If we could get them to merge, we could have a new amazing committee who will not be able to agree on anything and who's agenda will clog with junk as fast as the arteries of the "supersize me" guy. Two competing destop environments is better than none.
Not so! As I've pointed out several times, if your claim defames me, it doesn't matter (in an English court) that it's true because the truth isn't, and never has been an absolute defense there.
You could say it several more times and it still doesn't make it true. I have heard that some countries have this law, but in the UK and Commonwealth countries, truth is an abosolute defense to libel and slander, you just have to prove that either it is true (justification), or it is a belief that may be held by a rational person (fair comment). Witness the Marquess of Queensberry who defended himself from Oscar Wilde's libel action by proving that Wilde was a homosexual and thus calling him a "posing somdomite(sic)" was accurate.
The reason for this approach is that in Commonwealth countries people are responsible for checking the facts before talking. Ignorance of fact is no excuse to defame someone, only the truth is worth protecting as free speech. Take your poorly researched and unfair comments about the UK legal system for an example, what you said was neither true, nor a fair comment, since it may be easily researched, even just through looking at wikipedia. Of course this statement has not caused actual damage to the United Kingdom and thus is not actionable as defamation.
And being incompatible with the GPL doesn't mean something isn't open.
I think a more reasonable thing to say is "being compatible with the GPL doesn't mean something is open". However, those two statements aren't quite the same. Being open means that it should be compatible with pretty much anything, including the GPL. If a standard had a clause making it incompatible with all commercial software, or making it only compatible with GPLed software it wouldn't be open either for the exact same reason.
It may amaze you that I am actually a professional computer games developer. I am a "victim" who's work has been pirated probably many more times than it has been paid for. However in the industry, even with the publishers, your hard-line attitude is not particularly common. The key goal is to get people to pay money for software, not to stop people from playing the software without paying. If a copy of a computer game is bought by someone who has seen his friend play a pirate version, then that is a sale as much as any other. That is what makes money. I would get more money from someone who buys ten games and pirates another ten than one who plays none at all.
Secondly, what you clearly don't understand is that developers _want_ to have their game played, just like an artist wants their work viewed. It is nothing even close to being just a profit making venture in the eyes of the developers (I could be making double my salary in another field). THAT is why Ubisoft should be and for the most part probably is thanking pirates, since they are largely the ones playing the games. Developers mainly want more people to look on their works and be impressed, money just allows them to make more.
Anyway, sadly I cannot continue this argument due to time constraints, it's been fun but ultimately pointless.
At the end of the day, you may rationalize stealing any way you want, but it doesn't change the fact your a leech on society and no better than a bank robber. Scum is scum.
As I said, I've bought many games from Ubisoft (often at launch price) and I've pirated a grand total of one (during the 4 years between when it left store shelves and when it went on Steam and it's legal purchase was prohibitively difficult). My main reaction towards Ubisoft games in the last three or so years is simply to not play them. But if I had pirated them, they would have the exact same money, but they would also have the acknowledgement that I liked their game.
Maybe I am scum due to other facets of my life, but I currently have shelves full of PC and PS3 games and no pirated games or software installed anywhere. This is because I can afford this software, not because I am inherently a better person than those who cannot. I am at a point in my life where I consider time more precious than money, if it is not worth my AU$110 (US$90... yes, that is how much they cost here) it is not worth 10 hours to play through it. However for a student, that can be 2/3rds of their weekly income, buying games at that price is stupid and irresponsible and they should simply not do it, pirating occasionally would leave the world in much the same position as if they had taken the only other option and not played it at all.
That's the mentality of a low life. You should thank me for stealing from you?! WTF? Should women thank you after you rape them? Should homeless people thank you after you shoot them? Stealing from a big company is okay but stealing from a person is wrong? Where do you draw the line? Stealing is okay so long as you were ONLY moderately entertained?
Wow... um... I'm not quite sure how to respond to that. Even if I was actually rationalizing shoplifting or embezzlement (financial crimes with actual victims), comparing me to a rapist or murderer would still be pretty crazy hyperbole.
