Don't bother putting so much effort into arguing. They guy won't even reply. The people that argue against trucks are dogmatic in their views and there's nothing you can do to change them.
I argued once with a guy who wanted a Prius, telling him its a bad investment. I told him financially it makes no sense and the only reason to get one is if it provides you with piece of mind - not that you using 30% less fuel than a compact car is going to make any impact - but whatever. If it makes him feel it does fine, then get a Prius. He got all huffy to this saying how can it not save him money on gas, its a good buy etc. It was all rhetoric without any facts, just buzzwords and propaganda. I posted a lengthy rebuttal using actual numbers to show that if you get a Prius over a similar sized regular car, it will take someone over 15 years to actually break even on the increased initial investment of the Prius. Furthermore, if someone were to take the initial price difference and invest it at a moderate 4% interest rate, they would actually pay off the yearly gas difference between the Prius and the compact gasoline car. To put it another way, the Prius owner puts up a lot more principal to get a return of $500 a year, only he never sees that principal. The point is at the end of 15 years the Prius has finally equal to the small car, but the owner with the small car also has that invested principal too - since it was in a bank and not used towards the price of the car! In the end it makes no financial sense to get one unless the price of gas were significantly higher or the cost of the Prius were much closer to a regular gasoline car. (I could write out all the numbers and exactly what I mean, but I'm just this this to illustrate my point.)
Anyway, after making this point with irrefutable numbers - you know actually working stuff out before I make an investment of $25k he never responded to me. He responded to other people in the thread, mostly just jerking each other off about how great the Prius is, but ignored my reply to his statement. For people who pride themselves on being intellectuals and open-minded it seems whenever something like this comes up logic goes out the window and everyone just gets passionate about owning economically stupid vehicles and how not doing so equates to raping the environment etc.
So yeah, don't even bother, just sit secure in the knowledge that they're wasting their money on stupid shit and driving tiny cars cause they don't know better.
UO doesn't have levels. Those blacksmiths could train their swordsmanship or magic or whatever to defend themselves.
UO also has a well balanced and intricate murderer system - i.e. if you are a murderer anyone can attack you on sight and you are unable to go into towns or are killed on sight by town guards. Just like the real world, there's nothing stopping someone from killing just because they want to. But also like in the real world - and unlike every mmo out there - there are actual long term consequences for your actions and you do become a murderer. Hell, UO even had a bounty system wherein mass murderers would eventually have massive bounties on their heads from the summation of all their victims. Mobs of people would go around trying to hunt them down since you would actually be rewarded for bringing someone to justice. All this of course involved PVP.
There were no spawn campers in UO because there were no spawns.
This game wasn't some shitty pre-WOW level grindfest - it was a living, breathing world with highway men, real danger, and real consequences. It forced people to work together for protection. From playing other mmos, none come close to the camaraderie that UO fostered by placing you into a dangerous world in which the biggest threat to your life weren't mindless computer controlled monsters but other adaptive real-life human beings.
So you don't want to get attacked by me and my buddy hiding in the woods waiting for you to walk by? Go with a friend and kick our ass, then loot all of our shit. Wear a shitty cloak over your awesome armor to make me and my friend over confident, then turn the tables on us. UO was a semi-real (I mean there were dragons and magic and shit) medieval simulation. There were only humans, doing human things - there's no elves or grinding on monsters, spawn camping or retarded raids. You wanna get better as a swordsman you use that skill either by killing some monsters or sparing with your friends. You wanted to make furniture, you could go ahead and do it. You needed wood, you could buy it off a lumberjack or go harvest some yourself.
WoW has 10 million subscribers for reasons other than people who kill other people. I won't go into it but its pretty obvious why WoW is successful. Those 10 million people, if they knew how much fun UO was - I can't attest to its current form - would switch in an instant. But its hard to get people to look at a 10+ year old game when they're content to sit and grind monster after monster so they can get more money to buy better weapons to kill more monsters and do same thing over and over - what fun!
Hands down, UO had the best PVP. No modern mmo has yet to top it. The consequence of death - lose everything on your person. EVERYTHING. Its only when you have true consequences like that that people start taking PVP seriously. Its the only game where you can be hunted by two guys as you run through the woods and your heart is RACING in real life because you desperately don't want to die.
Everyone in that game had a macro for hide, you would spam it as you fled from a battle. Or better yet if you had UO extreme you had your emergency recall button, to make fast getaways before you were slaughtered. I have dozens of great stories in UO of back and forth PVP fighting, murdering, stealing houses and actually having an impact on other players. Its lame as shit when my friends play WoW and try to impress me with their PVP stories, none of which are interesting in the least bit, none of which have any lasting repercussions, and none of which hold the attention of the listener, unless you happen to play WoW. I'd tell my non- gamer friends some of my exploits in UO and they'd always get a good laugh out of it. All I ever get out of hearing WoW stories is total boredom, sometimes to the point that I can't help but mock them for being so into something so dreadfully unexciting.
