We'll all agree that there is some bias from just about every news source, but let me educate you about what "false equivalence" means.
Let's say that the amount of bias from CNN is +10 towards "liberals," because they don't report that the economic stimulus was anything but an utter disaster, with the entire $800 billion disappearing into the ether. Now let's say that the amount of bias from Fox News is +1000 towards the GOP or Tea Party or whatever organization they've currently aligned themselves by giving numerous shows to its top potential candidates for the next presidential race.
You're essentially trying to claim that 10 = 1000. That's false equivalence. We're telling you you're full of shit.
And by that logic, if there was at least one British person who donated to the IRA, then you could just as easily say that the UK was involved in funding them.
Characterizing a hobby as "bizarre" still doesn't make his point any stronger. At some point you have to realize, hey, we're living in the *safest time to be alive in all of human history* and let some shit go.
The TSA's got to keep tap dancing around the fact that they can't use methods that work, namely profiling, no, not just racial or religious profiling, because then "everyone" would be up in arms about how they discriminate so they need to keep up the appearance of anticipating every crazy attack vector.
Yeah, it's all the PC liberals' fault that we can't *really* go after the terrorists. If it weren't for them, we could actually achieve true security.
Nevermind that the false positive rate is so high that profiling is also useless, but I wouldn't expect you to know what false positives are given that you buy into this tripe. They aren't looking for a needle in a haystack. They are looking for a needle that may or may not be in one of the hay fields in Idaho.
Healthcare cost go up largely due to the lack of tort reform.
Popular Republican talking point, but factually incorrect. Tort reform would certainly save some money, but it's not even close to being a major source of waste.
Drugs are expensive in this country because the companies are building in the cost of a future lawsuit.
Also bullshit. Drugs are expensive in this country because of the obscene profit margins and the equally obscene amount spent on advertising. Reduce those to more normal levels and drugs could easily cost less than half of what they do now.
Thunderbolt sounded like a pretty interesting technology, but if cables can't be produced for less than $50 I don't think it'll ever take off. It's not like the HDMI situation where Joe Blow walks in off the street to buy an HDTV (a feature he wants) and is told "You need this $70 digital cable to hook up to your receiver," who then proceeds to bend over and shell out the cash to get teh shiny.
I'd expect places like Monoprice.com to start selling them for under $10, and once some actual sub-$1000 peripherals start taking advantage of it it might be worth the upgrade. Until then, for the couple of times per year that I need to do large file transfers, I can live with a slower progress bar.
We get it. Help, help, you're being repressed. All of these Big Environment funding sources picking on the poor little Big Oil skeptics is really tough to watch.
It's possible for someone to think that global warming is a problem and simultaneously think that the carbon credit bubble that's going to be created is a bad thing. Believe it or not, acknowledging a problem doesn't mean that one automatically thinks that every possible solution is a good one.
However, what you seem to fail to understand is that just because carbon credits aren't really a very good idea, it doesn't mean that global warming isn't happening and that we shouldn't be concerned about it. Just because there are bad solutions to a problem doesn't mean that the problem doesn't exist.
Wow, what 50s propaganda pamphlet did you get your material from?
Oh -- and you know what else it does? The coloreds go *crazy* when they smoke the reefer!
Also, I notice that there are a number of great rebuttals to your original nonsense, but instead of attempting to respond to any of those you go after the one person who calls you out for what you are: an ignorant, deliberately obtuse douche.
People want pot legalized because a) it's not that harmful and b) we waste a huge amount of resources trying -- completely in vain -- to stop people from using it. That's not the same thing as trying to get access to smoke pot in every bar and restaurant.
When (not 'if', but 'when' -- people are starting to see how stupid prohibition is) pot becomes legal, the second that the smokers want to start doing it indoors in public places with other non-smoking patrons, I'll be right there by your side telling them to fuck right off and do it in their own homes or outside. Until that happens, your nice little strawman has absolutely no point.
I work at a small company. We have 3 devs. Washington State recently passed a law that made some of what we sell taxable. Which means that we have to worry about county and city taxes as well as the state tax rate.
It took us all of 1 week for one of our developers to get the tax calculation API provided by Washington State integrated into our system, and a couple more weeks of testing to make sure it worked -- and that was in addition to our other duties.