Anyway, my final conclusion is that I have not pirated a game for 2 years (since Steam made the whole practice redundant). However, if I was a pirate, I would still feel better about myself than if I ever felt the urge to be calling people scum on Slashdot for advocating something that my tiny little brain could not distinguish from stealing.
Well, you should. I haven't bought OR pirated an Ubisoft game for the last six months for the exact same reason: they suck. The last game I did buy was the new Prince of Persia, which I was deeply disappointed with. Prior to that, I bought Assassin's Creed, which I was mildly disappointed with and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent which was terrible.
I usually do not pirate Ubisoft games because they don't warrant the effort. The only one I have ever pirated was Beyond Good and Evil, which I might have enjoyed if it didn't come up so often as a "perfect game" in the rhetoric of a certain kind of critic.
Ubisoft, next time someone pirates one of your games, thank them. Because that's far more than I would be willing to do with one of them.
One billion yuan is currently equal to about $146,000,000. I'm pretty sure it was a typo.
It would be awesome for tourists though, I've eaten a meal at a decent enough restaurant for as little as 12 yuan, street food goes for 1/4 that. If instead of $2 it equaled.2c I would feel even more frugal. I'm currently being paid in them so I'm glad it's not the case.
They both call themselves "The Republic of China" internally.
Internally, the PRC's official name is pronounced: "Zhonghua renmin gongheguo" (sadly/. doesn't seem to work with Chinese characters). That "renmin" bit means "the people", whereas thee other two words mean "China" and "Republic" respectively. In English, they usually just call themselves "China" these days, even in official documents like a Chinese visa, but when they use the full name, they always put the "People's" bit in.
GLSL stands for openGL Shader Language. It's a high level way of specifying vertex programs (functions run on each vertex) and fragment programs (functions run on each pixel as it is drawn). Basically, it provides a language environment similar to c that can be used to program the GPU to do calculations that the CPU would otherwise have to do. Another similar technology is Microsoft HLSL which does something very similar for DirectX (though using slightly different terminology such as "vertex shaders", "pixel shaders" and "geometry shaders").
the second half ruined everything, and proved to me that Crytek mostly cared about the tech.
Then don't play the second half, it's not as if the game was particularly short. Crysis suffered from the same "second half syndrome" that Farcry did (where you fight those mutants), Halo did (where you fight those zombies), Drake's Fortune did (where you fight those mutant zombies) and happens time and again. It is a law that every outstanding game where you fight intelligent enemies needs a terrible second half where everything just runs right for you, like FEAR's mercifully short "shooting at ghosts" bit. I was surprised that Gears of War didn't degenerate into merely a fight against wretches half way through.
In my opinion, Crysis was a far above average FPS with far above average gameplay. The tactical options it gives you with the open game world and its weapons and suit capabilities are amazing, there is just so much fun that can be had, doing things just a little bit differently each time, sneaking up on guys, blowing up shacks, jumping onto things, crashing vehicles into enemies, etc.
Compare it to the games released around the same time, Bioshock is an immersive atmosphere with grinding combat and stupid AI, Halo 3 was essentially an upgraded version of the last two (not a such a bad thing), UT3 never pretended to not be a reskin of an old franchise, Resistance: Fall of Man was a fairly good execution of a game I swear I've played before, I'll admit that CoD4 was awesome. These ganes were all good (2007 was an AMAZING year for the FPS genre), but I don't see any of them having clearly better gameplay than Crysis as far as the parts of the game you can actually interact with, I'm having to say that Crysis was one of the better ones, yet it always seems to get the criticism.
If all Crytek cared about was the tech, why would they have bothered with the first half? My theory is that Crysis' problem is that it had brilliant tech, which has become a very fashionable thing to complain about these days for some reason. They put in some awesome gameplay, some terrific game art (those alien things look really good) and as good a story as you can expect from this genre. The tech shines so much that people can't look at these things though.
Australia is even harder as they have similar visa options as the US, but no 'green card lottery' equivalent. So to move to Australia, you need to find a company willing to employ you and move you there, or have family there already.