Who can forget shit like running into someone between towns, paralyzing them, surrounding them with walls, and casting an elemental inside the death-box you created. Or going into the mining area where the RPers hang out, working on their blacksmithing. Casting an energy field on the exit of the mines and telling a group of 9 of them that you're going to murder them all. Watching as they scramble to exit the mine, only to see it sealed off as you go to town on them. For good measure you kill their pack animals too. Having huge battles in front of rival guild houses, the moment a guy drops everyone swarming the corpse and completely looting it of all its items. Taking down a guy with a tame White Wyrm walking around outside town, thinking he's hot shit. As the Wyrm is slowly killed he pleads with his attackers to stop and constantly spams "a follow" to get the creature into town and safety. Watching him whine and put up a fight out of anger for losing his prized possession, only to be cut down. And finally, kicking someone's ass so bad, making him lose such good items/so many reagents that the guy in his vitriol follows you around as a ghost just spamming your screen with lines and lines of OoooOoOOOOooo because he has no other recourse. Or even better, up and quitting the game because his loss was so devastating.
We're not talking about shitty corporate news sources like CNN being supplanted by web loggers. That worked because the quality of reporting is the same on both - i.e. non-existent. They offer the same info, but with private web loggers you can at least get a little bit of flavor to the story, rather than the dry cookie-cutter rehashed AP/Reuters four paragraph 'news' report.
Throw the thoughts that the same thing will happen to scientific journals away. Scientific progress NEEDS peer-review. If it were somehow opened like web blogging then it would be impossible for anyone to separate actual science from the ubiquitous noise of slop-science and at worst total pseudoscience/nutjobs.
Ugh, it gives me visions of a wikipedia for scientific articles. Just imagine, several hundred pages devoted to people's research into "body toxins," "chi," and "maintaining harmony with nature." I mean wikipedia proper already does that, but no one considers it a serious scientific resource (thank god).
In the real world - i.e. not in your room in your parent's house - people don't have their computer sitting in the living room by the TV.
I've noticed a certain lack of critical though on Slashdot lately. I mean really, you could have answered your own comment if you had thought about it for just a moment. Really thought about it, like ran through your head situations where people have different living situations/setups than you. You would have had your answer.
This is a comment in line with people who bitch at people bitching about high gas prices cause they ride their bike 8 miles a day to work. "Why would anyone possibly need a car," and "everyone should just bike to work." Its like, people think that everyone must be exactly like them - no family, non-professional job, snow-less southeastern US, and young. They have no capacity to think critically and put themselves in someone else's shoes or see the situation from a perspective that isn't theirs.
Just think for a fucking second and realize the rest of the world isn't you.
Why does absolutely no developer actually use the damn wii-control in the way people want/expect. Take Zelda - you expect Link to mimic your slashes in how you move the wiimote, instead you just shake it to get it to attack. It just serves as a funky way to push a button - shake = B.
Take this game and its pitching, from the video, - how would you expect to pitch with the wiimote. Obviously, how you pitch in real life. It would take the velocity of your swing, the twist of your hand, the motion and direction into account for a pitch. Instead we get the same fucking motion-equivalent-to-button-push bullshit. Watch the video, you pitch by tilting your hand down. Who the fuck pitches by tilting their hand down. The tilt down can easily be replaced by a button press, since they serve the same purpose. If you want to immerse people in the game with unique controls, why the hell don't the actually do it. How is tilting down a controller to pitch any more immersive than pressing a button.
I have been very, very disapointed by the Wii, since it seems that no one, apparently not even Nintendo, cares to make a game that actually uses the wii-mote in any meaningful way besides as a crosshair or as simply being another way to push a button (shake to attack!). The game that came closest to something like this was Boxing in Wii Sports. Sure it was flawed, but it gave a hint about how to make immersive gaming by showing how to use the controls to that effect. Everyone waited for a boxing-like game to come out, one that was more polished and really responsive - basically just improve upon what seems like a tech demo in Wii Sports. But it doesn't exist, hasn't been made.
At this point I'm beginning to wonder about the limitations of the wii-mote. It seems to me that the lack of games that we expect for the system - those with immersive, direct controls - may be fueled not by developers simply being lazy, but by the limits of what the wii-mote can do. Maybe we can never have a Zelda where the player directly controls his sword because its simply not possible with the wii-mote. Maybe we will never have a responsive boxing game because the wii-mote simply isn't responsive enough to do it. These are the things I and everyone expected from the system. Instead we have games that simply use the motions as buttons (does spinning in Mario Galaxy by shaking the wii-mote offer any benefit over a button?) or others that straight-up tell you to use a regular controller - Smash Bros. The only games we can say successfully used wii-mote it were RE4 and Metroid Prime as they actually used the aiming ability for it. Still, no actual games exist that actually uses the motion to any great benefit.
