I think a system that allows parents to have an effect on what kids eat is necessary when obesity is such a huge problem in a society, and kids simply aren't getting enough exercise. Every day, kids are bombarded by commercials and ads that encourage them to drink coke, eat at McDonalds, etc. There are many huge corporations giving their best efforts to get kids to eat their shitty food. Parents have to battle with these entities every day. I think this system is a good tool to help them fight against the fast-food industry.
I actually wish they had this when I went to high school. My parents gave me 5 bucks every day and told me that I should eat healthy, but I had no concept of what was healthy food. I generally had a slice of pizza and a coke every day, and some potato chips if I had enough money. When I was finally able to go campus, I usually ate at Taco Bell, Grandy's, or Wendys. Fortunately, I was on the soccer team and I have "good genetics." But I was usually one of the last of my teammates when it came to long distance running, sprinting, or interval training. I think my diet made a big impact on that. If I knew what I know now, I would have had a much different diet.
The downside to this thing is that if parents don't know how to eat healthy themselves, than how can we expect them to make their kids eat healthy? So obviously more must be done.
Also, ad banners on battle.net screens? Please. You give an argument essentially stating that all ad banners for third party websites having blizzard game info is lost revenue for blizzard.
Well technically, third party websites COULD result in lost revenue for Blizzard. What's your point? (Although, it wouldnt' be because of other websites ad banners. It would be because less people would be exposed to Blizzard's ad banners.)
This is in fact, not at all the reason the court used to shut down the website.
I never said that the court used the whole ad banner thing to take down bnetd. I know that's not why. But money is the whole reason why Blizzard/Vivendi started the whole issue in the first place. Why else would they wan't get rid of Bnetd?
So if anyone costs blizzard money it was from wasted time from people like YOU.
Wow that's some pretty interesting logic there, dude. Because I didn't join their server they couldn't stress test them enough? It's not like every kid and his grandma wanted to try out the game at the time. I'm pretty sure Blizzard had no problems getting enough people, regardless what you heard a couple of kids say in some bnet channels.
If I costed them money it's probably because I illegally downloaded the Warcraft III beta. Actaully, using your logic it wouldn't have costed them anything. Either way, I've bought Diablo I & II & expansion, Warcraft II & III, Starcraft Mac and PC, Brood War, World of Warcraft with 5 months of playing time. I think my wasted time hardly means shit to them.
When I was around 12 I was playing Mortal Combat with older brother. He kept doing some bs move over and over and it was pissing me off. So I said "That's bullshit!" He told me not to cuss. That's when I dropped the f-bomb. He then proceded to punch me in the head. Yeah, I cried pretty hard.
59k of 5 million is roughly 1%. That's hardly nothing. Not all of those 5 million buy/farm gold either.
In fact, I'm willing to bet that this probably hits the Chinese gold farming companies pretty hard. The article mentions that Blizzard destroyed 22 million gold. If you use the rate of $.15 per gold (which is about how much it's worth these days.) This set of bans has set back the farming companies in the order of millions of dollars.
I was around when the Bnetd thing was going on. I think I used bnetd to play the Warcraft III beta. It was cool, and I wish it was still around, but think about this for a second from a companies perspective. On Battle.net you see ads right? Well being able to put the ads on bnet generated revenue for them. If tons of people started leaving bnet for all these different bnetd servers, they will lose that revenue. Furtheremore, pirates wouldn't have to pay for the games to play and compete online. Not to mention the game experience would be screwed up by player-run unstable, insecure, and slow bnetd servers.
You can't argue that Blizzard wouldn't have lost money if they let bnetd continue. Even if you account for the people who are all pointlessly bitter about it and aren't buying games. They are a company, their goal is to maximize profits. Did you really expect them to let this slide? Blizzard obviously makes great games, and they are making tons of profit because of it. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't give a shit if a few people stopped buying their games for such a stupid reason. I gladly support Blizzard. Maybe someday they'll make Starcraft 2!
"Good gameplay can save a game with a terrible story. But a good story can't save a game with terrible gameplay."
What the hell is gameplay, anyways? Everytime there is a slashdot article about what makes a good game or bad. Everyone immediately starts spouting out the obligatory "gameplay is more important than graphics" or "games these days don't have good gameplay like they used too." What does that mean!?!? I'm not disagreeing that gameplay is important, but I'm just stepping back and thinking for a second. To me it could be any aspect of the game, including the plot/story/enviroment.