Nope, Australia has a fairly open immigration policy. You don't need to be sponsored for a visa to get permanent residence, you just need to be skilled at a particular trade or profession, have a clean record, be healthy, speak English and be aged between 18 and 45. The process takes a while and can be quite bureaucratic, but the government does give out tens of thousands of these visas every year. In any case, if you match the criteria, you probably stand a much better chance of acceptance than winning the US greencard lottery. I know Canada is the same and it is also a very nice country
Correction: 19 Billion dollars is only $60 from every American. I think proper entertainment of this sort is worth $x per capita (where X > 60). It was mainly just rhetorical anyway.
Can I point out something that the parent poster might have missed? Sending people to Mars is actually quite cool.
Now, if we think about this for a second, meat and potato aerospace research is done in many places, spacecraft manufacturers, communications companies, the Airforce etc. Because they actually have to do useful things with the research, the research must therefore be done. On the other hand NASA's purpose is to make Americans feel good about themselves. The idea is to show the national contempt for the universe by lobbing a group of jocks as far out into it as possible then brining them back alive.
Now, with the amount Americans currently spend on entertainment, I think it is quite financially sane to invest money primarily on doing cool stuff. Nobody cares about the ISS, nobody cares about permanent bases, nobody cares about where the next robot is going. But if you stick some airforce guys on the end of a giant rocket and send them to another planet and everyone's going to start paying attention. You can have news coverage, you can have books, you can have documentaries, you can have movies and everyone's happy and entertained.
Not to mention, whichever nation first successfully recovers a crew that has been to Mars is going to feel awesome. Look at the Apollo program, America was having a rough decade with foreign relations, Bay of Pigs, Vietnam etc. but when 2 Americans flew to the moon, everyone generally considered that to be a good thing. Nobody even cared that the rocket was designed by a Nazi, everyone just likes big engines with lots of fire and adventure.
19 Billion dollars is only $6 from every American. I think proper entertainment of this sort is worth $50 per capita. I'm not even American but I would gladly chip in that amount to NASA or any other country's space program putting a serious effort into putting someone where they don't belong and bringing them back again.
Besides, I couldn't understand why Japan was regarded as being such a threat back then and still don't.
When Japan started booming economically the world was still largely run by those who remember Japan practicing history's biggest genocide in China, humiliating the once mighty British Empire in Singapore, blowing apart the United States Pacific fleet in Hawaii and fighting the United States and British Commonwealth for half a decade until they finally succumbed to two nuclear blasts. Sixty four years of peace has changed the way Japanese people are seen and rightly so, but anyone who scoffs at the idea of the Japanese ever being a threat in the next century has no memory.
If I am understanding "Instant run-off" correctly, then people would need to go out and vote more than once per election whenever no Majority candidate were chosen.
Then you don't understand it correctly. The "instant" bit comes from the fact that voters only show up once and write a series of choices. The vote travels by itself in the counting room from 1->2->3->4->etc. whenever the top choice is eliminated.
the manufacture of a car creates SIX TIMES the CO2 that the average car will emit in its lifetime
How silly. whoever told you that (citation needed) is comparing the total CO2 output of the factories that assemble the car and the raw material against simply what comes out of a car's exhaust pipe. This is forgetting how much energy is used extracting, transporting, refining and distributing the fuel that the car runs on. It also neglects that oil much rarer than the coke and coal burned to smelt steel and run the grid; whatever replaces it will likely be much less efficient to create than oil is to dig up. Rarity is also a factor with how much energy needs to be used invading countries for their oil.
If there was any validity to the claim at all, the places that make cars would be more notoriously polluted than the ones that use them. This is not the case, How many cars are made in Las Angeles for example.
In short, this is like the old "Russians using a pencil / NASA spending $** million on the space pen story". It sounds clever until you realize that a pencil makes loose graphite dust in a closed environment.
The whole story is pure bollocks anyway. Both US and Soviet agencies used pencils in space. The space pen was developed independently by Paul C. Fisher without being requested to do so by NASA. In the end, I've been told that both agencies ended up ordering them.
What the Chinese government really needs to give to its people is porn, addictive dumb reality TV shows, food and booze.
