make sense, I really don't have a problem with them.
This is not a victimless crime. Someone wants to kill their liver at home, it might cost us money to pay for their terminal care but it's not hurting anyone but the alcoholic. Drunk driving, those fuckers never manage to kill themselves, they just kill others.
Didn't even Hot Coffee help GTA? I'm wondering when they'll have a kicking dogs and raping babies option in a game. That'll make polygonal titties in that unexceptional biking game look like old hat.
Watch "A New Hope", for the scene where Obi-Wan tells Luke he knew Luke's father in the Clone Wars. That's a classic throw away line. The writer thinks, "Where could they know each other from? I know, they were in the army together. Hey, it's SF, do they even have an army? Well, space navy or whatever... Anyhoo, they were in the war together. That oughtta fit with the title. We got this new rebellion, and now I should mention older wars so Star Wars makes more sense. Vietnam? No it's space, so they were in a spacy sounding war together. Hey, how about 'Clone Wars'?"
At that point. Lucas has no idea who or what the clones were clones of, which side the clones fought on, or anything else about the Clone Wars, just that they give the film a feel that fits his title. Later, when he writes sequels, prequels, and Christmas specials, he goes back to look for hooks that can anchor them into the same universe, and decides to make this one of his hooks.
I have crappy ears and so it sounded to me like he said "Colonial Wars." I was surprised as hell when I found out he really said "Clone War." That sounded damn cheesy to teenage me and even cheesier now. Colonial Wars fits with the setting. You've got the core worlds setting up colonies rimward, demanding tribute, securing the frontiers of the Republic. And later that Republic falls. Yeah, that fits.
And you're so right about the hooks Lucas uses not making any sense. The whole Vader/Anakin thing falls apart in the prequels. Luke keeping his father's name and hiding with his uncle on his father's homeworld? Stormtroopers being clones when they most obviously weren't in the existing movies?
Those hooks you mention, the first rule of using them is not contradicting anything that's been previously established. If Kirk and Spock met at the academy, don't have a flashback to them meeting on the USS Constellation for the first time!
Palpatine knew he was evil. He was a master of deception and was sowing seeds of confusion into Anakins mind. Never once did Darth Sidious think he was on the 'good' side.
My preferred take is that Palpy gained his Dark Side powers and decided to conquer the galaxy because he thought he could do it better. The thirst for power and domination became overwhelming and took over the simple, brutal efficiency that his defining character. With Vader, he should have grown disgusted with the corruption and waste of the Old Republic and felt that the people could no longer be trusted to act in their own best interest, that a strong hand was needed to keep order. He would see Palpy as being exactly on the same level as he, motivated for the same reason, but only through time realize that Palpy is in it for Palpy. But he goes along with it because he still feels the bitterness towards the rest of the galaxy and contempt for the weak-minded fools he terrifies.
Discovering he has a son sparks in him the thought of rebellion. His attempt at recruiting Luke in TESB is genuine. The Emperor's whole "strike me down" ploy in ROTJ is just trying to get Luke's goat, he doesn't really think he's going to die. Telling him to kill Vader is genuine because Luke would make an even more powerful apprentice. Vader's conflict finally boils over when he realizes his only son is about to die. Up to this point he thought that Luke could still be turned and safe in the Emperor's keeping.
Vader's heel/face turn isn't so much becoming a fluffy bunny of light but realizing blood is thicker than water. He can be fine with blowing up an entire planet and force-choking imperial officers but he still has enough humanity left in him to want his son to live. That's the only thing left he realizes he cannot, will not sacrifice.
Making him out to be a fluffy bunny at that point is taking things a little far. Lucas said that the Emperor was not intended to be a force user, was originally meant to be an ineffective figurehead manipulated by his advisors. He later realized that if he wanted a heel/face turn, he needed a greater evil for Vader to turn away from. Vader has to be doing wrong for what may have seemed like the right reasons so long ago whereas the Emperor is black as sin, no nuance.