Sorry for the rant, but seeing yet another game completely miss the point of what the Wii SHOULD be just pissed me off.
This is very very true. I think Warren Buffet even made a comment about how fucked up the short term investment shit has gotten. He's a more traditionalist who invests long term into growing companies in which he sees potential. It's also why he's the richest man in the world. Anyway, his comment was basically that Icahn's intervention will result in absolutely nothing changing except making Icahn a couple million bucks. I think we can take that one step further and agree that it would also lay off a bunch of people and utterly destroy a business.
On a tangential rant, its somewhat sickening that some rich asshole can come in and destroy a viable multiBILLION dollar company, ruin countless people's lives, have negative repercussions for the rest of the industry, and do it all for his own personal benefit.
Yes you are. When I think of miniaturized wearable prosthetics I don't think about how exciting it would be to control giant robots or "Mecha," whatever that is. Also, had you actually watched the video, they tell you the guy with the 3rd arm had it controlled by someone off camera. Regardless, some actual info about your statement:
Yeah, that's not new at all. Surgeons have been using remote robotics for YEARS to do micro-surgery. Recently they've even started to do telesurgery, where the surgeon experienced in one particular procedure lives half way around the world and uses a robotic interface to work with the robot in the operating room thousands of miles away.
There's really no barrier to using it for moon robots, although I can't imagine the benefit of directly controlling them. Plus, there's like a 2.5 second lag which would make it a chore to directly control. Basically it would be pretty stupid and worthless to have a direct interface like that. Anyway, all the mars probes and such are essentially the same thing, none of them are really automated and have to have everything done by direct input from NASA. Of course, their input is keyboards and buttons since they have to plot out what the rover/probe will do exactly as physical speed limits stop them from ever controlling something in real time.
To put it more simply, you'll only ever be able to use something like this (direct input) when controlling something on Earth or reasonable close - like something on the ISS.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. In Europe when you want a new phone you have to shell out several hundred dollars, there are no free phones or discounts. The phone companies here give them away for free*.
*Of course the price of the phone is rolled up into the price of the service you get - that's why new phones need a 2 year service plan because after 2 years you will have paid off the cost of phone. It is also why when you renew your contract you get a new phone, since you have paid off the old one and are making payments on the new one.
If there were no cancelation fees then the company would have no way to make up its initial gift of a several hundred dollar phone to you if you decided to stop paying the monthly fee for it.
If the FCC strikes down cancelation fees then the price of phones will suddenly increase several hundred bucks. This isn't necessarily a good thing for the market since almost everyone I know tends to go for the free phone or the 50 dollar phone when getting a new plan - no one is willing to spend several hundred dollars. At least, not in a lump sum up front.
Is facebook worth billions? Well you have to think it isn't about yearly profit, but about potential future profit. I know that facebook isn't making billions per year but enough investors feel that it has the future earnings potential so that its value IS in the billions, even if its not being realized in the present.
But since no one can see into the future its impossible to tell if the company is over or undervalued right now. Personally, I think facebook is monstrously overvalued and whatever earnings potential investors see is due to a lack of understanding of social networks or the frugality of users. They perceive it as some penultimate repository of personal information that can somehow be funneled into directed-marketing, the 21st century advertising buzz-concept that will revolutionize how all companies do business. Of course they fail to understand that kinds of people on facebook are the same sorts of people that have grown numb to almost all advertising, watch shows online, buy commercial-less dvds etc. A friend recently showed me a rather ridiculous advertisement that was directed at him because of some esoteric and fake interest he had listed on the site. The ad was ridiculous, but more telling was that I was actually surprised there were ads, I'd never noticed them before since I just completely tuned them out.
I think you're wrong on the first point. I feel like it wouldn't be that hard to make a very very lightweight weathervane, maybe even made of foil. I do think you're spot on with your second point though, the pivot would seem to be the limiting factor.
Why didn't they put in a lightweight weather vane with a small fan? That way they could tell direction and velocity. With the rock you can basically gauge the initial wind, but once it starts swinging in the opposite direction its practically impossible to tell if the deflection is from an opposing wind or merely the pendulum swinging. It becomes even more useless if there are sudden changes in wind speed/direction since it will just seemingly bounce round in random directions none of which are reflective of the actual wind direction or velocity.
I don't see how this is any better than a weather vane, cheaper, or smaller. It sure is way more useless.
I just really wanted a response to my question, but I guess its easier to throw it back at me.