You've never watched CCTV have you? They run 18 channels of pure shit 24/7. Soap operas, inane stock-character comedies that just drag on for hours (which I admit might be funnier if I were a native speaker) and news that tells you the exact same trivial things three times an hour. On other channels there are some form of reality shows and all the mind numbing goodness you'd expect in the west.
Food is a huge part of China, Sure, the rural poor may be living off bowls of congee but if anything the urban middle class generally eat far more lavishly than those of western countries with both dishes, more exotic ingredients, more complex preparation and larger portions (even KFC's menu is roughly double its normal size).
As for booze, everyone should try Tsing Tao or Harbin beer when over there. It just costs a few RMB, comes in massive bottles and due to its sparse flavor you can keep drinking it and drinking it and be thoroughly drunk well before your mouth feels like you've been drinking beer. If you ordering, make sure you pronounce "Tsing Tao" as "Tchingdao" and emphasize the "r" in Harbin or they won't know what you are asking for.
Anyway, I'm not going to do any further analysis here, apart from mentioning that the Chinese government is not stupid in these matters and has probably realised the exact same thing as you and most western governments have.
We've known that a shopper has no privacy for a while now, retail chains, credit card companies etc are watching your every move through any distinguishing information they can possibly find, discount cards, rewards cards, credit cards and even debit cards, this surprises nobody that is not living under a rock. The difference is that here, the companies in question sent this guy a firmware update disc. The upshot of this is not only does he get to upgrade his firmware on his Blueray without any additional effort, but things like this serve to remind shoppers that they are not anonymous unless they are extremely careful, which is a damn good lesson.
but I still think it's shitty of them to not let their departments choose. Different departments are going to have very different needs.
OK, I'm not sure what special requirements different government departments have but I'm pretty positive that they are all quite similar. Each bureaucrat has a computer which they use to make documents on, documents are sent between them and kept on a central server. Department keeps a database with all the government type info on it as well as internal administrative stuff.
It's a shallow analysis of course, but my point is that they are not producing embedded systems, they are not editing or streaming media, they do not have hard realtime limits such as in flight control systems or medial systems, they are pushing paper and they want something simple and universal to do this while being free and open. The other alternatives are the BSDs (similar to Linux but with even less focus on the desktop), ReactOS (a much less stable version of Windows), Haiku (unusably unstable), Darwin (BSD with no desktop). Why exactly should a government department be considering using any of these for use outside some incredibly specialized applications that probably come outside of this mandate anyway?
Seems every time a company chooses to support FreeBSD, Linux fanboys come to/. to diss it. Linux fanboys are usually freeloaders, academics, or religious zealots of the Church of Stallman..
I believe most of the comments have been along the lines of "What the hell is Bordeaux?" because the summary doesn't say what it does. As for the "fanboys" (an unfair, derogatory term in this context); Linux users are quite welcome to be "freeloaders" since the software itself is free and code contribution is not a requisite to using it; Academics make up an extremely small, but relatively useful part of the Linux community, when I worked for a university, I wrote some pretty interesting and useful software (all open source). As for Stallman, most Linux users are quite embarrassed by him, which is sad because his only real crime is his commitment to his ideology, which shouldn't be a thing to be ridiculed. Otherwise he's a hard working, passionate and intelligent guy (and this is coming from a guy who writes proprietary software and RMS would personally hate).
We need to have a software ecosystem from small software houses and I feel this will never happen with linux due to the GPL.
That's an interesting feeling, particularly since many small software companies already do support Linux. The company I work for (15 programmers or so) makes closed source, proprietary software that runs on Linux. The GPL doesn't obstruct us since we can run on Linux just fine without using GPLed code.
I will say something about BSD, the FreeBSD development team has a good sense of pragmatism in how they write software and are happy to let the jackasses go off and do their thing while they set to work writing good code. However out of those who have switched to the various BSDs in the last ten years, the majority have been looking for a political crusade more than an operating system. Not so much something to abstract and manage their hardware, but something to defend to other nerds (of which, more don't use BSD than don't use Linux). I think the saying that: "Linux users hate Windows, BSD users love Unix" does not apply anymore. The BSD users I've met seem to love attacking Linux, attacking other BSDs and sometimes even praising Windows for shock value, with far more fury than I've ever heard a Linux user over 20 years old bash anything. Sure, if you're a BSD user that I haven't met it may not apply to you and of course there are plenty of stupid jackasses in the Linux world as well, but saying Linux users are comparatively a bunch of fanboy trolls just flies in the face or reality.
