California's anti-business laws are the marvel of the nation, certainly. But how do they keep out-sourcing to cheap foreign labor from driving down wages?
So how does that jibe with your comment that 'the west has stopped having babies'? Again, that's replacement level.
Re-read the comment, please. If you miss what I wrote on that a second time, I'll respond.
Japan is the West all of the sudden? A minute ago you were talking about the west...
Point out where I said Japan was the West, please.
Why? Hispanic culture is more strongly rooted in devout Christianity than the average European culture.
Why should that make me eager to have Hispanic culture replace my own culture? I'm an atheist for God's sake.
This is false. If I recall, peak immigration years were in 1900-1910. During that decade, more than a million immigrants PER YEAR came into the country. Especially if you compare the lower population of the time, those numbers were FAR greater than now.
Please re-read my comment. Notice the words "birth rate ratio." Yes I am aware that the direct population ratio was entirely different, which is why I didn't say it. Funny how that works, me not having said something but you still attacking me for it.
But you make another mistake about immigration between 1900-1910. A far greater percentage of that immigration was from European cultures -- so there was very little pressure on American culture. That is entirely different from today.
Now, when you say that "you can be any ethnicity and be an American," I certainly agree. So long as you share American culture. What sort of migration would be necessary, do you think, to replace American culture? And what about European culture?
What do you think of illegal immigration in California? How do you think California should handle the budget demands imposed by it? And what do you think about companies in California out-sourcing high tech jobs to foreign countries and importing workers through the H2-1B Visa program in order to drive down wages in California?
No, not my morality, actually. Any morality at all would be kind of nice. I am a great fan of Asian culture. Judaism possesses an admirable morality. I find Islamic politics disgusting and evil, but I love the warmth and basic hospitality that they have as a people. Christianity is the morality of the culture I was born in, however, and that's the one I'll fight for here. I'd expect other cultures to fight for their own as well.
The American fertility rate is 2.08. The non-Hispanic white American fertility rate is 1.84 (in 1998, I believe from the same CDC study that found the total 2.08 figure). That's far better than the European rate of 1.4. Japan has a worse rate than either.
Now, in Japan, population decline will probably stop well before population hits zero. And because Japan is not importing vast numbers of immigrants to solve its population problem, it will probably maintain its culture. The problems it will face because of population decline will be primarily economic.
In the U.S., it is the Hispanic birth rate that almost entirely makes up for the sub-replacement white birthrate. By 2050, the majority white American population will be a minority and still shrinking. I don't have a problem with Hispanic culture. But I'm not eager to see it replace my own. (Utah is the big exception to the American demographic trend with a fertility rate of 2.71 -- Mormons, you know. Without Mormons, the white trend would be far bleaker.) Moreover, immigration not only increases population, but immigrants currently bring with them a far higher birth rate than our current one. The comparative immigration to native birth rate ratio is far higher than it has ever been in America (since Columbus, that is). And we all know how much fun the natives had after Columbus.
In Europe, of course, the demographic picture is far worse. And Europe is importing the difference from the Islamic world. There is no word for it but replacement. And it's a demographic event that is completely unprecedented.
If you want a better discussion of the figures than I have provided (and with a bibliography and all the fun stuff), check out Buchanan's The Death of the West. You may not agree with his politics, but he does lay out the demographic picture rather well.
Though you might not know it, the designers of GTA created the game not out of selfless love, but out of the desire to make money selling it. Their choices about content were made with the idea of selling more games.
Why am I down on the choices some people make in a free society? Now there is a loaded question. I do agree with freedom, and I do agree that political systems need to guarantee freedom to their citizens. That does not mean that I would like to live in a society where people are not limited by tradition and morality. I would not even call such a society 'free.' Without limits, civilization fails, and freedom cannot be maintained. One of those limits is basic standards about how children are taught about violence. Another limit is basic standards about how children are taught about sex.