To address your statement, yes there is a large outcry against torture both from the public level and at the highest governmental levels as well as active attempts to forbid its use.
So I ask again, is there a similar outcry in the UK over restriction of free-speech?
Gotta love it! It is disheartening that it seems every European country, and Canada too, seems to have some kind of idiotic anti-speech law(s).
The scientology thing just serves to unmask this rather gigantic lapse in liberty. I think a better question than whether the kid is guilty or not is why you Brits have such laws. Further why aren't you outraged that such laws exist and why you aren't actively trying to overturn them? This isn't a flame but a serious question, since when the slightest bit of censorship rears its head in America we tend to jump all over it - as evidenced by the Youtube article still on the frontpage.
This is the point I was trying to get at. If my AC example isn't sufficient, we can use the example of a car's engine. She buys a Honda Civic and those jackass Honda people include a crappy Civic engine. Why should she be forced to use it when she wants to put in a Mustang engine. Should Honda offer everyone a car without an engine by law, or should there be a law requiring Honda to remove the engine on demand and reimburse the person for the cost-as-new of the removed engine?
I'm asking seriously, how is this any different than a computer. The point is if you start to apply this law to other items it illustrates how absurd it is, and how nonsensical it becomes to do business over any product that isn't a single component.
You get relegated to selling only apples, single cuts of meat, individual plates, DVD seasons that are sold by disc - the case also separate, and every piece of electronic equipment is a build-it-yourself of basic single electronic components (sold separately by law)!
To me this feels like she bought a car with power windows and AC then went back to the place that sold her the vehicle and forced them to take out the parts. Not only that but then pay her money for the value of window motors and air-conditioning as if they had been bought separately. She knew what came with it when she bought it, why should the company be forced to refund those features she later decided she no longer needed?
Its not like there aren't other computers on the market without those features.
"The story takes place in Africa where Chris will face quite an epidemic. The enemies this time are not zombies or Ganados, they appear to represent multiple races which addresses the concern that all the enemies in the game would be of African descent"
This political correctness bullshit has got to stop. Why in the world would it be racist to think that the zombie-people you fight in Africa might be *gasp* Africans!
Conversely, in the last game why wasn't it considered racist when you went around systematically killing Spaniards?
By that logic every video game should just be a rainbow of enemies, all the time, regardless of the time period or location. We can't have a repeat of the blatant racism of Sid Meier's Gettysburg!, a game in which you command the wholesale slaughter of white Americans!
The instant an event happens anywhere in the world you have hundreds of cameras on it. This is a very, very good thing. Reporters and ground crews are no longer necessary to capture footage, you can get it de novo, unfiltered, unbiased. Of course, this only happens in a sufficiency advanced nation that has ubiquitous means of recording and means of transmission.
Which is interesting because I could swear China had a Youtube block to prevent such uncontrolled proliferation of footage.
Correct, when other governments do that and ours does not, our hands ARE CLEAN.
I was hoping to illustrate my point in a humorous way, but I guess I'll just be explicit. First, accept that no government is perfect. As long as people are part of the government there will always be mistakes and lapses of judgement. The US government, likewise, is not perfect nor has it always made correct choices. However, there is no way you can make the argument that the US is oppressive, whether from an absolute stance, and most certainly from a relative stance (in comparison to other nations).
So yes I prop up "OTHER GOVERNMENTS THAT DO THAT" because they DO do that and WE DON'T DO THAT.
"Our pot is so black none of the kettles should be expected to listen."
This has to be one of the most ignorant statements I've ever read on slashdot. I guess I forgot about America's recent government mandated bread-lines. Our inability to cross state-lines without proper documentation. Our inability to leave our country to go abroad. The undercover agents that follow foreign nationals within our country all day, everyday. Our mandatory weekly propaganda indoctrination. Our ultrapatriotic school systems which allow reading only of books written by American authors, on patriotic and government sanctioned topics. Our inability to practice religion freely because of government closure of churches. The mass killing of intellectuals that disagree with our current and eternal glorious regime. Our government's suspension of our right to vote, electoral year after electoral year. Our presidents that are in office for 30 years at a time. The fact that not a single newspaper exists that is not wholly government controlled. The fact that we have only one channel which plays only government approved television. Our single radio station which produces an endless stream of mind-numbing propaganda. I could go on but I think the thought-police internet division is about to rape my family after burning my house down.
You're right, our kettle is the BLACKEST. Too bad our country is so oppressive you aren't allowed to leave, maybe you'll find a way to smuggle yourself out, you spoiled perspective-less ignorant jackass.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't bother putting so much effort into arguing. They guy won't even reply. The people that argue against trucks are dogmatic in their views and there's nothing you can do to change them.