I'm not saying that collecting state taxes, or even collecting sales tax in general, is necessarily the right thing to do (though I do believe that not collecting taxes gives online retailers an unfair advantage), but your number 3 isn't nearly as big of a deal as you make it out to be, and with some streamlining neither 3 or 4 would be that burdensome for online retailers.
Also... from what I've heard... the console can't have more than one of these special controllers connected to it at any time, so it doesn't even open up any new multiplayer potential.
Somebody never played Pac Man Vs.
I'll forgive you, because a lot of people missed it, but that was by far one of the most fun, unique multiplayer experiences I've had in a videogame since the original WarCraft.
I file Fire Emblem under the "old school nintendo" category since it's yet-another-updated-version of a Nintendo series
Pretty much everything out today is an "old school Nintendo" genre with a different skin on it because Nintendo invented most of the action gaming genres we see.
Id invented the first-person 3d shooter.
Konami invented the rhythm genre.
RPGs were invented by dozens of different studios back in the early days of gaming.
That covers pretty much 95% of what's on the market today.
My favorite wii games didn't make much use of the motion sensors. But the pointer is an extremely useful UI element.
Agree with this 100%. The pointer was, hands down, the best use of the Wii controller, and easily the biggest improvement in consoles' UIs this generation.
Most of the good games made very sparing use of the motion controls, and I think the ones that did make good use of them did it quite well. The visceral feel of the deathblows in No More Heroes was very satisfying. Unfortunately, for every game that found a novel way to use motion controls, there were 10 that used a generic waggle to do something stupid that should have just been mapped to a button.
PC has tons of shovelware, but a high enough percentage of games are good to save it.
Umm, no. The ratio of good games to crap on the PC is abysmal. The main difference is that you never *see* the crap, and what gets stuck on store shelves in the few places that stock PC games (although still 90% crap) is just the cream of the crop of the crap.
With the Wii, and the PS2 before it, all of that crap that somehow got approved by Nintendo and Sony for publication gets stuck right up there along with Zelda and Little Big Planet -- it's particularly bad at places like Target that don't carry a lot of the more obscure games that *aren't* crap, making the ratio even worse.
Personally, I got tired of on-line gaming back in the 90s and early 00s, so the lack of online features for me wasn't a huge deal with the Wii.
That said, I did think it was pretty stupid that they required different friend codes for each game; the Wii itself already has some sort of built-in list of other friends' consoles (to exchange messages or some other relatively useless things), so there's really no reason that games shouldn't be able to make use of that feature. If they just reduced it to a single friend code per console, I think that would be a decent compromise with what they have now.
And if I have to choose between no online play and XBox Live's ads in your face every time you turn on the console, I'll stick with solo gaming.
I see roughly the same amount of immature behavior on both sides. (as if it could really be broken down into just "both" sides)
It's unsurprising that you see more yelling, screaming, and violence from the left when you do shit just to piss them off. Ever heard of cause and effect? Or confirmation bias, for that matter?
Besides being the best way to get decent pay and working conditions, unions are also the best way to improve an economy, grow a healthy middle class and make society better generally.
You forget -- when the ownership class organizes against the working class, that's just doing business. But when the working class organizes, that's SOCIALISM.
And the activistcash.com (not.org) site looks like a well funded smear campaign against pretty much every remotely "liberal" organization out there. They list their sponsor as the "center for consumer freedom" that lists this gem amongst its articles. One of the choice lines, while trying to point out that sugary drinks "are really just fine to drink and nobody knows for sure if they're bad or not!" is:
What about soft drinks? Research appearing in the March issue of the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise found that drinking sugary beverages before exercise actually improved physical performance among elite athletes.
Umm, yeah, but if you're not an elite athelete about to exercise, it *might* be best to skip the 32oz Gatorade. This site tries to position itself as some sort of skeptic resource, but the brand of skepticism stinks.
As a customer, I think a 7 day return window is very reasonable; I also know that I'm not likely to abuse it.