You may enjoy the current moral climate of our civilization. But take a look at the demographic side. The West has stopped having children. In a hundred years, our current free society will have been completely replaced in a way far more thorough than the Roman Empire was replaced. The current freedom is already dead on its feet.
Sorry man, but we happen to be human beings, not some Tabula Rasa in a liberal wet dream. Us humans, especially the little ones we tend to call children, react differently when watching violence enacted upon images of human beings, than we react when watching violence enacted against machines which would technically contain a human being. Double standard? Yeah. Smart double standard? You better believe it.
Surprisingly to you no doubt, a free society allows individuals to choose to impose their own standard of morality on the games they create. In better times, morality has won out over money, and games like GTA have been avoided. Today, money is winning. Tomorrow, no doubt, GTA IV will allow the player to rape other characters before murdering them.
I have played both Myth and Shogun. I was impressed by the tactics side of both games, but not by how the strategy side took advantage of it. As you say, I wouldn't really consider either to be RTS. I think that I wrote some comments on Shogun above. My comments on supply were a reply to a comment on Kohan which I have not played.
Warcraft 3 certainly did drop RPG elements, but that was hardly because of some inherent difficulty with combining the two.
I've mentioned Natural Selection in another comment as well. Again, I find its multiplayer RTS style very interesting, but I had been referring to a single player combination, which would necessarily be quite different.
I didn't 'think' of combining board games with RTS because I have played both Shogun and Rise of Nations. Neither of whom were impressive on that front.
We Geeks are having a discussion about grammar?!? Hasn't anybody thought about considerations more important than grammar?
Flavor is the obvious choice here. The unnecessary 'u' is another 8 bits every time it occurs. It's 64 bits with wide character support!!! That's eight freaking bytes. Don't any of you care about kernel bloat?
I think that most of my suggestions have both a tactical element and a strategic element, and actually I'm more interested in the strategic side of things. I don't mean for all of my suggestions to be combined into one game, either. I'd simply like to see attention paid to them issues in future game.
All issues of strategy have a tactical base. Formation is technically a tactics issue. But combined arms is a strategy issue, and in games without formation, it's hard to effectively use combined arms. Terrain is a tactics issue, but holding ground is strategy. Maneuver is the essence of tactics, but you can't have very much strategy at all if you are simply limited to clicking where you want your troops to go. (Or, more correctly, if you aren't limited in how you can order your troops to move.) Though terrain exists to some degree in Warcraft III, for example, there isn't a great deal of thought about strategic position. Rather, it is mostly about tactical position, quite a different thing.
I think that the most interesting improvements in regard to strategy might come from finding some way of limiting the player's knowledge and power over the battlefield. That was the impetus behind my idea of having individual AI generals.
Kohan sounds a little bit like Shogun, though you have more control in Shogun. I think morale is a realism issue, but it can add a dimension that provides a lot of fun.
I think your scripting idea is very good, and there are ways around the performance issue. The easiest would be to ration CPU time to player's scripts. That would mean that a more complicated script would take more gametime to execute. If a unit has 5 rules of engagement, it will react more slowly than a unit with 3, for example. I think that it would be very interesting to go up against a player with your own custom AI, to see how it does against his.
How is it hacking if you publish it on your FTP server? I'm sure no one would call it hacking if the protocol had simply been http instead. Now, this fellow may have used the information for nefarious purposes, and if there is any law he broke in doing so, go get him. But I don't see this as hacking.
Supply -- that was what I forgot to mention. Now, logistics is something that I wouldn't mind leaving up to the computer since it can count faster than I can. But supply makes holding ground important. In too many RTS games the map is just a place to fight. When you have supply lines however, you have to be much more careful with troop placement. There are certain areas that are vital to defend and any attack has to be carefully conducted so that it will not get cut off. Now, much of this stuff should be automated in a real-time game. I wouldn't want to have to send individual supply trucks where they have to go. But making sure supply lines stay open adds an important dimension to the game. I'm interested to see Conquest's gameplay now.