I argued once with a guy who wanted a Prius, telling him its a bad investment. I told him financially it makes no sense and the only reason to get one is if it provides you with piece of mind - not that you using 30% less fuel than a compact car is going to make any impact - but whatever. If it makes him feel it does fine, then get a Prius. He got all huffy to this saying how can it not save him money on gas, its a good buy etc. It was all rhetoric without any facts, just buzzwords and propaganda. I posted a lengthy rebuttal using actual numbers to show that if you get a Prius over a similar sized regular car, it will take someone over 15 years to actually break even on the increased initial investment of the Prius. Furthermore, if someone were to take the initial price difference and invest it at a moderate 4% interest rate, they would actually pay off the yearly gas difference between the Prius and the compact gasoline car. To put it another way, the Prius owner puts up a lot more principal to get a return of $500 a year, only he never sees that principal. The point is at the end of 15 years the Prius has finally equal to the small car, but the owner with the small car also has that invested principal too - since it was in a bank and not used towards the price of the car! In the end it makes no financial sense to get one unless the price of gas were significantly higher or the cost of the Prius were much closer to a regular gasoline car. (I could write out all the numbers and exactly what I mean, but I'm just this this to illustrate my point.)
Anyway, after making this point with irrefutable numbers - you know actually working stuff out before I make an investment of $25k he never responded to me. He responded to other people in the thread, mostly just jerking each other off about how great the Prius is, but ignored my reply to his statement. For people who pride themselves on being intellectuals and open-minded it seems whenever something like this comes up logic goes out the window and everyone just gets passionate about owning economically stupid vehicles and how not doing so equates to raping the environment etc.
So yeah, don't even bother, just sit secure in the knowledge that they're wasting their money on stupid shit and driving tiny cars cause they don't know better.
UO doesn't have levels. Those blacksmiths could train their swordsmanship or magic or whatever to defend themselves.
UO also has a well balanced and intricate murderer system - i.e. if you are a murderer anyone can attack you on sight and you are unable to go into towns or are killed on sight by town guards. Just like the real world, there's nothing stopping someone from killing just because they want to. But also like in the real world - and unlike every mmo out there - there are actual long term consequences for your actions and you do become a murderer. Hell, UO even had a bounty system wherein mass murderers would eventually have massive bounties on their heads from the summation of all their victims. Mobs of people would go around trying to hunt them down since you would actually be rewarded for bringing someone to justice. All this of course involved PVP.
There were no spawn campers in UO because there were no spawns.
This game wasn't some shitty pre-WOW level grindfest - it was a living, breathing world with highway men, real danger, and real consequences. It forced people to work together for protection. From playing other mmos, none come close to the camaraderie that UO fostered by placing you into a dangerous world in which the biggest threat to your life weren't mindless computer controlled monsters but other adaptive real-life human beings.
So you don't want to get attacked by me and my buddy hiding in the woods waiting for you to walk by? Go with a friend and kick our ass, then loot all of our shit. Wear a shitty cloak over your awesome armor to make me and my friend over confident, then turn the tables on us. UO was a semi-real (I mean there were dragons and magic and shit) medieval simulation. There were only humans, doing human things - there's no elves or grinding on monsters, spawn camping or retarded raids. You wanna get better as a swordsman you use that skill either by killing some monsters or sparing with your friends. You wanted to make furniture, you could go ahead and do it. You needed wood, you could buy it off a lumberjack or go harvest some yourself.
WoW has 10 million subscribers for reasons other than people who kill other people. I won't go into it but its pretty obvious why WoW is successful. Those 10 million people, if they knew how much fun UO was - I can't attest to its current form - would switch in an instant. But its hard to get people to look at a 10+ year old game when they're content to sit and grind monster after monster so they can get more money to buy better weapons to kill more monsters and do same thing over and over - what fun!
Hands down, UO had the best PVP. No modern mmo has yet to top it. The consequence of death - lose everything on your person. EVERYTHING. Its only when you have true consequences like that that people start taking PVP seriously. Its the only game where you can be hunted by two guys as you run through the woods and your heart is RACING in real life because you desperately don't want to die.
Everyone in that game had a macro for hide, you would spam it as you fled from a battle. Or better yet if you had UO extreme you had your emergency recall button, to make fast getaways before you were slaughtered. I have dozens of great stories in UO of back and forth PVP fighting, murdering, stealing houses and actually having an impact on other players. Its lame as shit when my friends play WoW and try to impress me with their PVP stories, none of which are interesting in the least bit, none of which have any lasting repercussions, and none of which hold the attention of the listener, unless you happen to play WoW. I'd tell my non- gamer friends some of my exploits in UO and they'd always get a good laugh out of it. All I ever get out of hearing WoW stories is total boredom, sometimes to the point that I can't help but mock them for being so into something so dreadfully unexciting.
