Let me hit you with a clue stick, I spent 10 years of my life defending that flag. Millions of Americans have fought, died or served to defend that flag as well, it certainly deserves it's prominence.
To defend the flag? Not the Republic, not the Constitution, not 'We the People', not liberty or equality, but the flag?
That's dangerous. Flags are whores; they'll flutter for anybody who sticks a pole up them. Anyone can wave a flag; it's no guarantee that they're worth defending. If your allegiance is only to the flag, and not to anything really worth fighting for, then sooner or later you'll find yourself supporting someone truly loathsome just because they're the ones waving that flag.
The EULA is a contract between you and the software vendor; separate from copyright. While the enforceability of EULA terms is open to debate, vendors can define conditions on the use of their software; you can agree and buy it or not agree and not buy it.
I don't buy the game from Activision. I buy it from HMV. I hand over some cash and they hand me a disc in a box. Contract for sale of goods fulfilled to the satisfaction of both parties. Nobody at HMV ever mentioned anything about separate contracts, and once they have my money I don't think HMV care whether I play the game with an official controller, an unofficial controller, psychic powers, or indeed whether I play the game at all instead of, say, setting fire to it.
I don't see where I have any contract with Activision at all. Sure, something comes up on screen saying 'don't use this game with other controllers', but fuck 'em; as I see it, short of copyright violation I can do as I please.
By "harmonious" you must mean "plans and executes a massive attack on American soil resulting in massive losses of life and property"
American soil? Hawaii didn't become part of the USA until 1959. Before that it was an annexed territory, having been invaded in 1893 and formally annexed in 1898. It was American soil in much the same sense that India was British soil and Manchuria was Japanese soil.
I don't care what kind of cosmic rays they've been exposed to, spiders wielding lubricant guns and hex wrenches are not scary. "Oh, look out, it's going to build some furniture and reduce wear on my bearings!"
Go and read The Mote in God's Eye. This kind of thing does not end well.
No, that's a measure of calorie content. The standard unit of land area is the Belgium, although the Wales is commonly used in the deforestation industry.
The pool of talentless do-nothing "hehe look at me I can pound on a piece of plastic" dim wits is being expanded. Repeat after me: Guitar Hero is for Morons. You wanna see what Guitar Hero should have been? Check out synthesiagame.com --- a game for real musicians.
I assume you made the same complaint about Call of Duty 4, and recommended something else as 'a game for real soldiers'?
Last time I checked, the EULA on the loading screen explicitly states that you are only licensed to use the software with an official Guitar Hero controller.
Good luck to them enforcing that. The right that the publisher has that I do not is 'copyright' - the right to copy, plus associated rights regarding public performance and so forth. The idea behind an EULA is that in installing THE SOFTWARE You are creating a copy, and to do that You need a licence from Us. But here, when I use THE SOFTWARE I don't create a copy at all, I run direct from the disc (YMMV, dependent on your system).
So I don't need a licence, because I'm doing nothing that would otherwise infringe the copyright holder's rights. I can do as I please with THE SOFTWARE as long as that's true: I can shove it up my arse if I like and they can't stop me. I only need a licence if my use of THE SOFTWARE would otherwise be a breach of copyright.
Ever worn colored glasses? They rather significantly change your experience of reality, but gave zero direct effect on the brain.
Do coloured glasses make you do stupid stuff? Make you get into fights? Make you hit on girls you otherwise wouldn't? Ever woken up with a traffic cone after a coloured glasses bender and wondered what the hell you were doing last night? No?
Coloured glasses are a change to the inputs. I could understand drugs doing that kind of thing if we're a soul, and indeed there are many drugs that will mess up your inputs and outputs. But coloured glasses don't affect the consciousness itself. Drugs do: they're perfectly capable of messing up the thought process itself, and causing drastic changes in consciousness, temperament and personality.
In addition, it is not known whether consciousness is actually a property of the brain, or whether the brain is merely an interface device for something else.
If the consciousness is not in the brain, but instead somewhere else, how is it that consciousness is affected by drugs? Drugs can alter the subjective experience of consciousness quite dramatically. Yet they're nothing but mundane organic chemicals which fuck with brain chemistry. That, to me, is extremely strong evidence that consciousness is resident in the brain.