Yes, I've played Natural Selection and enjoyed it a lot. I think that it really should have two teams with overhead commanders, but it's still fun the way it is. I think that it provides a strategy cooperation element that multi-player games have sorely lacked.
I think, however, that an FPS, RTS, combo could work well as a single player game. Perhaps most of the RTS part of the game could be automated, and the player could hop around to different individual units in the thick of battle -- imagine jumping into a marine in the middle of a Starcraft battle. Or, on the other hand, RTS displays could be presented on a straight FPS game as a sort of more advanced Mechwarrior style game.
In the same line of thought as what you've said, the one command that I'd really like to see in more RTS games is Hold Formation. I'd like to be able to line my units up into a certain formation and have them keep it as they move. Right now grouping is simply a way to give the same order to lots of troops at once.
I played Shogun and I liked it a lot. Historical realism obviously limits what the designers could do with the gameplay. But at the same time that's a strength as well because it focuses conception. Beyond the paper-scissors-stone (or Janken Pow?--I recently read that children all over the world play that same hand game and have for centuries) of the unit types, the terrain was the most important part of the game. Gameplay revolved around the hills, bridges, and forests. I felt that it was unfortunate, however, that there were no objectives beyond the killing of enemy soldiers. The terrain was just important as a battlefield, and never as a piece of land that needed to be held. I haven't played Medieval War yet but I plan to.
I thought that the single most inventive thing about Shogun was a graphics engine that makes it look like you're fighting with huge armies when there is actual little individual troop action -- which is both realistic and fun.
I do like the idea of intelligent individual units. I always feel that the computer should do whatever it's capable of, and leave the strategy to me.
What I was getting at with the commander idea though, was having some sort of general that you could assign a dozen of your troops to or some such. Then you could order him to defend a certain section of the map or to attack the enemy somewhere or raid or something like that. That would knock down the god of the battlefield feeling you get when playing most RTS games. The units under your direct control might be in a very limited area. Maybe you wouldn't even know where your generals were until they reported back to you. Stuff like that can open up whole new dimensions to gameplay.
I do agree that Warcraft 3 is fun. It is the epitome of a tactics style RTS. But I think that the low hanging fruit of tactics games has been picked. It's probably been that way since Starcraft. RTS games will have to evolve for there to be any new masterpieces of the genre.
I always figured the majority of slashdotting occured because of bandwidth constraints. I suppose a few servers crapped out, but that has got to be few and far between, hasn't it?
Don't let me crap all over your cutesy linux saves the day story, though.
I am constantly surprised by how conformist the game industry is. Game companies have barely scratched the surface of RTS. Combat could be drastically improved. Most current games concentrate mainly on unit differences. A far more interesting system could be made using the elements of formation, terrain, and maneuver. Control is rarely explored beyond simple point and click directions to individual units. An interesting system would be to make a few computer commanders which the human player could direct. With even simple AI such a system could have real potential. And RTS elements could also be easily combined with a true RPG style game or with FPS games to make for an interesting experience.
If we wanted oil that badly, wouldn't we take over Kuwait and Saudi Arabia? We've got plenty of reason for the Saudis, and our military already owns Kuwait. Who cares about Afghanistan and Iraq? They've got less oil than Alaska.
Your wish for a world without horizontal scroll bars is commendable. Just not pratical. Even if you could get browser compliance across the industry for text (hint: you won't), browsers sometimes display things other than text, and computers sometimes run programs other than web browsers. Hence the need for this mouse for some of us.
Because this mouse lets you deal better with Top Web Design Mistake #3.
My God, but this troll was done exactly right. Anti-Microsoft, and with an absurdly illogical argument that looks reasonable to any Microsoft hater who only reads it fast. I only hope that you continue on with trolls that attack more interesting subjects like gender politics, race, or modern social ideology.
Yeah, looks like he's jumped ship. You know, normal crackpots are supposed to be a little more persistent with their crazy theories. I invested some time into that refutation, and I was figuring that he'd be posting 30 page replies to me for the next couple months.