Who can forget shit like running into someone between towns, paralyzing them, surrounding them with walls, and casting an elemental inside the death-box you created. Or going into the mining area where the RPers hang out, working on their blacksmithing. Casting an energy field on the exit of the mines and telling a group of 9 of them that you're going to murder them all. Watching as they scramble to exit the mine, only to see it sealed off as you go to town on them. For good measure you kill their pack animals too. Having huge battles in front of rival guild houses, the moment a guy drops everyone swarming the corpse and completely looting it of all its items. Taking down a guy with a tame White Wyrm walking around outside town, thinking he's hot shit. As the Wyrm is slowly killed he pleads with his attackers to stop and constantly spams "a follow" to get the creature into town and safety. Watching him whine and put up a fight out of anger for losing his prized possession, only to be cut down. And finally, kicking someone's ass so bad, making him lose such good items/so many reagents that the guy in his vitriol follows you around as a ghost just spamming your screen with lines and lines of OoooOoOOOOooo because he has no other recourse. Or even better, up and quitting the game because his loss was so devastating.
That's real PVP.
We're not talking about shitty corporate news sources like CNN being supplanted by web loggers. That worked because the quality of reporting is the same on both - i.e. non-existent. They offer the same info, but with private web loggers you can at least get a little bit of flavor to the story, rather than the dry cookie-cutter rehashed AP/Reuters four paragraph 'news' report.
Throw the thoughts that the same thing will happen to scientific journals away. Scientific progress NEEDS peer-review. If it were somehow opened like web blogging then it would be impossible for anyone to separate actual science from the ubiquitous noise of slop-science and at worst total pseudoscience/nutjobs.
Ugh, it gives me visions of a wikipedia for scientific articles. Just imagine, several hundred pages devoted to people's research into "body toxins," "chi," and "maintaining harmony with nature." I mean wikipedia proper already does that, but no one considers it a serious scientific resource (thank god).
In the real world - i.e. not in your room in your parent's house - people don't have their computer sitting in the living room by the TV.
I've noticed a certain lack of critical though on Slashdot lately. I mean really, you could have answered your own comment if you had thought about it for just a moment. Really thought about it, like ran through your head situations where people have different living situations/setups than you. You would have had your answer.
This is a comment in line with people who bitch at people bitching about high gas prices cause they ride their bike 8 miles a day to work. "Why would anyone possibly need a car," and "everyone should just bike to work." Its like, people think that everyone must be exactly like them - no family, non-professional job, snow-less southeastern US, and young. They have no capacity to think critically and put themselves in someone else's shoes or see the situation from a perspective that isn't theirs.
Just think for a fucking second and realize the rest of the world isn't you.
Why does absolutely no developer actually use the damn wii-control in the way people want/expect. Take Zelda - you expect Link to mimic your slashes in how you move the wiimote, instead you just shake it to get it to attack. It just serves as a funky way to push a button - shake = B.
Take this game and its pitching, from the video, - how would you expect to pitch with the wiimote. Obviously, how you pitch in real life. It would take the velocity of your swing, the twist of your hand, the motion and direction into account for a pitch. Instead we get the same fucking motion-equivalent-to-button-push bullshit. Watch the video, you pitch by tilting your hand down. Who the fuck pitches by tilting their hand down. The tilt down can easily be replaced by a button press, since they serve the same purpose. If you want to immerse people in the game with unique controls, why the hell don't the actually do it. How is tilting down a controller to pitch any more immersive than pressing a button.
I have been very, very disapointed by the Wii, since it seems that no one, apparently not even Nintendo, cares to make a game that actually uses the wii-mote in any meaningful way besides as a crosshair or as simply being another way to push a button (shake to attack!). The game that came closest to something like this was Boxing in Wii Sports. Sure it was flawed, but it gave a hint about how to make immersive gaming by showing how to use the controls to that effect. Everyone waited for a boxing-like game to come out, one that was more polished and really responsive - basically just improve upon what seems like a tech demo in Wii Sports. But it doesn't exist, hasn't been made.
At this point I'm beginning to wonder about the limitations of the wii-mote. It seems to me that the lack of games that we expect for the system - those with immersive, direct controls - may be fueled not by developers simply being lazy, but by the limits of what the wii-mote can do. Maybe we can never have a Zelda where the player directly controls his sword because its simply not possible with the wii-mote. Maybe we will never have a responsive boxing game because the wii-mote simply isn't responsive enough to do it. These are the things I and everyone expected from the system. Instead we have games that simply use the motions as buttons (does spinning in Mario Galaxy by shaking the wii-mote offer any benefit over a button?) or others that straight-up tell you to use a regular controller - Smash Bros. The only games we can say successfully used wii-mote it were RE4 and Metroid Prime as they actually used the aiming ability for it. Still, no actual games exist that actually uses the motion to any great benefit.