As a developer, a 7 day return window seems pretty excessive. I've got a simple puzzle game that has deeper strategy to it for players who enjoy it, but it's also possible that someone might play it for a couple of hours and not have it hook them. I'm ok with that. However, at only a dollar or two, I think that they probably got their money's worth, even if they do only choose to play it for a couple of hours. It's about like trying out a game in the arcade and deciding that you don't like it, with the added bonus that if you *do* like it, you get to keep it forever. I'd be ok with a 30 minute return window, as that's plenty of time to check out a puzzle game and decide if you like it at all, but beyond that, if you're still playing, it's because you see *something* in it.
So I'm all for stronger customer protection laws, but at the same time, 7 days seems somewhat excessive for really small purchases. Perhaps the price of the item needs to be taken into account when determining the return window?
Crapcom admitting to the fact that they haven't made a good, solid, enjoyable game in over a decade
What the fuck are you talking about? Capcom is one of few publishers that regularly turns out anything interesting that *isn't* just FPS Version+1.
I haven't bought much of theirs this generation, but in the Gamecube/PS2/XBox generation, they turned out Resident Evil 4, the Resident Evil remake (which was of remarkable quality, given its remake status), the Viewtiful Joe series, and Killer 7. This generation they've released RE5, which wasn't anything groundbreaking but was still of fairly high quality and most certainly enjoyable, and a new Street Fighter that I haven't played but has received plenty of positive reviews.
They haven't given us insidious DRM or abusive DLC, they haven't resorted to pumping out a new Version+1 game every year, they generally release fairly solid games. I don't know what you're bitching about. This is the first news of a Capcom fuckup that I've heard, and while it seems pretty stupid, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt until they start making a habit of doing stupid things -- especially considering they're one of the last old-school publishers around.
The ones getting shot at wouldn't be the ones responsible for putting forth the effort to implement more efficient, cost saving changes. +1 for the nice appeal to emotion anyway, though.
Slashdot Mirror
We'll all agree that there is some bias from just about every news source, but let me educate you about what "false equivalence" means.
Let's say that the amount of bias from CNN is +10 towards "liberals," because they don't report that the economic stimulus was anything but an utter disaster, with the entire $800 billion disappearing into the ether. Now let's say that the amount of bias from Fox News is +1000 towards the GOP or Tea Party or whatever organization they've currently aligned themselves by giving numerous shows to its top potential candidates for the next presidential race.
You're essentially trying to claim that 10 = 1000. That's false equivalence. We're telling you you're full of shit.
--Jeremy
And by that logic, if there was at least one British person who donated to the IRA, then you could just as easily say that the UK was involved in funding them.
--Jeremy
Characterizing a hobby as "bizarre" still doesn't make his point any stronger. At some point you have to realize, hey, we're living in the *safest time to be alive in all of human history* and let some shit go.
--Jeremy
The TSA's got to keep tap dancing around the fact that they can't use methods that work, namely profiling, no, not just racial or religious profiling, because then "everyone" would be up in arms about how they discriminate so they need to keep up the appearance of anticipating every crazy attack vector.
Yeah, it's all the PC liberals' fault that we can't *really* go after the terrorists. If it weren't for them, we could actually achieve true security.
Nevermind that the false positive rate is so high that profiling is also useless, but I wouldn't expect you to know what false positives are given that you buy into this tripe. They aren't looking for a needle in a haystack. They are looking for a needle that may or may not be in one of the hay fields in Idaho.
--Jeremy
Healthcare cost go up largely due to the lack of tort reform.
Popular Republican talking point, but factually incorrect. Tort reform would certainly save some money, but it's not even close to being a major source of waste.
Drugs are expensive in this country because the companies are building in the cost of a future lawsuit.
Also bullshit. Drugs are expensive in this country because of the obscene profit margins and the equally obscene amount spent on advertising. Reduce those to more normal levels and drugs could easily cost less than half of what they do now.
--Jeremy
The false equivalence is strong with this one.
--Jeremy
Not according to this you didn't.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your original thesis, but claiming to have played a game that doesn't exist doesn't help your argument much.
--Jeremy
Thunderbolt sounded like a pretty interesting technology, but if cables can't be produced for less than $50 I don't think it'll ever take off. It's not like the HDMI situation where Joe Blow walks in off the street to buy an HDTV (a feature he wants) and is told "You need this $70 digital cable to hook up to your receiver," who then proceeds to bend over and shell out the cash to get teh shiny.
I'd expect places like Monoprice.com to start selling them for under $10, and once some actual sub-$1000 peripherals start taking advantage of it it might be worth the upgrade. Until then, for the couple of times per year that I need to do large file transfers, I can live with a slower progress bar.
--Jeremy
We get it. Help, help, you're being repressed. All of these Big Environment funding sources picking on the poor little Big Oil skeptics is really tough to watch.
--Jeremy
Let me clue you in on something:
It's possible for someone to think that global warming is a problem and simultaneously think that the carbon credit bubble that's going to be created is a bad thing. Believe it or not, acknowledging a problem doesn't mean that one automatically thinks that every possible solution is a good one.
However, what you seem to fail to understand is that just because carbon credits aren't really a very good idea, it doesn't mean that global warming isn't happening and that we shouldn't be concerned about it. Just because there are bad solutions to a problem doesn't mean that the problem doesn't exist.
--Jeremy
Wow, what 50s propaganda pamphlet did you get your material from?
Oh -- and you know what else it does? The coloreds go *crazy* when they smoke the reefer!
Also, I notice that there are a number of great rebuttals to your original nonsense, but instead of attempting to respond to any of those you go after the one person who calls you out for what you are: an ignorant, deliberately obtuse douche.
--Jeremy
Yeah, let me clarify it for you:
People want pot legalized because a) it's not that harmful and b) we waste a huge amount of resources trying -- completely in vain -- to stop people from using it. That's not the same thing as trying to get access to smoke pot in every bar and restaurant.
When (not 'if', but 'when' -- people are starting to see how stupid prohibition is) pot becomes legal, the second that the smokers want to start doing it indoors in public places with other non-smoking patrons, I'll be right there by your side telling them to fuck right off and do it in their own homes or outside. Until that happens, your nice little strawman has absolutely no point.
--Jeremy
I work at a small company. We have 3 devs. Washington State recently passed a law that made some of what we sell taxable. Which means that we have to worry about county and city taxes as well as the state tax rate.
It took us all of 1 week for one of our developers to get the tax calculation API provided by Washington State integrated into our system, and a couple more weeks of testing to make sure it worked -- and that was in addition to our other duties.
I'm not saying that collecting state taxes, or even collecting sales tax in general, is necessarily the right thing to do (though I do believe that not collecting taxes gives online retailers an unfair advantage), but your number 3 isn't nearly as big of a deal as you make it out to be, and with some streamlining neither 3 or 4 would be that burdensome for online retailers.
--Jeremy
Also... from what I've heard... the console can't have more than one of these special controllers connected to it at any time, so it doesn't even open up any new multiplayer potential.
Somebody never played Pac Man Vs.
I'll forgive you, because a lot of people missed it, but that was by far one of the most fun, unique multiplayer experiences I've had in a videogame since the original WarCraft.
--Jeremy
I file Fire Emblem under the "old school nintendo" category since it's yet-another-updated-version of a Nintendo series
Pretty much everything out today is an "old school Nintendo" genre with a different skin on it because Nintendo invented most of the action gaming genres we see.
Id invented the first-person 3d shooter.
Konami invented the rhythm genre.
RPGs were invented by dozens of different studios back in the early days of gaming.
That covers pretty much 95% of what's on the market today.
My favorite wii games didn't make much use of the motion sensors. But the pointer is an extremely useful UI element.
Agree with this 100%. The pointer was, hands down, the best use of the Wii controller, and easily the biggest improvement in consoles' UIs this generation.
Most of the good games made very sparing use of the motion controls, and I think the ones that did make good use of them did it quite well. The visceral feel of the deathblows in No More Heroes was very satisfying. Unfortunately, for every game that found a novel way to use motion controls, there were 10 that used a generic waggle to do something stupid that should have just been mapped to a button.
--Jeremy
PC has tons of shovelware, but a high enough percentage of games are good to save it.
Umm, no. The ratio of good games to crap on the PC is abysmal. The main difference is that you never *see* the crap, and what gets stuck on store shelves in the few places that stock PC games (although still 90% crap) is just the cream of the crop of the crap.
With the Wii, and the PS2 before it, all of that crap that somehow got approved by Nintendo and Sony for publication gets stuck right up there along with Zelda and Little Big Planet -- it's particularly bad at places like Target that don't carry a lot of the more obscure games that *aren't* crap, making the ratio even worse.
--Jeremy
Personally, I got tired of on-line gaming back in the 90s and early 00s, so the lack of online features for me wasn't a huge deal with the Wii.
That said, I did think it was pretty stupid that they required different friend codes for each game; the Wii itself already has some sort of built-in list of other friends' consoles (to exchange messages or some other relatively useless things), so there's really no reason that games shouldn't be able to make use of that feature. If they just reduced it to a single friend code per console, I think that would be a decent compromise with what they have now.
And if I have to choose between no online play and XBox Live's ads in your face every time you turn on the console, I'll stick with solo gaming.
--Jeremy
Empanel the losers from the competition on a witch hunt against the winner. Sounds like a dick move to me. Definitely doesn't pass the smell test.
Projection. When you're a dick, you tend to think that everyone else is a dick, too.
--Jeremy
I see roughly the same amount of immature behavior on both sides. (as if it could really be broken down into just "both" sides)
It's unsurprising that you see more yelling, screaming, and violence from the left when you do shit just to piss them off. Ever heard of cause and effect? Or confirmation bias, for that matter?
--Jeremy
Besides being the best way to get decent pay and working conditions, unions are also the best way to improve an economy, grow a healthy middle class and make society better generally.
You forget -- when the ownership class organizes against the working class, that's just doing business. But when the working class organizes, that's SOCIALISM.
--Jeremy
And the activistcash.com (not .org) site looks like a well funded smear campaign against pretty much every remotely "liberal" organization out there. They list their sponsor as the "center for consumer freedom" that lists this gem amongst its articles. One of the choice lines, while trying to point out that sugary drinks "are really just fine to drink and nobody knows for sure if they're bad or not!" is:
What about soft drinks? Research appearing in the March issue of the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise found that drinking sugary beverages before exercise actually improved physical performance among elite athletes.
Umm, yeah, but if you're not an elite athelete about to exercise, it *might* be best to skip the 32oz Gatorade. This site tries to position itself as some sort of skeptic resource, but the brand of skepticism stinks.
--Jeremy
As a customer, I think a 7 day return window is very reasonable; I also know that I'm not likely to abuse it.
As a developer, a 7 day return window seems pretty excessive. I've got a simple puzzle game that has deeper strategy to it for players who enjoy it, but it's also possible that someone might play it for a couple of hours and not have it hook them. I'm ok with that. However, at only a dollar or two, I think that they probably got their money's worth, even if they do only choose to play it for a couple of hours. It's about like trying out a game in the arcade and deciding that you don't like it, with the added bonus that if you *do* like it, you get to keep it forever. I'd be ok with a 30 minute return window, as that's plenty of time to check out a puzzle game and decide if you like it at all, but beyond that, if you're still playing, it's because you see *something* in it.
So I'm all for stronger customer protection laws, but at the same time, 7 days seems somewhat excessive for really small purchases. Perhaps the price of the item needs to be taken into account when determining the return window?
--Jeremy
Crapcom admitting to the fact that they haven't made a good, solid, enjoyable game in over a decade
What the fuck are you talking about? Capcom is one of few publishers that regularly turns out anything interesting that *isn't* just FPS Version+1.
I haven't bought much of theirs this generation, but in the Gamecube/PS2/XBox generation, they turned out Resident Evil 4, the Resident Evil remake (which was of remarkable quality, given its remake status), the Viewtiful Joe series, and Killer 7. This generation they've released RE5, which wasn't anything groundbreaking but was still of fairly high quality and most certainly enjoyable, and a new Street Fighter that I haven't played but has received plenty of positive reviews.
They haven't given us insidious DRM or abusive DLC, they haven't resorted to pumping out a new Version+1 game every year, they generally release fairly solid games. I don't know what you're bitching about. This is the first news of a Capcom fuckup that I've heard, and while it seems pretty stupid, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt until they start making a habit of doing stupid things -- especially considering they're one of the last old-school publishers around.
--Jeremy
The ones getting shot at wouldn't be the ones responsible for putting forth the effort to implement more efficient, cost saving changes. +1 for the nice appeal to emotion anyway, though.
--Jeremy