Personally, I think he's a Norwegian agent. The Norwegians may want everyone to think they're a peaceful little northern country, but they're just lulling us into false confidence. We'll fight our wars amongst ourselves, and when we're weak they'll start up their Viking raiding parties again and steal our cattle and our women.
Bigoted for mentioning Arab incompetence? Maybe you could explain why they keep losing wars even with superior numbers. 1947 was in the bag. And hell, just point out a single well run government over there. But I do apologize. I meant it in jest. I said all the rude things about the Mossad for you, after all.
And again, I'll ask you the mechanism for this world-wide video suppression (including Arab channels). It could simply be the fact that large files take up lots bandwidth. If you want, you could write the a network for a tape - most of them sell them from their achieves. My Aunt still has the VCR recording if you're really desperate. I'll rip it and set up a bit-torrent for you.
First of all, I'll respond to the post you wrote in reply to me.
The video could be faked, but why bother? The Bush administration already had the American people behind them, and knew that nothing could ever convince the Arabs. Again, I'll say that it is possible that bin Laden is simply bragging about something that he wished he had done.
Second, the video went out on CNN. I watched it. My family watched it. It's out there. It went out on CNN live feed. The whole world has it. Arab news services have it as well. How exactly would the US government go about suppressing it? Imagine Bush calling up French or Russian television and telling them what they could and could not put on the web. Think about how that would play for a second.
Now, for the other post you linked to. I was already aware of the small number of Israeli nationals killed in the WTC attack. If that was because all the other Israelis who were there were warned to leave, who warned them? If it were the Mossad, don't you think that would be an extremely risky way to conduct an operation which, if it backfired, would possibly result in something along the lines of a nuclear attack on Israel? If that Odigo stuff really went down as reported (unlikely), then were all the other warnings given my instant messenger? Imagine what the average Israeli might do upon receiving that sort of anonymous message. Ignore it? Call the police? Tell everybody you worked with? It doesn't sound like a well-conceived operation.
As for the fake art dealers, I saw the report when it came out on Fox News. Salon.com had the story as well. Unsurprising. You can't kick over a rock in the US without uncovering a dozen Mossad agents (exaggeration for effect). I do recall that the report said nothing about links to 9/11. Denied them even.
The dancing Israeli Mossad agents don't sound connected to the event. How the hell would they have helped from the ground? Maybe they were really dancing and celebrating. After all, the US was about to open a can of whoop-ass on the Arabs, everybody could see that. Or maybe they weren't dancing, and the neighbors just got freaked by Middle-Easterners. Who knows?
The living hijackers sounds interesting. It could simply be, however, fake news picked up from Arab sources who have been known to, shall we say, make stuff up in the past. But it could be real information. All of the supposed living hijackers had their passports stolen. Now I can imagine the Mossad doing that. But I can imagine their Arab friends doing that too. So what sort of plan would the Mossad be following? They would need more than a dozen rabid Zionists willing to die for a kooky mission to make Americans think the Arabs were attacking. (And for that matter, why Saudis like bin Laden? If you're in the business of framing Arabs, why not the Palestinians?) These fake Arabs apparently did things like getting driver's licenses and playing around with hookers and getting taped on video cameras all before the big event. Isn't that bad for the Mossad - wouldn't they be worried about their fake Arabs getting found out after the fact because of all the people who had seen their faces?
And the stuff about fighter pilot maneuvers by the pilots is bull. The media talked up the flight school angle of the whole thing with help from our government. Frankly, despite what was reported, the hard part of flying a passenger jet is take-off and landing. The rest you can learn from Microsoft's flight simulator in about 15 minutes. Crashing into buildings is nearly as simple as not crashing into them. The hijackers went to flight school out of stupidity. I put it down to Arab incompetence. Wouldn't be the first time.
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California's anti-business laws are the marvel of the nation, certainly. But how do they keep out-sourcing to cheap foreign labor from driving down wages?