Given the disorganized bunch of feckless idiots the Expanded Universe presents the New Republic leadership as being, there's actually a pretty good argument for the Empire as being the lesser of two evils. When you've got Hitler breathing down your neck, will you throw in with Stalin? If you're Russian you will.
All the EVE advcotes will boast about how they aren't pussies, and how they love risk and a challenge. But they only love risk and challenge when they are heavily favored to win. What do they do when a stronger force shows up? They run away. God forbid they actually fight something that might beat them. Of course, this is the 'intelligent' thing to do in EVE, so you can't fault them.
That's what I disliked about it. As far as real life goes you never want to be in a fair fight -- if it's fair you didn't pick it right. But games should be about fun and enjoyment, not punishment. And you're exactly right -- the people extolling the virtues of fighting in-game aren't likely to find themselves in a fair fight. The wolf has no idea what the sheep is complaining about.
I'll be more interested in online multiplayer games when matchmaking can actually pair like-skilled players together.
are they going to play for miami heat too?
This is slashdot. We don't understand your sports pop culture reference.
You mean like the Minority Report interface. Well, guess what, Spielbergs science advisor for the movie, John Underkoffler of MIT's Media Lab actually further developed the idea.
I've seen those presentations. While incredibly cool to watch, I'm still puzzling over the practicality of it. While everyone assumes that we can improve upon the mouse and keyboard, we still haven't done it yet. I won't be so rash as to say that they cannot be improved on, just that we're going to have to work awfully hard at it. I'd make a comparison to the bicycle. It's one of the most perfect transportation machines ever devised by man. People-powered, easy to operate and maintain. The Segway was pitched as being a bicycle replacement and while being incredibly cool, it most certainly could not be that. Expensive, requires power, would be on the sidewalk with people instead of a bike lane in the road, a perfect case-study in overengineering.
A minority report interface makes you wave your hands around like a conductor in an orchestra. That would have to get old very quickly.
Of the future interfaces, I think they still need a lot of baking.
1. Voice control. Getting better but still balkier than doing it yourself. My cell phone still can't even do hands-free dialing properly. We might finally see this implemented properly with GPS navigators, exactly the kind of tool you want to use without taking your hands off the more important task. And while the latest version of Dragon is amazing, it still can't take the place of
2. Touch screen. I still won't be convinced until they get rid of the grease factor. Would also prefer some tactile feedback. They're supposed to be doing stuff with making the screens buckle or vibrate in response to touch.
3. Pupil trackers. Still far off but has the potential of replacing the mouse if they can ever get it working right. Might still wind up as something useful only in specific cases -- you use a pupil tracker on your handheld but a standard mouse on your desktop.
Those are the only practical improvements I know of on the horizon. Gesture interfaces like for video games, that looks like it may be fun for entertainment but I don't know if it will ultimately be of practical value.
First they took our money. Then they took our freedom.
But they will never take our Pornography!!!
I know that's the last thing I'd want to take from anyone's cold, dead hands.
Rather than try and dumb down the internet to what is suitable for 8-year-olds, I would rather raise children to be mature and handle adult content.
The irony here is regardless of some law, young kids see crazy hardcore sh*t on the internet every day. So I guess I'm revising my first sentence to say that I would rather raise the maturity of adults to cope with the fact that kids can handle adult content.
I love ir*ny on the internets.
So... I don't want to sound like an Apple fanboy, but nobody ever said that the Apple forums on Apple's website are a place of free speech, right? I haven't read the terms & conditions of course, but I'm pretty sure there is a clause allowing them to "moderate" according to whatever values they want. AFAIK, they don't censor all the forums on the web...
So how is this censorship?
It certainly fits one of the definitions of censorship. You end up in a tricky area. A restaurant can choose not to serve hard liquor or beer and wine. That's no problem, you can always go to another one that does. If the government prevents anyone from doing it, that's where you have a dry county. But it's not national prohibition, people just go to the next county over to get their beer. I think the whole dry county thing is silly but it is, strictly speaking to the letter of the law, legal.