You would play the North under Douglas MacArthur and start with a division of Panzer tanks and two battalions of chariots from Pennsylvania
The Total War games are each set in a single time period. All of the units are drawn from the same general technology level and the cities are in fixed places. Sure, they don't hit the mark every time, e.g. the chariots and scythes being the primary weapons of Ptolemaic Egypt but they deviate to make the game more fun, not because they are ignorant. I think you're referring to the Civilization series here, Civ 3 to be precise since you have 3 units under the one general, though you should have upgraded your chariots to cavalry before you put them in McArthur's army since they cannot be upgraded when they're in there.
it is filled with bizarre inaccuracies like the Roman legions fielding companies of archers...
They did. They had always had auxiliary archer units and/or Roman archers called sagiterii. The Roman military during the Republic and early Empire was built around a core of heavy infantry but they realized early on that they had to field a diverse and flexible army or face devastation.
...Julius Caesar riding around the battlefield at the head of his own band of Teutonic knights...
The Romans employed large amounts of cavalry units, originally mostly supplied by allied kingdoms. In fact the word "ally" comes from the Latin "allae" meaning squadrons of cavalry. The Romans won the favor friendly chieftains in places like Germania in order to supply units that the Roman legions lacked. The Tutonic Knights themselves were a later military founded well after the fall of the Western Empire and the Germans at that time were more likely to fight on foot, however the idea of a Roman general commanding German horsemen is very possible.
...Don't even start with the crazy armies that come out of Briton.
You mean Celtic warriors wearing nothing save a torc and a liberal coating of woad on their faces? Much was exaggerated about the "barbarity" of the northern barbarians by classical Roman and Greek historians, but they certainly did have some quite unorthodox battle tactics.
And I have a lot of hope for this one, since a good chunk of it will deal with American history which many of the developers probably know a bit more about than Roman, Japanese, or medieval European history.
Creative Assembly is based in the UK and Australia. These countries both teach Roman and medieval European history but do not teach much American history at school. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that Empire: Total War will be more based around the European powers such as the British, French, Spanish, Russian, Dutch etc. empires rather than the US which was not an empire before it conquered Cuba and the Philippines in the Spanish American war in the 1890s.
the series has tended to move forwards in time, with the exception of Medieval 2 which revisited a time period that had already been covered.
Actually, it has moved backwards in time until Medievil 2 Total War. Shogun: Total war was set in the Sengoku period (15th - 17th centuries AD), Medievil: Total War was set in the High and Late Middle Ages 11th - 15th centuries AD. Rome: Total War was set from the founding of Rome to the beginning of the Roman Empire (3rd century BC - 1st century AD). That said, having one in the industrial period is going to be awesome... I'm going to turn the whole map red the way it should have been.
I think if it were to limit itself to real events and persons it would limit the scope of player involvement as the events of the campaign would have to follow reality rather than depend on the player's actions. It would be nice if the factions could be a bit more realistic, I think the Roman factions in R:TW having four totally separate empires was kind of silly, they would be squabbling within one. Also, the bronze age armies in Ptolemaic Egypt were pretty silly too, though I admit that I found it more fun than having yet another side made up with different types of pikemen.
there's an awful lot of silly hyperbole and cherry-picked "issues" in your post as well.
The parent said Australia was not founded upon freedom like the US was. Whether comparing the moral history of two countries proves anything in todays society is another question, but I felt that the question had been asked and someone should discuss it a bit better than it had been in this thread.
I'm not sure how many issues I brought up. As for the factuality of this "issue" I did bring up; is the Fourteenth amendment in the bill of rights or not? If not, then who were the other ten written to protect? Did or did not the man who wrote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." own slaves?