So how does that jibe with your comment that 'the west has stopped having babies'? Again, that's replacement level.
Re-read the comment, please. If you miss what I wrote on that a second time, I'll respond.
Japan is the West all of the sudden? A minute ago you were talking about the west...
Point out where I said Japan was the West, please.
Why? Hispanic culture is more strongly rooted in devout Christianity than the average European culture.
Why should that make me eager to have Hispanic culture replace my own culture? I'm an atheist for God's sake.
This is false. If I recall, peak immigration years were in 1900-1910. During that decade, more than a million immigrants PER YEAR came into the country. Especially if you compare the lower population of the time, those numbers were FAR greater than now.
Please re-read my comment. Notice the words "birth rate ratio." Yes I am aware that the direct population ratio was entirely different, which is why I didn't say it. Funny how that works, me not having said something but you still attacking me for it.
But you make another mistake about immigration between 1900-1910. A far greater percentage of that immigration was from European cultures -- so there was very little pressure on American culture. That is entirely different from today.
Now, when you say that "you can be any ethnicity and be an American," I certainly agree. So long as you share American culture. What sort of migration would be necessary, do you think, to replace American culture? And what about European culture?
What do you think of illegal immigration in California? How do you think California should handle the budget demands imposed by it? And what do you think about companies in California out-sourcing high tech jobs to foreign countries and importing workers through the H2-1B Visa program in order to drive down wages in California?
No, not my morality, actually. Any morality at all would be kind of nice. I am a great fan of Asian culture. Judaism possesses an admirable morality. I find Islamic politics disgusting and evil, but I love the warmth and basic hospitality that they have as a people. Christianity is the morality of the culture I was born in, however, and that's the one I'll fight for here. I'd expect other cultures to fight for their own as well.
The American fertility rate is 2.08. The non-Hispanic white American fertility rate is 1.84 (in 1998, I believe from the same CDC study that found the total 2.08 figure). That's far better than the European rate of 1.4. Japan has a worse rate than either.
Now, in Japan, population decline will probably stop well before population hits zero. And because Japan is not importing vast numbers of immigrants to solve its population problem, it will probably maintain its culture. The problems it will face because of population decline will be primarily economic.
In the U.S., it is the Hispanic birth rate that almost entirely makes up for the sub-replacement white birthrate. By 2050, the majority white American population will be a minority and still shrinking. I don't have a problem with Hispanic culture. But I'm not eager to see it replace my own. (Utah is the big exception to the American demographic trend with a fertility rate of 2.71 -- Mormons, you know. Without Mormons, the white trend would be far bleaker.) Moreover, immigration not only increases population, but immigrants currently bring with them a far higher birth rate than our current one. The comparative immigration to native birth rate ratio is far higher than it has ever been in America (since Columbus, that is). And we all know how much fun the natives had after Columbus.
In Europe, of course, the demographic picture is far worse. And Europe is importing the difference from the Islamic world. There is no word for it but replacement. And it's a demographic event that is completely unprecedented.
If you want a better discussion of the figures than I have provided (and with a bibliography and all the fun stuff), check out Buchanan's The Death of the West. You may not agree with his politics, but he does lay out the demographic picture rather well.
Though you might not know it, the designers of GTA created the game not out of selfless love, but out of the desire to make money selling it. Their choices about content were made with the idea of selling more games.
Why am I down on the choices some people make in a free society? Now there is a loaded question. I do agree with freedom, and I do agree that political systems need to guarantee freedom to their citizens. That does not mean that I would like to live in a society where people are not limited by tradition and morality. I would not even call such a society 'free.' Without limits, civilization fails, and freedom cannot be maintained. One of those limits is basic standards about how children are taught about violence. Another limit is basic standards about how children are taught about sex.
You may enjoy the current moral climate of our civilization. But take a look at the demographic side. The West has stopped having children. In a hundred years, our current free society will have been completely replaced in a way far more thorough than the Roman Empire was replaced. The current freedom is already dead on its feet.