Sorry for the rant, but seeing yet another game completely miss the point of what the Wii SHOULD be just pissed me off.
People who have a PS3 come to mind.
This is very very true. I think Warren Buffet even made a comment about how fucked up the short term investment shit has gotten. He's a more traditionalist who invests long term into growing companies in which he sees potential. It's also why he's the richest man in the world. Anyway, his comment was basically that Icahn's intervention will result in absolutely nothing changing except making Icahn a couple million bucks. I think we can take that one step further and agree that it would also lay off a bunch of people and utterly destroy a business.
On a tangential rant, its somewhat sickening that some rich asshole can come in and destroy a viable multiBILLION dollar company, ruin countless people's lives, have negative repercussions for the rest of the industry, and do it all for his own personal benefit.
Yes you are. When I think of miniaturized wearable prosthetics I don't think about how exciting it would be to control giant robots or "Mecha," whatever that is. Also, had you actually watched the video, they tell you the guy with the 3rd arm had it controlled by someone off camera. Regardless, some actual info about your statement:
Yeah, that's not new at all. Surgeons have been using remote robotics for YEARS to do micro-surgery. Recently they've even started to do telesurgery, where the surgeon experienced in one particular procedure lives half way around the world and uses a robotic interface to work with the robot in the operating room thousands of miles away.
There's really no barrier to using it for moon robots, although I can't imagine the benefit of directly controlling them. Plus, there's like a 2.5 second lag which would make it a chore to directly control. Basically it would be pretty stupid and worthless to have a direct interface like that. Anyway, all the mars probes and such are essentially the same thing, none of them are really automated and have to have everything done by direct input from NASA. Of course, their input is keyboards and buttons since they have to plot out what the rover/probe will do exactly as physical speed limits stop them from ever controlling something in real time.
To put it more simply, you'll only ever be able to use something like this (direct input) when controlling something on Earth or reasonable close - like something on the ISS.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. In Europe when you want a new phone you have to shell out several hundred dollars, there are no free phones or discounts. The phone companies here give them away for free*.
*Of course the price of the phone is rolled up into the price of the service you get - that's why new phones need a 2 year service plan because after 2 years you will have paid off the cost of phone. It is also why when you renew your contract you get a new phone, since you have paid off the old one and are making payments on the new one.
If there were no cancelation fees then the company would have no way to make up its initial gift of a several hundred dollar phone to you if you decided to stop paying the monthly fee for it.
If the FCC strikes down cancelation fees then the price of phones will suddenly increase several hundred bucks. This isn't necessarily a good thing for the market since almost everyone I know tends to go for the free phone or the 50 dollar phone when getting a new plan - no one is willing to spend several hundred dollars. At least, not in a lump sum up front.
Is facebook worth billions? Well you have to think it isn't about yearly profit, but about potential future profit. I know that facebook isn't making billions per year but enough investors feel that it has the future earnings potential so that its value IS in the billions, even if its not being realized in the present.
But since no one can see into the future its impossible to tell if the company is over or undervalued right now. Personally, I think facebook is monstrously overvalued and whatever earnings potential investors see is due to a lack of understanding of social networks or the frugality of users. They perceive it as some penultimate repository of personal information that can somehow be funneled into directed-marketing, the 21st century advertising buzz-concept that will revolutionize how all companies do business. Of course they fail to understand that kinds of people on facebook are the same sorts of people that have grown numb to almost all advertising, watch shows online, buy commercial-less dvds etc. A friend recently showed me a rather ridiculous advertisement that was directed at him because of some esoteric and fake interest he had listed on the site. The ad was ridiculous, but more telling was that I was actually surprised there were ads, I'd never noticed them before since I just completely tuned them out.
I think you're wrong on the first point. I feel like it wouldn't be that hard to make a very very lightweight weathervane, maybe even made of foil. I do think you're spot on with your second point though, the pivot would seem to be the limiting factor.
Thanks for answering the question.
Why didn't they put in a lightweight weather vane with a small fan? That way they could tell direction and velocity. With the rock you can basically gauge the initial wind, but once it starts swinging in the opposite direction its practically impossible to tell if the deflection is from an opposing wind or merely the pendulum swinging. It becomes even more useless if there are sudden changes in wind speed/direction since it will just seemingly bounce round in random directions none of which are reflective of the actual wind direction or velocity.
I don't see how this is any better than a weather vane, cheaper, or smaller. It sure is way more useless.
I just really wanted a response to my question, but I guess its easier to throw it back at me.
To address your statement, yes there is a large outcry against torture both from the public level and at the highest governmental levels as well as active attempts to forbid its use.
So I ask again, is there a similar outcry in the UK over restriction of free-speech?