"Because i certanly ain't gonna make i easyer for anyone, to "live the lazy way, the stupid way"(TM), when i can be the fittest, who survives in the end.;)"
Unless a grammar/spelling nazi sees this and kills you.
"Um...isn't Democracy about making everyone's voice heard, no matter how educated/uneducated you are? Your statement leans disturbingly toward controlling who can/can't vote."
Um....The GP said educate people and let them decide. How the hell does this seem controlling? He was responding to someone who said that we should force people to vote, now THAT is controlling. Also, the democracy you are talking about is direct democracy. The U.S. government is not a direct democracy.
The Most Important Question
on
Prey Review
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Do you have spiritual powers that allow you to see in the dark. Or do we have to download a duct-tape mod?
Have you played Jedi Knight or JK II? I thought they were really great FPS's. I love how I could go in Han Solo style and blast away the Storm Troopers with various guns, or if I were strong enough with the force, I could just throw all of them off a high-rise with a motion of my hand. The light-sabre fighting got kind of monotonous after while, but there was definately strategy involved.
Where in the article does it say that Vista's networking stack uses a poor design concept? Let me answer that question for you. NOWHERE! I'm not saying Vista is going to perfect, but people are blowing this article way out of proportion. Here are the issues that that Symantic talks about:
-They found several security bugs and determined that Vista's networking technology will be less stable, at least in the short run, than Windows XP's, the report said. -Support for IPv6, something that will eventually be a requirement for OS's in the future, will create some security issues. Wow, Microsoft made such a poor choice here! -The technology that underlies Vista's peer-to-peer collaboration features, much ballyhooed by Microsoft, could also pose a security threat, Symantec said.
Even if you can somehow derive that Symantec is implying poor design concepts with Vista, employees at Symantec admit the following things:
"We're not saying that Vista's network stack is going to be inherently insecure when it is released..."
"We expect many of our results to be invalidated by changes made prior to its public release..."
Furthermore, the article even states that Symantec and Microsoft are competing now. Symantec NEEDS Microsoft OS's to be unstable and insecure, so of course they are going to make these kind of comments. The title of the story is B.S. "Windows Vista still Rife with Insecure Code" my ass. I bet if you saw a/. aritcle about security flaws in Linux, it would say "Very Minor unexpected feature found in Linux Code" or something. Get a brain and stop looking at stuff from one point of view, slashdot.
It's not watching people play video games that's fun. It's watching people REALLY good at video games that could be fun, (assuming you know enough about the game to determine what is really good).
If you played soccer all your life, you will probably like to watch the world cup simply because you are impressed by the skill of the best players in the world. Furthermore, by watching a sport at a professional level you might be able to pick up some new moves to try out on the field when you play. This is no different with video games.
If you never played EVE before, or if you played and thought it was boring as hell (like me), of course it's not gonna be fun. But I'm sure it is for some people.
Your link mostly proved how fantastically boring it is to watch people play video games. That was even more dull than I would have guessed.
It was boring for you. That doesn't mean it's boring to EVERYONE. The spectators were obviously into the match (there seemed to be much more than 70 btw). If they were just there for a convention, I don't think they would have been cheering the winner with such excitement. I thought the match was really interesting because I used to play starcraft religously when I was in high school. The speed of which the players are able to pump out units and micromanage them at the same time is nothing short of amazing. It's pretty much an art.
I used to play on a professional counter-strike team. I remember hundreds of spectators watching our playoff matches through HLTV. And we weren't even close to the top teams.
People like to watch people be the best at what they do. Whether it's Texas Holdem, athletic sports, video games, or even cooking (Iron Chef). The amount of people watching generally relative to how popular that activity is. Right now video games are only popular to the under-30 crowd. Depending on how well the game industry does the future, we will see more or less channels showing matches of video games, and I'm guessing more.
Bah, parent should be modded informative. I played that game for 5 hours, and I don't think I got involved in a single battle. All I remember was mining asteroids and warping from system to system trying to find something interesting to do.
I would like to see an article that has the number of viewers of last year's Super Bowl. Not a speculation of how much many might watch the next Super Bowl.
Elemantary schools may be trying emphasizing soccer over football, but Universities and many High Schools are still completely focused on football. Granted I went to Texas Tech (football is part of religion in Texas), but a huge majority of spending was directed towards our football team, whether it was the stadium, equipment, or the team itself. We don't even have a NCAA men's soccer team, just a woman's soccer team. I don't know the stats but I would imagine that football players get offered better scholarships than soccer players.