Sorry man, but we happen to be human beings, not some Tabula Rasa in a liberal wet dream. Us humans, especially the little ones we tend to call children, react differently when watching violence enacted upon images of human beings, than we react when watching violence enacted against machines which would technically contain a human being. Double standard? Yeah. Smart double standard? You better believe it.
Surprisingly to you no doubt, a free society allows individuals to choose to impose their own standard of morality on the games they create. In better times, morality has won out over money, and games like GTA have been avoided. Today, money is winning. Tomorrow, no doubt, GTA IV will allow the player to rape other characters before murdering them.
I have played both Myth and Shogun. I was impressed by the tactics side of both games, but not by how the strategy side took advantage of it. As you say, I wouldn't really consider either to be RTS. I think that I wrote some comments on Shogun above. My comments on supply were a reply to a comment on Kohan which I have not played.
Warcraft 3 certainly did drop RPG elements, but that was hardly because of some inherent difficulty with combining the two.
I've mentioned Natural Selection in another comment as well. Again, I find its multiplayer RTS style very interesting, but I had been referring to a single player combination, which would necessarily be quite different.
I didn't 'think' of combining board games with RTS because I have played both Shogun and Rise of Nations. Neither of whom were impressive on that front.
We Geeks are having a discussion about grammar?!? Hasn't anybody thought about considerations more important than grammar?
Flavor is the obvious choice here. The unnecessary 'u' is another 8 bits every time it occurs. It's 64 bits with wide character support!!! That's eight freaking bytes. Don't any of you care about kernel bloat?
I think that most of my suggestions have both a tactical element and a strategic element, and actually I'm more interested in the strategic side of things. I don't mean for all of my suggestions to be combined into one game, either. I'd simply like to see attention paid to them issues in future game.
All issues of strategy have a tactical base. Formation is technically a tactics issue. But combined arms is a strategy issue, and in games without formation, it's hard to effectively use combined arms. Terrain is a tactics issue, but holding ground is strategy. Maneuver is the essence of tactics, but you can't have very much strategy at all if you are simply limited to clicking where you want your troops to go. (Or, more correctly, if you aren't limited in how you can order your troops to move.) Though terrain exists to some degree in Warcraft III, for example, there isn't a great deal of thought about strategic position. Rather, it is mostly about tactical position, quite a different thing.
I think that the most interesting improvements in regard to strategy might come from finding some way of limiting the player's knowledge and power over the battlefield. That was the impetus behind my idea of having individual AI generals.
Kohan sounds a little bit like Shogun, though you have more control in Shogun. I think morale is a realism issue, but it can add a dimension that provides a lot of fun.
I think your scripting idea is very good, and there are ways around the performance issue. The easiest would be to ration CPU time to player's scripts. That would mean that a more complicated script would take more gametime to execute. If a unit has 5 rules of engagement, it will react more slowly than a unit with 3, for example. I think that it would be very interesting to go up against a player with your own custom AI, to see how it does against his.
Didn't read that. In the article I read, the FTP server was 'unsecured.'
How is it hacking if you publish it on your FTP server? I'm sure no one would call it hacking if the protocol had simply been http instead. Now, this fellow may have used the information for nefarious purposes, and if there is any law he broke in doing so, go get him. But I don't see this as hacking.
Supply -- that was what I forgot to mention. Now, logistics is something that I wouldn't mind leaving up to the computer since it can count faster than I can. But supply makes holding ground important. In too many RTS games the map is just a place to fight. When you have supply lines however, you have to be much more careful with troop placement. There are certain areas that are vital to defend and any attack has to be carefully conducted so that it will not get cut off. Now, much of this stuff should be automated in a real-time game. I wouldn't want to have to send individual supply trucks where they have to go. But making sure supply lines stay open adds an important dimension to the game. I'm interested to see Conquest's gameplay now.
Yes, I've played Natural Selection and enjoyed it a lot. I think that it really should have two teams with overhead commanders, but it's still fun the way it is. I think that it provides a strategy cooperation element that multi-player games have sorely lacked.