Apple's actions are corporate censorship. Not illegal but simply awful PR.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
It sounds like they are trying to fix my most hated part of the game, the combat system. I loved the look and feel of the game but the combat system made me give up near the end. Surprisingly even though I hated it so much, pulling a Star Destroyer out of the sky was a novel and creative (if poorly implemented) idea.
No, that's actually a perfect example of why the game was so fuxx0red. Star Wars isn't about Dragonball Z Super-Sayan characters. Force users may be powerful but they're not freakin' Greek gods. Yoda can say size matters not but living an X-Wing with his mind took some effort.
If a Force-user can pull a Star Destroyer out of the sky, he could just as well fly everywhere. And make laser beams shoot out of his eyes. And pretty much be Superman. All he needs is a cape and glasses when he needs a disguise.
The new Star Wars MMORPG looks like it's going to be Star Wars 40K complete with stand-in space marines. It's going to suck.
The computer is just a tool. I'd think it has no direct effect on education whatsoever. Smart kids with supportive parents will gain a great deal from having a computer. Dumb kids with dumber parents will spend hours on Youtube, twitter etc and learn nothing of consequence.
Ding ding ding ding! Exactly what I was going to type. Same goes with having an encyclopedia in the house or any other kind of books. Kids who have an interest will make use of the tools and get some learnin' in their heads. Books aren't a magic teaching machine that instill knowledge through osmosis.
The same kinds of kids who improve themselves with books will take to computers; the same kinds of kids who aren't interested in books won't be interested in computers, or at least not in learning with the computers.
Windows Mobile 6.5 on an HTC is slow, balky, slow, crash-prone and a misery to experience. Apple stepped on it's own dick with the latest iPhone hardware but the OS remains rock-solid. The antenna issue can be fixed but Windows Mobile cannot.
Do I foresee them doing anything smarter with a tablet OS? No, no I don't. I think it's more likely for Apple to screw up their OS than for Microsoft to fix theirs. I think Microsoft is culturally incapable of innovation at this point and it would take a massive crisis to change their corporate culture. I don't think they've hit the point at which they're scared enough to make that change.
Oh, right. I'm taking money out of the hands of the starving artists. You know, the ones who aren't getting any money because their points were off the net and golly gee, the movie didn't make any money.
I love Disney strip-mining the world's fairy tales for ideas and then suing people for intellectual property infringements.
Fuck all the fucking fuckers.
Sounds like we have similar tastes. I really got drawn into Oblivion's world despite the ho-hum storyline, while Dragon Age failed to grab me at all. Perhaps it's the open sandbox-style gameplay of Oblivion that appeals to me... Dragon age felt like I was on rails, like one of those Disneyland rides, which is why I gave it up after a few hours.
It's funny. I was really impressed by GTAIV and found it quite engaging. A friend of mine who loves gaming and greatly enjoyed GTAIII and Vice City found IV to be tedious and boring. While many times we'll be identical with our likes and hates, sometimes we're so far off from each other it's crazy.
By the way, I'm the same with SciFi and Firefly.
Any particular reason why? Some people couldn't get past the setting, some couldn't stand the actors, some hated the Joss Whedon dialog. I'm always curious about when someone's feelings about something goes against their usual tastes -- hates the romance genre but loves this movie, loves scifi but hates that movie that everyone else thinks is the best thing since Star Wars.
I found the game completely unimmersive. I've played a handful of RPG's that I've really, really liked but have not been able to find any in a long time that feel really engaging. I thought that Oblivion was a tremendously varied mixed bag. The engine was beyond amazing, just completely brilliant. I spent hours just wandering around the damn environment gawking at everything. Top notch! But the storytelling was limp and uninspired. And don't even get me started on the mess with leveling. Good game design should be intuitive and the leveling system was anything but. You had to read up and study on how to do it correctly. You run into the same problem with the quests where you might put your game in an unwinnable state by doing something the designers did not anticipate.