If 'I' were a supernatural entity resident elsewhere - a 'soul' using the brain as an interface to the physical world - then I might expect drugs to slow down transmissions from the brain, or even scramble them to some extent. So reflex delays, loss of coordination, even hallucination, that's possible. But the core 'I', the consciousness, should be serenely unaffected by this.
Anybody who has done something bloody stupid while drunk knows that this is not what brain-affecting drugs are like. The consciousness itself as a subjective experience is strongly affected by chemicals which affect the brain.
Seriously, you wanted a direct sequel? Following on from the end of Throne of Bhaal? What would you do? Depending on how you ended the game you're at least an ubercharacter of ridiculously high level, and you're quite possibly the god of murder. You killed Demogorgon as a side quest. Where do you go from here?
Tell me - what are you three going to do after January 20, 2009?
Is that the date that's been set to withdraw from Iraq? If so, then of course we'll stop complaining about the ongoing cost of the war in Iraq. Otherwise, we'll continue complaining until the withdrawal takes place.
We don't need a sequel to MOM, we just need the license holder to improve the graphics and re-mix the fantastic audio to modern standards, and LEAVE EVERYTHING ELSE ALONE.
It might be a good idea to re-balance the rules a little. Master of Magic was oh so very exploitable. So very many plans for munchkin starting builds. My favourite was always to abuse the crafting system to get more mana from breaking an artefact than it took to create it in the first place. Use this to build up enormous mana stocks very early, equip some schmuck hero with top-of-the-line gear, and have him take over the world for you.
There was also the fact that if you took all Death books, you could get Wraiths as a starting spell.
No, you know what? Sod re-balancing. Most of the fun of that game was in finding new and interesting ways to break it.
I like their quote "The cost of the work will fall within the Cern's existing budget" though it does make me idly speculate on the size of their budget and how large a secret fortress I could build with it...
14 million quid is the price of a decent footballer. It's really not that much money at all. CERN's total budget runs to something like £700 million per year.
How the fuck can you advertise a contemporary product for today's culture in a game like NeverWinter nights anyways?
On the loading screens. As for which products, know your target market. Source books, dice, miniatures, XXXL T-shirts, pizza delivery, and fizzy drinks. And expansion modules for the game itself, of course.
The next thing they will want to do is bottle the stuff, and regular nukes would be toys in comparison.
Inefficient. Producing antimatter this way still takes more energy than the antimatter releases in annihilation. Where's the benefit? An antimatter bomb would be smaller and lighter than an equivalent hydrogen bomb, but still far more expensive. No form of power generation in the world can come close to the efficiency of a hydrogen bomb.
Work out a miraculous means of making antimatter cheaply, in bulk and with lower energy input than its annihilation yield, and then we'll talk about antimatter bombs.
You want to have a real meaningful effect? Sink 100 million dollars into a lobbying firm and hope your "bribe" money is better than the competitions.
If you have $100m to spare, form a political party, and then vote for it. The ruling elite are only a ruling elite because people keep voting for them. Stop doing that. If the masses in America really oppose the imperialists, then they can form a new party of their own and kick the imperialists out. That they do not do so indicates to me that the Americans do in fact support the imperialists, because that means the cheap cheeseburgers keep coming.
Admittedly, when the masses unite, establish a party to represent the interests of the common man, and get it elected to government, it's generally called 'Socialism'. That this is considered a dirty word in America is still more evidence that the Americans support the imperialists.
Case in point: Sid Meier's Pirates!, which was in many respects totally identical to the old 2D version, and which looks great and is awesomely fun to play.
Sid Meier likes doing that. Take a look at Colonization, which preserves the basic mechanisms of the original, but adds more sophisticated Civ4-style diplomacy and trade. And alliances with the Indians.
Only problem is, the Royal Expeditionary Force is normally absolutely huge by the time you declare independence, your troops don't upgrade to Continental Army status, and there's no foreign intervention force coming.
I had to drastically revise my war plans. In the original I used to build big heavily armed fortresses and pack them with troops and cannon, and wait for the king's men to come to the slaughter. In the new game, that doesn't work: artillery get a huge bonus to city attack, so no fortress is strong enough. Instead I play a Stalinist strategy. All troops and most of the population are evacuated from any cities the king's men approach, leaving only a token guard. The civilians are sent to the arms manufactories deep inland, and there drafted into the militia. The army lurks in the woods.
Meanwhile the king's men destroy my token garrison and occupy the city. That's when I counterattack: the artillery bonus now works in my favour. Sure, it means my cities get wrecked. The objective is to exterminate the king's men, not to have a viable colony left when the dust settles.
It actually made me feel very bad. The burning ruin of the greatest city in the New World, now home to nothing but a couple of small fishing communities. My score history at the end showed a colossal drop during the war, as all trade and useful industry was abandoned, and all of the civilian population not involved in arms manufacture evacuated from the cities and drafted into an army in the wild. And then slaughtered. I had a mental image of Field Marshal Sir Dougie Haig with his battle plans, sweeping soldiers off the board with a dustpan and brush...
Trek chronology has always been fluid. In current, official nerd canon, when did the Eugenics Wars take place? When did Khan leave Earth?
Because right now it's 2008 and there's no sign of either one of them. And when Voyager went back in time to 1996? Also no sign of global devastation in any form.
Fudging Kirk's date of birth is a minor detail when you've already had to reschedule World War 3.
It might be cool to see what the peeps on good ol' Earth-without-a-monetary-economy were doing while Kirk was vigorously fornicating with green alien chicks in shady exoplanetary bars...
In Kirk's day, I think Earth did have money. Wasn't Dr McCoy going to buy a boat in VI? The money economy was abandoned between TOS and TNG, probably as a result of the invention of the replicator. That thing would do to every other industry what the Internet has done to music.
American citizens are just another colony of oppressed people that belong to this "American Imperial Empire" that you speak of. Americans in general have no interests in controlling the rest of the world militarily or economically. Most citizens are far more concerned about the distractions like American Idol, Heroes, Paris Hilton, and Cheeseburgers loaded with chemical crap and zero nutrients.
If America were a military dictatorship this might be a legitimate excuse. However, it is not; it is a representative democracy. Why do you not simply vote out the imperialists? Oh, wait: because the imperialists keep the cheeseburgers coming. Then the masses do support the imperialists, through their very apathy. Otherwise their cheeseburgers might become rather more scarce, their car might become smaller, and their clothes far more expensive for want of child slave labour.
Re:Nope, sorry
on
Ender in Exile
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
He's one of the very few popular writers who admits (gasp!) to being a Christian.
You may not have noticed this but we're awfully keen on J. R. R. Tolkien around here.
couldn't possibly be done justice in a 2 hour film (Watchmen)
It probably could be done well, and I look forward to it. But you'd lose all the extra material between chapters - the scrapbooks and memoirs and files that fill in the gaps. You'd never work out what the real deal was with Silk Spectre and Captain Metropolis, or what became of Hooded Justice, or why Nite Owl never really caught on to any of that stuff. So much of the richness of the Watchmen world was in details like that, in the gap between the facade the heroes put up for the media and the reality beneath it, and so much of the character of the older heroes is tied up in the lies they've concealed for decades.
Really I'd like Watchmen to be done as a very long film - like a 'Once Upon A Time In America' with capes. But honestly - who but we would sit through that?
Slashdot Mirror
To defend the flag? Not the Republic, not the Constitution, not 'We the People', not liberty or equality, but the flag?
That's dangerous. Flags are whores; they'll flutter for anybody who sticks a pole up them. Anyone can wave a flag; it's no guarantee that they're worth defending. If your allegiance is only to the flag, and not to anything really worth fighting for, then sooner or later you'll find yourself supporting someone truly loathsome just because they're the ones waving that flag.
I don't buy the game from Activision. I buy it from HMV. I hand over some cash and they hand me a disc in a box. Contract for sale of goods fulfilled to the satisfaction of both parties. Nobody at HMV ever mentioned anything about separate contracts, and once they have my money I don't think HMV care whether I play the game with an official controller, an unofficial controller, psychic powers, or indeed whether I play the game at all instead of, say, setting fire to it.
I don't see where I have any contract with Activision at all. Sure, something comes up on screen saying 'don't use this game with other controllers', but fuck 'em; as I see it, short of copyright violation I can do as I please.
American soil? Hawaii didn't become part of the USA until 1959. Before that it was an annexed territory, having been invaded in 1893 and formally annexed in 1898. It was American soil in much the same sense that India was British soil and Manchuria was Japanese soil.
Go and read The Mote in God's Eye. This kind of thing does not end well.
<gene>Oh shut up you ponce.</gene>
No, that's a measure of calorie content. The standard unit of land area is the Belgium, although the Wales is commonly used in the deforestation industry.
Now that's the hard part. Unless you're willing to put up with a six-minute ping time?
I assume you made the same complaint about Call of Duty 4, and recommended something else as 'a game for real soldiers'?
Good luck to them enforcing that. The right that the publisher has that I do not is 'copyright' - the right to copy, plus associated rights regarding public performance and so forth. The idea behind an EULA is that in installing THE SOFTWARE You are creating a copy, and to do that You need a licence from Us. But here, when I use THE SOFTWARE I don't create a copy at all, I run direct from the disc (YMMV, dependent on your system).
So I don't need a licence, because I'm doing nothing that would otherwise infringe the copyright holder's rights. I can do as I please with THE SOFTWARE as long as that's true: I can shove it up my arse if I like and they can't stop me. I only need a licence if my use of THE SOFTWARE would otherwise be a breach of copyright.
Do coloured glasses make you do stupid stuff? Make you get into fights? Make you hit on girls you otherwise wouldn't? Ever woken up with a traffic cone after a coloured glasses bender and wondered what the hell you were doing last night? No?
Coloured glasses are a change to the inputs. I could understand drugs doing that kind of thing if we're a soul, and indeed there are many drugs that will mess up your inputs and outputs. But coloured glasses don't affect the consciousness itself. Drugs do: they're perfectly capable of messing up the thought process itself, and causing drastic changes in consciousness, temperament and personality.
Ah, but at least among those Australians you will find NOOOOOOOOO POOFTERS.
If the consciousness is not in the brain, but instead somewhere else, how is it that consciousness is affected by drugs? Drugs can alter the subjective experience of consciousness quite dramatically. Yet they're nothing but mundane organic chemicals which fuck with brain chemistry. That, to me, is extremely strong evidence that consciousness is resident in the brain.
If 'I' were a supernatural entity resident elsewhere - a 'soul' using the brain as an interface to the physical world - then I might expect drugs to slow down transmissions from the brain, or even scramble them to some extent. So reflex delays, loss of coordination, even hallucination, that's possible. But the core 'I', the consciousness, should be serenely unaffected by this.
Anybody who has done something bloody stupid while drunk knows that this is not what brain-affecting drugs are like. The consciousness itself as a subjective experience is strongly affected by chemicals which affect the brain.
It was called Neverwinter Nights.
Seriously, you wanted a direct sequel? Following on from the end of Throne of Bhaal? What would you do? Depending on how you ended the game you're at least an ubercharacter of ridiculously high level, and you're quite possibly the god of murder. You killed Demogorgon as a side quest. Where do you go from here?
Is that the date that's been set to withdraw from Iraq? If so, then of course we'll stop complaining about the ongoing cost of the war in Iraq. Otherwise, we'll continue complaining until the withdrawal takes place.
It might be a good idea to re-balance the rules a little. Master of Magic was oh so very exploitable. So very many plans for munchkin starting builds. My favourite was always to abuse the crafting system to get more mana from breaking an artefact than it took to create it in the first place. Use this to build up enormous mana stocks very early, equip some schmuck hero with top-of-the-line gear, and have him take over the world for you.
There was also the fact that if you took all Death books, you could get Wraiths as a starting spell.
No, you know what? Sod re-balancing. Most of the fun of that game was in finding new and interesting ways to break it.
14 million quid is the price of a decent footballer. It's really not that much money at all. CERN's total budget runs to something like £700 million per year.
On the loading screens. As for which products, know your target market. Source books, dice, miniatures, XXXL T-shirts, pizza delivery, and fizzy drinks. And expansion modules for the game itself, of course.
Inefficient. Producing antimatter this way still takes more energy than the antimatter releases in annihilation. Where's the benefit? An antimatter bomb would be smaller and lighter than an equivalent hydrogen bomb, but still far more expensive. No form of power generation in the world can come close to the efficiency of a hydrogen bomb.
Work out a miraculous means of making antimatter cheaply, in bulk and with lower energy input than its annihilation yield, and then we'll talk about antimatter bombs.
If you have $100m to spare, form a political party, and then vote for it. The ruling elite are only a ruling elite because people keep voting for them. Stop doing that. If the masses in America really oppose the imperialists, then they can form a new party of their own and kick the imperialists out. That they do not do so indicates to me that the Americans do in fact support the imperialists, because that means the cheap cheeseburgers keep coming.
Admittedly, when the masses unite, establish a party to represent the interests of the common man, and get it elected to government, it's generally called 'Socialism'. That this is considered a dirty word in America is still more evidence that the Americans support the imperialists.
Sid Meier likes doing that. Take a look at Colonization, which preserves the basic mechanisms of the original, but adds more sophisticated Civ4-style diplomacy and trade. And alliances with the Indians.
Only problem is, the Royal Expeditionary Force is normally absolutely huge by the time you declare independence, your troops don't upgrade to Continental Army status, and there's no foreign intervention force coming.
I had to drastically revise my war plans. In the original I used to build big heavily armed fortresses and pack them with troops and cannon, and wait for the king's men to come to the slaughter. In the new game, that doesn't work: artillery get a huge bonus to city attack, so no fortress is strong enough. Instead I play a Stalinist strategy. All troops and most of the population are evacuated from any cities the king's men approach, leaving only a token guard. The civilians are sent to the arms manufactories deep inland, and there drafted into the militia. The army lurks in the woods.
Meanwhile the king's men destroy my token garrison and occupy the city. That's when I counterattack: the artillery bonus now works in my favour. Sure, it means my cities get wrecked. The objective is to exterminate the king's men, not to have a viable colony left when the dust settles.
It actually made me feel very bad. The burning ruin of the greatest city in the New World, now home to nothing but a couple of small fishing communities. My score history at the end showed a colossal drop during the war, as all trade and useful industry was abandoned, and all of the civilian population not involved in arms manufacture evacuated from the cities and drafted into an army in the wild. And then slaughtered. I had a mental image of Field Marshal Sir Dougie Haig with his battle plans, sweeping soldiers off the board with a dustpan and brush...
Because right now it's 2008 and there's no sign of either one of them. And when Voyager went back in time to 1996? Also no sign of global devastation in any form.
Fudging Kirk's date of birth is a minor detail when you've already had to reschedule World War 3.
In Kirk's day, I think Earth did have money. Wasn't Dr McCoy going to buy a boat in VI? The money economy was abandoned between TOS and TNG, probably as a result of the invention of the replicator. That thing would do to every other industry what the Internet has done to music.
If America were a military dictatorship this might be a legitimate excuse. However, it is not; it is a representative democracy. Why do you not simply vote out the imperialists? Oh, wait: because the imperialists keep the cheeseburgers coming. Then the masses do support the imperialists, through their very apathy. Otherwise their cheeseburgers might become rather more scarce, their car might become smaller, and their clothes far more expensive for want of child slave labour.
You may not have noticed this but we're awfully keen on J. R. R. Tolkien around here.
It probably could be done well, and I look forward to it. But you'd lose all the extra material between chapters - the scrapbooks and memoirs and files that fill in the gaps. You'd never work out what the real deal was with Silk Spectre and Captain Metropolis, or what became of Hooded Justice, or why Nite Owl never really caught on to any of that stuff. So much of the richness of the Watchmen world was in details like that, in the gap between the facade the heroes put up for the media and the reality beneath it, and so much of the character of the older heroes is tied up in the lies they've concealed for decades.
Really I'd like Watchmen to be done as a very long film - like a 'Once Upon A Time In America' with capes. But honestly - who but we would sit through that?