I think, however, that an FPS, RTS, combo could work well as a single player game. Perhaps most of the RTS part of the game could be automated, and the player could hop around to different individual units in the thick of battle -- imagine jumping into a marine in the middle of a Starcraft battle. Or, on the other hand, RTS displays could be presented on a straight FPS game as a sort of more advanced Mechwarrior style game.
In the same line of thought as what you've said, the one command that I'd really like to see in more RTS games is Hold Formation. I'd like to be able to line my units up into a certain formation and have them keep it as they move. Right now grouping is simply a way to give the same order to lots of troops at once.
I'll take a look for Savage, sounds like fun.
I played Shogun and I liked it a lot. Historical realism obviously limits what the designers could do with the gameplay. But at the same time that's a strength as well because it focuses conception. Beyond the paper-scissors-stone (or Janken Pow?--I recently read that children all over the world play that same hand game and have for centuries) of the unit types, the terrain was the most important part of the game. Gameplay revolved around the hills, bridges, and forests. I felt that it was unfortunate, however, that there were no objectives beyond the killing of enemy soldiers. The terrain was just important as a battlefield, and never as a piece of land that needed to be held. I haven't played Medieval War yet but I plan to.
I thought that the single most inventive thing about Shogun was a graphics engine that makes it look like you're fighting with huge armies when there is actual little individual troop action -- which is both realistic and fun.
I do like the idea of intelligent individual units. I always feel that the computer should do whatever it's capable of, and leave the strategy to me.
What I was getting at with the commander idea though, was having some sort of general that you could assign a dozen of your troops to or some such. Then you could order him to defend a certain section of the map or to attack the enemy somewhere or raid or something like that. That would knock down the god of the battlefield feeling you get when playing most RTS games. The units under your direct control might be in a very limited area. Maybe you wouldn't even know where your generals were until they reported back to you. Stuff like that can open up whole new dimensions to gameplay.
I do agree that Warcraft 3 is fun. It is the epitome of a tactics style RTS. But I think that the low hanging fruit of tactics games has been picked. It's probably been that way since Starcraft. RTS games will have to evolve for there to be any new masterpieces of the genre.
I always figured the majority of slashdotting occured because of bandwidth constraints. I suppose a few servers crapped out, but that has got to be few and far between, hasn't it?
Don't let me crap all over your cutesy linux saves the day story, though.
I am constantly surprised by how conformist the game industry is. Game companies have barely scratched the surface of RTS. Combat could be drastically improved. Most current games concentrate mainly on unit differences. A far more interesting system could be made using the elements of formation, terrain, and maneuver. Control is rarely explored beyond simple point and click directions to individual units. An interesting system would be to make a few computer commanders which the human player could direct. With even simple AI such a system could have real potential. And RTS elements could also be easily combined with a true RPG style game or with FPS games to make for an interesting experience.
Hell, even Diablo is seriously derivative of Warcraft.
If we wanted oil that badly, wouldn't we take over Kuwait and Saudi Arabia? We've got plenty of reason for the Saudis, and our military already owns Kuwait. Who cares about Afghanistan and Iraq? They've got less oil than Alaska.
Your wish for a world without horizontal scroll bars is commendable. Just not pratical. Even if you could get browser compliance across the industry for text (hint: you won't), browsers sometimes display things other than text, and computers sometimes run programs other than web browsers. Hence the need for this mouse for some of us.
Because this mouse lets you deal better with Top Web Design Mistake #3.
My God, but this troll was done exactly right. Anti-Microsoft, and with an absurdly illogical argument that looks reasonable to any Microsoft hater who only reads it fast. I only hope that you continue on with trolls that attack more interesting subjects like gender politics, race, or modern social ideology.
Just think of the Supreme Court as its own perpetual constitutional convention, and the bad thoughts go away.
/works for me
Yeah, looks like he's jumped ship. You know, normal crackpots are supposed to be a little more persistent with their crazy theories. I invested some time into that refutation, and I was figuring that he'd be posting 30 page replies to me for the next couple months.
Personally, I think he's a Norwegian agent. The Norwegians may want everyone to think they're a peaceful little northern country, but they're just lulling us into false confidence. We'll fight our wars amongst ourselves, and when we're weak they'll start up their Viking raiding parties again and steal our cattle and our women.
Bigoted for mentioning Arab incompetence? Maybe you could explain why they keep losing wars even with superior numbers. 1947 was in the bag. And hell, just point out a single well run government over there. But I do apologize. I meant it in jest. I said all the rude things about the Mossad for you, after all.
And again, I'll ask you the mechanism for this world-wide video suppression (including Arab channels). It could simply be the fact that large files take up lots bandwidth. If you want, you could write the a network for a tape - most of them sell them from their achieves. My Aunt still has the VCR recording if you're really desperate. I'll rip it and set up a bit-torrent for you.
First of all, I'll respond to the post you wrote in reply to me.
The video could be faked, but why bother? The Bush administration already had the American people behind them, and knew that nothing could ever convince the Arabs. Again, I'll say that it is possible that bin Laden is simply bragging about something that he wished he had done.
Second, the video went out on CNN. I watched it. My family watched it. It's out there. It went out on CNN live feed. The whole world has it. Arab news services have it as well. How exactly would the US government go about suppressing it? Imagine Bush calling up French or Russian television and telling them what they could and could not put on the web. Think about how that would play for a second.
Now, for the other post you linked to. I was already aware of the small number of Israeli nationals killed in the WTC attack. If that was because all the other Israelis who were there were warned to leave, who warned them? If it were the Mossad, don't you think that would be an extremely risky way to conduct an operation which, if it backfired, would possibly result in something along the lines of a nuclear attack on Israel? If that Odigo stuff really went down as reported (unlikely), then were all the other warnings given my instant messenger? Imagine what the average Israeli might do upon receiving that sort of anonymous message. Ignore it? Call the police? Tell everybody you worked with? It doesn't sound like a well-conceived operation.
As for the fake art dealers, I saw the report when it came out on Fox News. Salon.com had the story as well. Unsurprising. You can't kick over a rock in the US without uncovering a dozen Mossad agents (exaggeration for effect). I do recall that the report said nothing about links to 9/11. Denied them even.
The dancing Israeli Mossad agents don't sound connected to the event. How the hell would they have helped from the ground? Maybe they were really dancing and celebrating. After all, the US was about to open a can of whoop-ass on the Arabs, everybody could see that. Or maybe they weren't dancing, and the neighbors just got freaked by Middle-Easterners. Who knows?
The living hijackers sounds interesting. It could simply be, however, fake news picked up from Arab sources who have been known to, shall we say, make stuff up in the past. But it could be real information. All of the supposed living hijackers had their passports stolen. Now I can imagine the Mossad doing that. But I can imagine their Arab friends doing that too. So what sort of plan would the Mossad be following? They would need more than a dozen rabid Zionists willing to die for a kooky mission to make Americans think the Arabs were attacking. (And for that matter, why Saudis like bin Laden? If you're in the business of framing Arabs, why not the Palestinians?) These fake Arabs apparently did things like getting driver's licenses and playing around with hookers and getting taped on video cameras all before the big event. Isn't that bad for the Mossad - wouldn't they be worried about their fake Arabs getting found out after the fact because of all the people who had seen their faces?
And the stuff about fighter pilot maneuvers by the pilots is bull. The media talked up the flight school angle of the whole thing with help from our government. Frankly, despite what was reported, the hard part of flying a passenger jet is take-off and landing. The rest you can learn from Microsoft's flight simulator in about 15 minutes. Crashing into buildings is nearly as simple as not crashing into them. The hijackers went to flight school out of stupidity. I put it down to Arab incompetence. Wouldn't be the first time.