The television networks will always favor football over soccer as well. Every 10 seconds there is a stoppage of play, and every change of possession creates an ample oppurtunity to pour advertisements into our living rooms.
As much as I would like to see soccer take over football in terms popularity in America, I don't think that's going to happen. There is just too much money to be made from football, and too much money invested in both college football and the NFL.
None of the battle systems bothered me except Final Fantasy. Holy crap was that slow! How my brother got through playing that game on the nintendo at the age of 14, I'll never know. I beat it on an emulator but that's only because I played that battles at 4x speed.
It was like this:
First player-character attack animation. Wait 3 seconds... DLDO does 3 dmg to IMP Wait 3 seconds... Second player-character attack animation. Wait 3 seconds... WHOR does 8 dmg to IMP Wait 2 seconds... IMP perishes. Wait 2 seconds. BTCH casts FIR3. Wait 3 seconds. Spell animation Wait 10 seconds for each of the 8 imps to die.
Don't even get me started when each character gains a level. And giving the characters immature names is only entertaining for the first 10 or so battles.
WoW, for example, give me a controlled environment where I have ample examples of various behaviors I want to point out and use as 'life lessons' when playing with kids. Perseverance, treating others fairly, random acts of kindness, and our lack of control over how others act are all easy to teach in this format.
Father: "Okay, Billy, what do you after you gank the nice ally?"
Billy: "Spit on his corpse and laugh at him?"
Father: "That's my boy!...BILLY! DON'T AGGRO THOSE DRAGONS...that's a bad Billy! Apoligize to your raid group RIGHT NOW!"
Yeah dude, your kids are going to learn alot about real life through WoW.
Slashdot Mirror
The system is wrong , because it's not neccesary .
I think a system that allows parents to have an effect on what kids eat is necessary when obesity is such a huge problem in a society, and kids simply aren't getting enough exercise. Every day, kids are bombarded by commercials and ads that encourage them to drink coke, eat at McDonalds, etc. There are many huge corporations giving their best efforts to get kids to eat their shitty food. Parents have to battle with these entities every day. I think this system is a good tool to help them fight against the fast-food industry.
I actually wish they had this when I went to high school. My parents gave me 5 bucks every day and told me that I should eat healthy, but I had no concept of what was healthy food. I generally had a slice of pizza and a coke every day, and some potato chips if I had enough money. When I was finally able to go campus, I usually ate at Taco Bell, Grandy's, or Wendys. Fortunately, I was on the soccer team and I have "good genetics." But I was usually one of the last of my teammates when it came to long distance running, sprinting, or interval training. I think my diet made a big impact on that. If I knew what I know now, I would have had a much different diet.
The downside to this thing is that if parents don't know how to eat healthy themselves, than how can we expect them to make their kids eat healthy? So obviously more must be done.
It's people like you that made bnetd look bad.
Huh?
Also, ad banners on battle.net screens? Please. You give an argument essentially stating that all ad banners for third party websites having blizzard game info is lost revenue for blizzard.
Well technically, third party websites COULD result in lost revenue for Blizzard. What's your point?
(Although, it wouldnt' be because of other websites ad banners. It would be because less people would be exposed to Blizzard's ad banners.)
This is in fact, not at all the reason the court used to shut down the website.
I never said that the court used the whole ad banner thing to take down bnetd. I know that's not why. But money is the whole reason why Blizzard/Vivendi started the whole issue in the first place. Why else would they wan't get rid of Bnetd?
So if anyone costs blizzard money it was from wasted time from people like YOU.
Wow that's some pretty interesting logic there, dude. Because I didn't join their server they couldn't stress test them enough? It's not like every kid and his grandma wanted to try out the game at the time. I'm pretty sure Blizzard had no problems getting enough people, regardless what you heard a couple of kids say in some bnet channels.
If I costed them money it's probably because I illegally downloaded the Warcraft III beta. Actaully, using your logic it wouldn't have costed them anything. Either way, I've bought Diablo I & II & expansion, Warcraft II & III, Starcraft Mac and PC, Brood War, World of Warcraft with 5 months of playing time. I think my wasted time hardly means shit to them.