As far as my playthrough of Dragon Age went, the controls were awful, the maps poorly designed, and the storyline was completely unengaging.
I'm the same way with fighting games. It's not that I dislike the genre -- I love the Dreamcast Soul Caliber -- but so few measure up to that. There's usually just a lot of extraneous fluff and BS and the gameplay itself isn't enjoyable or demands memorizing an endless series of button combos.
The whole Dragon Age phenomenon I find rather puzzling. Tons of people like it and it's not a Larry the Cable Guy situation where you can explain it as lowest common denominators with no taste. No, people like it for what it is. I like RPG's and it falls flat. It's weird how subjective tastes can be. Here's someone who loves a given genre, let's show him something that's seen as a classic of that genre, let's be puzzled when he dislikes it. Loves scifi but hates Firefly. Loves Thai food but hates curry. Strange.
Ah, I enjoyed that one. Didn't know there were sequels. Will have to check them out.
There's always been a weird back and forth between consoles and computers. The first computer I ever played on was an Atari ST and it had a slot for cartridges. You could play video games on it like your standard Atari or run software and it all plugged into the same television.
By the time we got to the NES and SNES era there was a real divergence between PC and console games. Consoles had faster and flashier graphics but PC's really had the edge in more complex games. Flight sims, Sierra adventure games, complicated wargames, etc, you really couldn't do this on the console.
By the Playstation era there started to be a real give and take between PC and console. You could get your Tomb Raider on a console or you could get it on the TV. The rule of thumb is a good graphics card would cost you as much as the whole console. If you wanted 3D games, you should stick with the console. The PC might look better but you paid through the nose for it.
The other big advantage of a console is that you are off the upgrade treadmill. A console will play this year's hottest title for several years until the release of the new console. Buy a fancy computer in January and you might not have the horsepower to play the latest game with all the bells and whistles in December.
Having a stable hardware platform isn't just beneficial for the customer, it's a lifesaver for the publishers. PC games have always been a nightmare to support because of the million and one configurations that could be encountered out there.
Can you imagine the nightmare of introducing a gaming PC standard like this and then watching the general public go nuts trying to deal with the result? Computer gamers were typically computer geeks first and foremost so we liked fiddling with all the gnarly little bits to get games up and running. We came to expect complications. It was all part of the masochistic challenge. Would the average console gamer enjoy the thought of coming home with a game and knowing he's going to spend the first night just trying to get the bastard to work correctly?
And like the other poster said, the Activision president is a motherfucker. If he's for something and it makes him happy, it probably involves fucking somebody's mother. You should be concerned.
Moving sidewalks are like flying cars, a staple of futurism that doesn't really work out so well. (Yes, I know about the Terrafugia. That's not a flying car in the traditional sense. People think Blade Runner when they think flying cars, they think Back to the Future. VTOL from your driveway to someone else's driveway.)
Really, a moving sidewalk is like mass transit, requires a certain density to be feasible. You only usually see that in airports. Just like it's unimaginable to run a subway out to my suburb neighborhood, it's unimaginable to bring a moving sidewalk out there, too.
There's also the practical concern of getting people up to speed. I'm always worried about falling on my face with those airport sidewalks.
If we really want to put some transit options in our cities, I like the personal rapid transit systems people are working on. The idea is to use really light monorails with two passenger cars. The lines only need a telephone pole sized pole and are quiet to run. You could route the line along a highway, out over a field, across a parking lot, zero impact on the space below. It would be computer-controlled so that you could lay out a grid of these lines and get good coverage in a dispersed area, one that wouldn't support conventional mass transit. And you also don't have the headache of starting and stopping a whole train at every stop.
The goal with these systems wouldn't be to completely replace cars but take the single user commuter vehicle off the road. You can still have your car for home for a trip to the store, rent a truck to deliver something bulky, but all the trips that are just one or two people going somewhere could be via one of these monorails. Would also cut down on the tremendous amount of wasted space devoted to parking lots.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTran