This really is insightful, the mods are correct. In fact, what they really should have done, in order to get a truly realistic soil, was send a probe to mars with chemical detectors so they could discover the contents of the soil, and send those details back so they could create a satisfactory example soil, and test the probe's chemical detectors on that. You should apply to NASA, they could use brains like you.
No, the people that want the music, movies, games, software and books want it to be free. The people that produce them out of their own creativity as a means to make a living would like to recieve some compensation for their efforts.
Except for movies. The entire movie business is filled with overpaid self-absorbed "actors" that do little else than play mild variations on themselves in movies that cost too much to make and aren't worth the time to watch in the vast majority of cases. Fuck movies, pirate the shit out of them.
In hindsight this entire post is me digressing, but I'm honestly not convinced. The general direction that the progress of the world is taking is one of the people in control locking down and controlling society so to advance their own personal gains as much as possible for the short time they are alive and/or in power. Knowledge of life on other planets and R&D on how to get there, doesn't make money, it only costs money. If possible, I imagine information like this would be censored as much as much as it could be. It also doesn't provide results in the 5 minute turn around of most political party periods of power, and in the eyes of the "make it happen yesterday" moronic populace.
And this is even before considering the incredible vested interest in keeping this sort of info under wraps that the worlds religions would have. And that people in general would likely freak out at the realisation that they actually aren't that special in the universe and that a life spent attempting to distract themselves from their inevitable death isn't one well spent.
I would have been much more postive about this whole thing had I not been suffering an incredibly bad case of (reflux and) Mondayitis. But seriously, general society is moving horrifically quickly in the direction of self absortion and me-me-me mentality that the idea of spending money on discovering other worlds isn't of interest to them.
That's of course well before we consider the "we shouldn't go to other planets before we fix up this one" idiots.
I used to be incredibly excited about Astronomy and the Universe as a whole and the possibilities that were out there. Now it seems safer to just never look because the only thing worse than never knowing whats out there is discovering for sure that there is something amazing and finding that no one will let you go.
The gameplay is meh, but the story far outstrips anything that came before it, including System Shock, and especially Half-Life.
Give me a break. The story is trash sci-fi at best. And you can't possibly be standing around here protecting it if you don't have a hard-on for the 'gameplay', bad-example-of-a-console-FPS as it is.
Half-Life doesn't have a story, by the way, it has around about a sentence. System Shock doesn't necessarily have a proper story that plays out in cut scenes, but the events that occur provide quite the experience, and I believe it likely that you've never played it.
My point is, though, that because so many people think it is an excellent game, and a game's excellence is purely subjective, it is an excellent game. End of story.
This right here. This is the type of person that Halo was marketed to. If you read this and thought "yeah, this makes sense", then Halo is probably your game.
Makes you wonder where the hell situational awareness and the general sense of self-preservation up and went, doesn't it?
This is the big one for me. Especially the self-preservation. People drive like they are invincible, and as though they are of the old mindset that "accidents are something that only happen to other people". I drive in a constant state of paranoia, and in Adelaide, South Australia, that's a good thing. The drivers here are absolutely horrible, and I don't sensationalise it at all. I get the impression that most people believe they drive impenetrable bumper cars or something.
Drivers are amazingly impatient here, heavy rush hour traffic tends to make things worse, as people make idiotic panicked moves to change lanes because the target lane appeared to be moving ever so slightly more than their current one. White lines in the middle of the road are merely for show, with a lot of drivers appearing happy to slide across them on corners, either through a refusal to slow down to a reasonable speed to allow a tighter turn, or on many baffling cases, even when going ridiculously slow for the road, at which point they will still drive across the lines anyway. Merging lanes in busy traffic are a nightmare, even in stop-start traffic, as people are quite prepared to put their car on the line to get ahead of either the car next to them, or the car in front of them. The amount of times I've had to concede my place in the intended zip effect of merging traffic because someone is quite happy to sit with their car half way up mine because they have to get an extra car in front is close to half the time (today, wednesday, was the first time this week I've not had to do it, and only because traffic wasn't held up at the merge point so I didn't have any one in proximity).
The only accident I've been unable to avoid (and to date I've probably managed to avoid at least half a dozen), was when some bright spark decided that a blind left turn, that lead onto another completely blind right turn, would be a great place to practice his powersliding abilities. And when I came around the second corner, his response was to slam on the brakes, locking him into his sideways momentum to follow me off the side of the road and straight into the front of my car. So my personal experience is that not only do people drive like complete fucking idiots without consideration of the conditions/visibility or the fact there might even be other cars on the road, but also that once things do go bad, their first instinct is to just panic and slam on the brakes.
The problem is that people will whinge and moan the second you suggest any attempt to teach people about traffic safety or even the affect of collisions. I'm still not convinced that the vast majority of people realise that a head on collision at 60kmph is the equivalent of a collision with a stationary car at 120kmph. People are complete and utter fucking idiots, and that is the main reason why roads are so unsafe.
This has merely been a big rant to make me feel better, but I really do need to put forward Adelaide in Australia as one of the worst driving cities around. My experience in admittedly lacking, and honestly I think I suggest this in the hope that it couldn't possibly get much worse than this.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you think your ISP might not be using lube when it fucks you, try spending some time in Australia.
This really needs to be the header of every single ISP whinging related story. Truer words were never spoken. The internet in Australia has basically become an anachronism; you look at the setup we have here and you keep having to double check what year it is.
The sad thing is that what you've said is way to intelligent to be appreciated by anyone involved in this position.
You've got to realise that this isn't smart people attempting to market to idiots. This is clueless idiots attempting to market to other idiots.
As you've said, it's the new age of never being happy with a good return, always working on ways to make it better, and inexplicably this appears to be at the cost of the existing audience.
It's very strange that they are obviously attempting to market away from the sci-fi crowd that will buy the books and the figurines and the dvds, to the 'syfy' crowd that might talk about the show over the water cooler and join the facebook fan club, never putting in a dollar.
Although, interesting enough, they are the crowd that will sit there and just continue watching the ads, enthralled. The sci-fi crowd, using myself as an example, will generally have a (nerd) magazine handy, a PSP or DS lying nearby, or at the very least the remote in hand to watch anything else but the ads. Maybe this is more of a concern to the powers that be than anything else.
He might want to press on and sue Blizzard for WoW, but I imagine both they and Sony will have plenty to say at this initial case. Hopefully when this fails it destroys Worlds.com in the process.
Maybe they'll string the Worlds.com people along, making them think their going to get what they want, and then, right at the end, present something completely different that they didn't want and laugh at them as they line up to do it again.
What has greed got to do with anything? Or is this the whole "If you want to make any sort of money out of anything, you're not an artist, you've sold out" bullshit. People might love writing games, but people love to eat as well.
This is exactly why I do all my typing with my mouse on an on-screen virtual keyboard. It's much faster too.
I was going to make a "Dad, is that you?" joke here, but my Dad's mouse movement is almost as bad as his typing speed.
Seriously though, how badly do you type to find that selecting characters via the mouse to be quicker?
Re:Speaking as a valve fanboy and steam early adop
on
The Age of Steam
·
· Score: 1
Hahaha we're just talking video games here, Plato, not the meaning of life. Possibly fortuitously, I was given mod points since last checking/. but I'd hate to kill your flowery philosophical dribbling because it's just so self-righteously, arrogantly brilliant.
I appreciate that you might simply enjoy the latest and greatest multiplayer-only game until the next new and shiny thing attracts your attention, but some gamers actually possess an attention span. Maybe it's a single player gamer thing, Steam actually sells those as well you know.
To suggest that --it's OK to theoretically lose games that people have paid for because in ten years time we'll all be playing something else is awesomely naive. It's like you're completely unaware that consoles existed before the PS2/Xbox, that projects like DOSBOX try to make it possible to play games as old as 15 years on modern hardware, and that sites like Retro Gamer magazine still have a solid userbase. That, just as people listen to music, watch movies, or read books for longer than a few months, some people actually play games for longer than a few months.
All these people ask you politely to get your head out of your ass and get the fuck off our lawn.
Re:Speaking as a valve fanboy and steam early adop
on
The Age of Steam
·
· Score: 1
How is it possibly insightful that if you lose games that you've paid for that it's okay because you've played them enough already? I don't understand this.
Oh wow, I've just had another one of those crazy religious flashback flashback flashbacks (/GTA reference).
Back in my stupider days (okay, there was a girl involved, but I digress) I was attending religious meetings that discussed idiotic things like bible numerics or whatever it's called.
I talked to the leader of the meeting, a pastor if memory serves, and I asked him on the stance they/the bible all took on the subject of other alien intelligences (I likely used the phrase UFOs, but the meaning was there).
He looked me in the eye, and these people were not prone to be facetious or sarcastic when talking of their precious bible etc, and said something that was basically the beginning of the end of my time there. I thought I could get it verbatim but I've forgotten the exact wording. Paraphrasing, he basically said that he thought that the stars in the night sky were a canvas of beauty that was painted by god to give us something nice to look at.
So yeah, you joke, but holy crap some people actually believe that the stars you see were manufactured. The mind, it boggles.
but there will always be that special something that only physical media can give.
I agree completely. Hell, I've repurchased a couple of games from a second hand gaming store (Gametraders in Australia) purely because the box was in awesome condition and I only had the CDs at home. System Shock 2 was one of them so I'm sure I'll get some nods of agreement from people anyway, but there is just something special that having a complete box with manual provides.
I've purchased games from Steam before, and it just feels soulless. These shithouse little indie games like etc that have all the polish of a piece of gravel, sure, whatever, drop $10 on Steam and play it for a while and forget about it.
But something like Bioshock, Tomb Raider Underworld or FEAR 2, I want boxes with cool artwork, and thick manuals that double as toilet reading, and that sense of "I own a copy of this awesome game" that is more than an entry in a Steam database for my account and a dodgy DVD+DL backup with 'Tomb Rad^Hider Underworld' scrawled in black marker on it.
Yes, one painfully impenetrable MMO will be an excellent indicator as to the success of boxed copies of games.
The only thing that selling boxed copies of Eve will show is how many people weren't aware of it's existence prior to a boxed release; hard to do if you have access to the internet, which is then of course required to actually play the game. I predict that selling Eve in boxes will be as reasonably close to a complete waste of time as you can be.
You want to show how much more popular boxed copies of games are? Sell Half Life 2 Episode 3 in a boxed, non-Steam requiring version, and advertise that it doesn't need Steam on the front of the boxed in an obvious way. Sell something like Dragon Age Origins on Steam but also in a boxed copy that has a non-critical but unique registration, like the good old days, that can be ignored, but which says plainly and clearly that registering this game will show support for boxed software.
Now, that would be a vaguely interesting experiment.
Slashdot Mirror
This really is insightful, the mods are correct. In fact, what they really should have done, in order to get a truly realistic soil, was send a probe to mars with chemical detectors so they could discover the contents of the soil, and send those details back so they could create a satisfactory example soil, and test the probe's chemical detectors on that. You should apply to NASA, they could use brains like you.
This brightened my morning by much more than trace amounts.
Standard audio cassette tape travels at 1 7/8 ips (inches of tape per second past the heads) and is complete and total SHIT
There is nothing like a good scientific detailing of an inferior product.
Excellent, my quest to discover the /. account of Jonathan Burroughs has finally met success.
Then stop describing them as anonymous.
No, the people that want the music, movies, games, software and books want it to be free. The people that produce them out of their own creativity as a means to make a living would like to recieve some compensation for their efforts.
Except for movies. The entire movie business is filled with overpaid self-absorbed "actors" that do little else than play mild variations on themselves in movies that cost too much to make and aren't worth the time to watch in the vast majority of cases. Fuck movies, pirate the shit out of them.
In hindsight this entire post is me digressing, but I'm honestly not convinced. The general direction that the progress of the world is taking is one of the people in control locking down and controlling society so to advance their own personal gains as much as possible for the short time they are alive and/or in power. Knowledge of life on other planets and R&D on how to get there, doesn't make money, it only costs money. If possible, I imagine information like this would be censored as much as much as it could be. It also doesn't provide results in the 5 minute turn around of most political party periods of power, and in the eyes of the "make it happen yesterday" moronic populace.
And this is even before considering the incredible vested interest in keeping this sort of info under wraps that the worlds religions would have. And that people in general would likely freak out at the realisation that they actually aren't that special in the universe and that a life spent attempting to distract themselves from their inevitable death isn't one well spent.
I would have been much more postive about this whole thing had I not been suffering an incredibly bad case of (reflux and) Mondayitis. But seriously, general society is moving horrifically quickly in the direction of self absortion and me-me-me mentality that the idea of spending money on discovering other worlds isn't of interest to them.
That's of course well before we consider the "we shouldn't go to other planets before we fix up this one" idiots.
I used to be incredibly excited about Astronomy and the Universe as a whole and the possibilities that were out there. Now it seems safer to just never look because the only thing worse than never knowing whats out there is discovering for sure that there is something amazing and finding that no one will let you go.
(+5, Cynical Git)
The gameplay is meh, but the story far outstrips anything that came before it, including System Shock, and especially Half-Life.
Give me a break. The story is trash sci-fi at best. And you can't possibly be standing around here protecting it if you don't have a hard-on for the 'gameplay', bad-example-of-a-console-FPS as it is.
Half-Life doesn't have a story, by the way, it has around about a sentence. System Shock doesn't necessarily have a proper story that plays out in cut scenes, but the events that occur provide quite the experience, and I believe it likely that you've never played it.
My point is, though, that because so many people think it is an excellent game, and a game's excellence is purely subjective, it is an excellent game. End of story.
This right here. This is the type of person that Halo was marketed to. If you read this and thought "yeah, this makes sense", then Halo is probably your game.
Makes you wonder where the hell situational awareness and the general sense of self-preservation up and went, doesn't it?
This is the big one for me. Especially the self-preservation. People drive like they are invincible, and as though they are of the old mindset that "accidents are something that only happen to other people". I drive in a constant state of paranoia, and in Adelaide, South Australia, that's a good thing. The drivers here are absolutely horrible, and I don't sensationalise it at all. I get the impression that most people believe they drive impenetrable bumper cars or something.
Drivers are amazingly impatient here, heavy rush hour traffic tends to make things worse, as people make idiotic panicked moves to change lanes because the target lane appeared to be moving ever so slightly more than their current one. White lines in the middle of the road are merely for show, with a lot of drivers appearing happy to slide across them on corners, either through a refusal to slow down to a reasonable speed to allow a tighter turn, or on many baffling cases, even when going ridiculously slow for the road, at which point they will still drive across the lines anyway. Merging lanes in busy traffic are a nightmare, even in stop-start traffic, as people are quite prepared to put their car on the line to get ahead of either the car next to them, or the car in front of them. The amount of times I've had to concede my place in the intended zip effect of merging traffic because someone is quite happy to sit with their car half way up mine because they have to get an extra car in front is close to half the time (today, wednesday, was the first time this week I've not had to do it, and only because traffic wasn't held up at the merge point so I didn't have any one in proximity).
The only accident I've been unable to avoid (and to date I've probably managed to avoid at least half a dozen), was when some bright spark decided that a blind left turn, that lead onto another completely blind right turn, would be a great place to practice his powersliding abilities. And when I came around the second corner, his response was to slam on the brakes, locking him into his sideways momentum to follow me off the side of the road and straight into the front of my car. So my personal experience is that not only do people drive like complete fucking idiots without consideration of the conditions/visibility or the fact there might even be other cars on the road, but also that once things do go bad, their first instinct is to just panic and slam on the brakes.
The problem is that people will whinge and moan the second you suggest any attempt to teach people about traffic safety or even the affect of collisions. I'm still not convinced that the vast majority of people realise that a head on collision at 60kmph is the equivalent of a collision with a stationary car at 120kmph. People are complete and utter fucking idiots, and that is the main reason why roads are so unsafe.
This has merely been a big rant to make me feel better, but I really do need to put forward Adelaide in Australia as one of the worst driving cities around. My experience in admittedly lacking, and honestly I think I suggest this in the hope that it couldn't possibly get much worse than this.
manipulate the biology
/cries
It all seems so innocent when all 'it likes' is to scare little kids.
Then before you know it, it 'would like' to nuke all mankind.
KILL IT WITH FIRE
I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you think your ISP might not be using lube when it fucks you, try spending some time in Australia.
This really needs to be the header of every single ISP whinging related story. Truer words were never spoken. The internet in Australia has basically become an anachronism; you look at the setup we have here and you keep having to double check what year it is.
The sad thing is that what you've said is way to intelligent to be appreciated by anyone involved in this position.
You've got to realise that this isn't smart people attempting to market to idiots. This is clueless idiots attempting to market to other idiots.
As you've said, it's the new age of never being happy with a good return, always working on ways to make it better, and inexplicably this appears to be at the cost of the existing audience.
It's very strange that they are obviously attempting to market away from the sci-fi crowd that will buy the books and the figurines and the dvds, to the 'syfy' crowd that might talk about the show over the water cooler and join the facebook fan club, never putting in a dollar.
Although, interesting enough, they are the crowd that will sit there and just continue watching the ads, enthralled. The sci-fi crowd, using myself as an example, will generally have a (nerd) magazine handy, a PSP or DS lying nearby, or at the very least the remote in hand to watch anything else but the ads. Maybe this is more of a concern to the powers that be than anything else.
He might want to press on and sue Blizzard for WoW, but I imagine both they and Sony will have plenty to say at this initial case. Hopefully when this fails it destroys Worlds.com in the process.
Maybe they'll string the Worlds.com people along, making them think their going to get what they want, and then, right at the end, present something completely different that they didn't want and laugh at them as they line up to do it again.
What has greed got to do with anything? Or is this the whole "If you want to make any sort of money out of anything, you're not an artist, you've sold out" bullshit. People might love writing games, but people love to eat as well.
This is exactly why I do all my typing with my mouse on an on-screen virtual keyboard. It's much faster too.
I was going to make a "Dad, is that you?" joke here, but my Dad's mouse movement is almost as bad as his typing speed.
Seriously though, how badly do you type to find that selecting characters via the mouse to be quicker?
Hahaha we're just talking video games here, Plato, not the meaning of life. Possibly fortuitously, I was given mod points since last checking /. but I'd hate to kill your flowery philosophical dribbling because it's just so self-righteously, arrogantly brilliant.
I appreciate that you might simply enjoy the latest and greatest multiplayer-only game until the next new and shiny thing attracts your attention, but some gamers actually possess an attention span. Maybe it's a single player gamer thing, Steam actually sells those as well you know.
To suggest that --it's OK to theoretically lose games that people have paid for because in ten years time we'll all be playing something else is awesomely naive. It's like you're completely unaware that consoles existed before the PS2/Xbox, that projects like DOSBOX try to make it possible to play games as old as 15 years on modern hardware, and that sites like Retro Gamer magazine still have a solid userbase. That, just as people listen to music, watch movies, or read books for longer than a few months, some people actually play games for longer than a few months.
All these people ask you politely to get your head out of your ass and get the fuck off our lawn.
How is it possibly insightful that if you lose games that you've paid for that it's okay because you've played them enough already? I don't understand this.
Oh wow, I've just had another one of those crazy religious flashback flashback flashbacks (/GTA reference).
Back in my stupider days (okay, there was a girl involved, but I digress) I was attending religious meetings that discussed idiotic things like bible numerics or whatever it's called.
I talked to the leader of the meeting, a pastor if memory serves, and I asked him on the stance they/the bible all took on the subject of other alien intelligences (I likely used the phrase UFOs, but the meaning was there).
He looked me in the eye, and these people were not prone to be facetious or sarcastic when talking of their precious bible etc, and said something that was basically the beginning of the end of my time there. I thought I could get it verbatim but I've forgotten the exact wording. Paraphrasing, he basically said that he thought that the stars in the night sky were a canvas of beauty that was painted by god to give us something nice to look at.
So yeah, you joke, but holy crap some people actually believe that the stars you see were manufactured. The mind, it boggles.
Jesus Puras, the rally driver? I never realised he was such a big name outside of Spain.
You might have missed it in the second sentence there where he said DRM-less.
(Meier)
but there will always be that special something that only physical media can give.
I agree completely. Hell, I've repurchased a couple of games from a second hand gaming store (Gametraders in Australia) purely because the box was in awesome condition and I only had the CDs at home. System Shock 2 was one of them so I'm sure I'll get some nods of agreement from people anyway, but there is just something special that having a complete box with manual provides.
I've purchased games from Steam before, and it just feels soulless. These shithouse little indie games like etc that have all the polish of a piece of gravel, sure, whatever, drop $10 on Steam and play it for a while and forget about it.
But something like Bioshock, Tomb Raider Underworld or FEAR 2, I want boxes with cool artwork, and thick manuals that double as toilet reading, and that sense of "I own a copy of this awesome game" that is more than an entry in a Steam database for my account and a dodgy DVD+DL backup with 'Tomb Rad^Hider Underworld' scrawled in black marker on it.
Yes, one painfully impenetrable MMO will be an excellent indicator as to the success of boxed copies of games.
The only thing that selling boxed copies of Eve will show is how many people weren't aware of it's existence prior to a boxed release; hard to do if you have access to the internet, which is then of course required to actually play the game. I predict that selling Eve in boxes will be as reasonably close to a complete waste of time as you can be.
You want to show how much more popular boxed copies of games are? Sell Half Life 2 Episode 3 in a boxed, non-Steam requiring version, and advertise that it doesn't need Steam on the front of the boxed in an obvious way. Sell something like Dragon Age Origins on Steam but also in a boxed copy that has a non-critical but unique registration, like the good old days, that can be ignored, but which says plainly and clearly that registering this game will show support for boxed software.
Now, that would be a vaguely interesting experiment.
In South Australia, knowing where the white line is in the center of the road in relation to your car basically overqualifies him.
Next they'll be telling me that this augmentation causes him to resist the urge to accelerate to fill the gap when I indicate to change lanes.
Insanity I tell you, insanity.