When I was around 12 I was playing Mortal Combat with older brother. He kept doing some bs move over and over and it was pissing me off. So I said "That's bullshit!" He told me not to cuss. That's when I dropped the f-bomb. He then proceded to punch me in the head. Yeah, I cried pretty hard.
59k of 5 million is roughly 1%. That's hardly nothing. Not all of those 5 million buy/farm gold either.
In fact, I'm willing to bet that this probably hits the Chinese gold farming companies pretty hard. The article mentions that Blizzard destroyed 22 million gold. If you use the rate of $.15 per gold (which is about how much it's worth these days.) This set of bans has set back the farming companies in the order of millions of dollars.
I was around when the Bnetd thing was going on. I think I used bnetd to play the Warcraft III beta. It was cool, and I wish it was still around, but think about this for a second from a companies perspective. On Battle.net you see ads right? Well being able to put the ads on bnet generated revenue for them. If tons of people started leaving bnet for all these different bnetd servers, they will lose that revenue. Furtheremore, pirates wouldn't have to pay for the games to play and compete online. Not to mention the game experience would be screwed up by player-run unstable, insecure, and slow bnetd servers.
You can't argue that Blizzard wouldn't have lost money if they let bnetd continue. Even if you account for the people who are all pointlessly bitter about it and aren't buying games. They are a company, their goal is to maximize profits. Did you really expect them to let this slide? Blizzard obviously makes great games, and they are making tons of profit because of it. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't give a shit if a few people stopped buying their games for such a stupid reason. I gladly support Blizzard. Maybe someday they'll make Starcraft 2!
We always had the technology to write on snow, at least males do anyways.
"Good gameplay can save a game with a terrible story. But a good story can't save a game with terrible gameplay."
What the hell is gameplay, anyways? Everytime there is a slashdot article about what makes a good game or bad. Everyone immediately starts spouting out the obligatory "gameplay is more important than graphics" or "games these days don't have good gameplay like they used too." What does that mean!?!? I'm not disagreeing that gameplay is important, but I'm just stepping back and thinking for a second. To me it could be any aspect of the game, including the plot/story/enviroment.
"Because i certanly ain't gonna make i easyer for anyone, to "live the lazy way, the stupid way"(TM), when i can be the fittest, who survives in the end. ;)"
Unless a grammar/spelling nazi sees this and kills you.
"Um...isn't Democracy about making everyone's voice heard, no matter how educated/uneducated you are? Your statement leans disturbingly toward controlling who can/can't vote."
Um....The GP said educate people and let them decide. How the hell does this seem controlling? He was responding to someone who said that we should force people to vote, now THAT is controlling. Also, the democracy you are talking about is direct democracy. The U.S. government is not a direct democracy.
Do you have spiritual powers that allow you to see in the dark. Or do we have to download a duct-tape mod?
Have you played Jedi Knight or JK II? I thought they were really great FPS's. I love how I could go in Han Solo style and blast away the Storm Troopers with various guns, or if I were strong enough with the force, I could just throw all of them off a high-rise with a motion of my hand. The light-sabre fighting got kind of monotonous after while, but there was definately strategy involved.
Where in the article does it say that Vista's networking stack uses a poor design concept? Let me answer that question for you. NOWHERE! I'm not saying Vista is going to perfect, but people are blowing this article way out of proportion. Here are the issues that that Symantic talks about:
/. aritcle about security flaws in Linux, it would say "Very Minor unexpected feature found in Linux Code" or something. Get a brain and stop looking at stuff from one point of view, slashdot.
-They found several security bugs and determined that Vista's networking technology will be less stable, at least in the short run, than Windows XP's, the report said.
-Support for IPv6, something that will eventually be a requirement for OS's in the future, will create some security issues. Wow, Microsoft made such a poor choice here!
-The technology that underlies Vista's peer-to-peer collaboration features, much ballyhooed by Microsoft, could also pose a security threat, Symantec said.
Even if you can somehow derive that Symantec is implying poor design concepts with Vista, employees at Symantec admit the following things:
"We're not saying that Vista's network stack is going to be inherently insecure when it is released..."
"We expect many of our results to be invalidated by changes made prior to its public release..."
Furthermore, the article even states that Symantec and Microsoft are competing now. Symantec NEEDS Microsoft OS's to be unstable and insecure, so of course they are going to make these kind of comments. The title of the story is B.S. "Windows Vista still Rife with Insecure Code" my ass. I bet if you saw a
Umm, breathing uses oxygen and produces carbon dioxide. So the action to take is to hyper-ventalate!
It's not watching people play video games that's fun. It's watching people REALLY good at video games that could be fun, (assuming you know enough about the game to determine what is really good).
If you played soccer all your life, you will probably like to watch the world cup simply because you are impressed by the skill of the best players in the world. Furthermore, by watching a sport at a professional level you might be able to pick up some new moves to try out on the field when you play. This is no different with video games.
If you never played EVE before, or if you played and thought it was boring as hell (like me), of course it's not gonna be fun. But I'm sure it is for some people.
Your link mostly proved how fantastically boring it is to watch people play video games. That was even more dull than I would have guessed.
It was boring for you. That doesn't mean it's boring to EVERYONE. The spectators were obviously into the match (there seemed to be much more than 70 btw). If they were just there for a convention, I don't think they would have been cheering the winner with such excitement. I thought the match was really interesting because I used to play starcraft religously when I was in high school. The speed of which the players are able to pump out units and micromanage them at the same time is nothing short of amazing. It's pretty much an art.
I used to play on a professional counter-strike team. I remember hundreds of spectators watching our playoff matches through HLTV. And we weren't even close to the top teams.
People like to watch people be the best at what they do. Whether it's Texas Holdem, athletic sports, video games, or even cooking (Iron Chef). The amount of people watching generally relative to how popular that activity is. Right now video games are only popular to the under-30 crowd. Depending on how well the game industry does the future, we will see more or less channels showing matches of video games, and I'm guessing more.
Bah, parent should be modded informative. I played that game for 5 hours, and I don't think I got involved in a single battle. All I remember was mining asteroids and warping from system to system trying to find something interesting to do.
Caption should be "from the going-slightly-less-up dept." to be accurate.
Why the hell is this not modded offtopic?
And thank fuck for that.
Thank you, fuck. Thank you so much.
Wait, why are thanking the f-bomb again?
Generation Y kids who probably have no idea what is so interesting about the number 2600
What is so interesting about the number 2600?
Saying the word "blue" doesn't work well, etc..
That's easy to fix. Just say, "brue."
The Worldwide figure is about 1 billion
I would like to see an article that has the number of viewers of last year's Super Bowl. Not a speculation of how much many might watch the next Super Bowl.
Elemantary schools may be trying emphasizing soccer over football, but Universities and many High Schools are still completely focused on football. Granted I went to Texas Tech (football is part of religion in Texas), but a huge majority of spending was directed towards our football team, whether it was the stadium, equipment, or the team itself. We don't even have a NCAA men's soccer team, just a woman's soccer team. I don't know the stats but I would imagine that football players get offered better scholarships than soccer players.
The television networks will always favor football over soccer as well. Every 10 seconds there is a stoppage of play, and every change of possession creates an ample oppurtunity to pour advertisements into our living rooms.
As much as I would like to see soccer take over football in terms popularity in America, I don't think that's going to happen. There is just too much money to be made from football, and too much money invested in both college football and the NFL.
None of the battle systems bothered me except Final Fantasy. Holy crap was that slow! How my brother got through playing that game on the nintendo at the age of 14, I'll never know. I beat it on an emulator but that's only because I played that battles at 4x speed.
It was like this:
First player-character attack animation.
Wait 3 seconds...
DLDO does 3 dmg to IMP
Wait 3 seconds...
Second player-character attack animation.
Wait 3 seconds...
WHOR does 8 dmg to IMP
Wait 2 seconds...
IMP perishes.
Wait 2 seconds.
BTCH casts FIR3.
Wait 3 seconds.
Spell animation
Wait 10 seconds for each of the 8 imps to die.
Don't even get me started when each character gains a level. And giving the characters immature names is only entertaining for the first 10 or so battles.
WoW, for example, give me a controlled environment where I have ample examples of various behaviors I want to point out and use as 'life lessons' when playing with kids. Perseverance, treating others fairly, random acts of kindness, and our lack of control over how others act are all easy to teach in this format.
Father: "Okay, Billy, what do you after you gank the nice ally?"
Billy: "Spit on his corpse and laugh at him?"
Father: "That's my boy!...BILLY! DON'T AGGRO THOSE DRAGONS...that's a bad Billy! Apoligize to your raid group RIGHT NOW!"
Yeah dude, your kids are going to learn alot about real life through WoW.