Gotta love it! It is disheartening that it seems every European country, and Canada too, seems to have some kind of idiotic anti-speech law(s).
The scientology thing just serves to unmask this rather gigantic lapse in liberty. I think a better question than whether the kid is guilty or not is why you Brits have such laws. Further why aren't you outraged that such laws exist and why you aren't actively trying to overturn them? This isn't a flame but a serious question, since when the slightest bit of censorship rears its head in America we tend to jump all over it - as evidenced by the Youtube article still on the frontpage.
This is the point I was trying to get at. If my AC example isn't sufficient, we can use the example of a car's engine. She buys a Honda Civic and those jackass Honda people include a crappy Civic engine. Why should she be forced to use it when she wants to put in a Mustang engine. Should Honda offer everyone a car without an engine by law, or should there be a law requiring Honda to remove the engine on demand and reimburse the person for the cost-as-new of the removed engine?
I'm asking seriously, how is this any different than a computer. The point is if you start to apply this law to other items it illustrates how absurd it is, and how nonsensical it becomes to do business over any product that isn't a single component.
You get relegated to selling only apples, single cuts of meat, individual plates, DVD seasons that are sold by disc - the case also separate, and every piece of electronic equipment is a build-it-yourself of basic single electronic components (sold separately by law)!
To me this feels like she bought a car with power windows and AC then went back to the place that sold her the vehicle and forced them to take out the parts. Not only that but then pay her money for the value of window motors and air-conditioning as if they had been bought separately. She knew what came with it when she bought it, why should the company be forced to refund those features she later decided she no longer needed?
Its not like there aren't other computers on the market without those features.
"The story takes place in Africa where Chris will face quite an epidemic. The enemies this time are not zombies or Ganados, they appear to represent multiple races which addresses the concern that all the enemies in the game would be of African descent"
This political correctness bullshit has got to stop. Why in the world would it be racist to think that the zombie-people you fight in Africa might be *gasp* Africans!
Conversely, in the last game why wasn't it considered racist when you went around systematically killing Spaniards?
By that logic every video game should just be a rainbow of enemies, all the time, regardless of the time period or location. We can't have a repeat of the blatant racism of Sid Meier's Gettysburg!, a game in which you command the wholesale slaughter of white Americans!
Will there ever be a day when electronic voting will be viewed with the same or greater level of credibility as paper voting?
The instant an event happens anywhere in the world you have hundreds of cameras on it. This is a very, very good thing. Reporters and ground crews are no longer necessary to capture footage, you can get it de novo, unfiltered, unbiased. Of course, this only happens in a sufficiency advanced nation that has ubiquitous means of recording and means of transmission.
Which is interesting because I could swear China had a Youtube block to prevent such uncontrolled proliferation of footage.
I don't disagree. But its certainly more immersive to have something moving there than not.
Actually I think it's slightly over 180 degrees - your cornea/lens diffracts the light perpendicular to the direction of your eyes.
Correct, when other governments do that and ours does not, our hands ARE CLEAN.
I was hoping to illustrate my point in a humorous way, but I guess I'll just be explicit. First, accept that no government is perfect. As long as people are part of the government there will always be mistakes and lapses of judgement. The US government, likewise, is not perfect nor has it always made correct choices. However, there is no way you can make the argument that the US is oppressive, whether from an absolute stance, and most certainly from a relative stance (in comparison to other nations).
So yes I prop up "OTHER GOVERNMENTS THAT DO THAT" because they DO do that and WE DON'T DO THAT.
"Our pot is so black none of the kettles should be expected to listen."
This has to be one of the most ignorant statements I've ever read on slashdot. I guess I forgot about America's recent government mandated bread-lines. Our inability to cross state-lines without proper documentation. Our inability to leave our country to go abroad. The undercover agents that follow foreign nationals within our country all day, everyday. Our mandatory weekly propaganda indoctrination. Our ultrapatriotic school systems which allow reading only of books written by American authors, on patriotic and government sanctioned topics. Our inability to practice religion freely because of government closure of churches. The mass killing of intellectuals that disagree with our current and eternal glorious regime. Our government's suspension of our right to vote, electoral year after electoral year. Our presidents that are in office for 30 years at a time. The fact that not a single newspaper exists that is not wholly government controlled. The fact that we have only one channel which plays only government approved television. Our single radio station which produces an endless stream of mind-numbing propaganda. I could go on but I think the thought-police internet division is about to rape my family after burning my house down.
You're right, our kettle is the BLACKEST. Too bad our country is so oppressive you aren't allowed to leave, maybe you'll find a way to smuggle yourself out, you spoiled perspective-less ignorant jackass.
I really don't understand why everyone has such a hard time understanding this. You're spot on.
I assume they have always had the capacity to censor things like that.