I think that Americans as a general rule have a slightly warped picture of their own founding. Many Americans picture the British Empire of 1775 as being run by a king, rather than the House of Commons and an elected Prime Minister. Many Americans feel that the thirteen colonies did not already have a large amount of self government. Many Americans feel that people like Thomas Jefferson had a view on freedom which extended to all Americans rather than just land owners. If these were true, then it would stand to reason that they idolise their founders. But in reality, they weren't men ahead of their time, they were men of their time, just like us all. America gained independence so as not to pay tax to an external government and to keep all decisions closer to home, much the same as Australia. This is not in any way ignoble but it was mainly practical rather than ideological. Both the British Empire at that time and the United States of America at that time were flawed democracies, known for upholding the rights of some and not of others, succession was not really a step in either direction.
Slashdot Mirror
If we could get them to merge, we could have a new amazing committee who will not be able to agree on anything and who's agenda will clog with junk as fast as the arteries of the "supersize me" guy. Two competing destop environments is better than none.
You could say it several more times and it still doesn't make it true. I have heard that some countries have this law, but in the UK and Commonwealth countries, truth is an abosolute defense to libel and slander, you just have to prove that either it is true (justification), or it is a belief that may be held by a rational person (fair comment). Witness the Marquess of Queensberry who defended himself from Oscar Wilde's libel action by proving that Wilde was a homosexual and thus calling him a "posing somdomite(sic)" was accurate.
The reason for this approach is that in Commonwealth countries people are responsible for checking the facts before talking. Ignorance of fact is no excuse to defame someone, only the truth is worth protecting as free speech. Take your poorly researched and unfair comments about the UK legal system for an example, what you said was neither true, nor a fair comment, since it may be easily researched, even just through looking at wikipedia. Of course this statement has not caused actual damage to the United Kingdom and thus is not actionable as defamation.
I think a more reasonable thing to say is "being compatible with the GPL doesn't mean something is open". However, those two statements aren't quite the same. Being open means that it should be compatible with pretty much anything, including the GPL. If a standard had a clause making it incompatible with all commercial software, or making it only compatible with GPLed software it wouldn't be open either for the exact same reason.
It may amaze you that I am actually a professional computer games developer. I am a "victim" who's work has been pirated probably many more times than it has been paid for. However in the industry, even with the publishers, your hard-line attitude is not particularly common. The key goal is to get people to pay money for software, not to stop people from playing the software without paying. If a copy of a computer game is bought by someone who has seen his friend play a pirate version, then that is a sale as much as any other. That is what makes money. I would get more money from someone who buys ten games and pirates another ten than one who plays none at all.
Secondly, what you clearly don't understand is that developers _want_ to have their game played, just like an artist wants their work viewed. It is nothing even close to being just a profit making venture in the eyes of the developers (I could be making double my salary in another field). THAT is why Ubisoft should be and for the most part probably is thanking pirates, since they are largely the ones playing the games. Developers mainly want more people to look on their works and be impressed, money just allows them to make more.
Anyway, sadly I cannot continue this argument due to time constraints, it's been fun but ultimately pointless.
As I said, I've bought many games from Ubisoft (often at launch price) and I've pirated a grand total of one (during the 4 years between when it left store shelves and when it went on Steam and it's legal purchase was prohibitively difficult). My main reaction towards Ubisoft games in the last three or so years is simply to not play them. But if I had pirated them, they would have the exact same money, but they would also have the acknowledgement that I liked their game.
Maybe I am scum due to other facets of my life, but I currently have shelves full of PC and PS3 games and no pirated games or software installed anywhere. This is because I can afford this software, not because I am inherently a better person than those who cannot. I am at a point in my life where I consider time more precious than money, if it is not worth my AU$110 (US$90... yes, that is how much they cost here) it is not worth 10 hours to play through it. However for a student, that can be 2/3rds of their weekly income, buying games at that price is stupid and irresponsible and they should simply not do it, pirating occasionally would leave the world in much the same position as if they had taken the only other option and not played it at all.
Wow... um... I'm not quite sure how to respond to that. Even if I was actually rationalizing shoplifting or embezzlement (financial crimes with actual victims), comparing me to a rapist or murderer would still be pretty crazy hyperbole.
Anyway, my final conclusion is that I have not pirated a game for 2 years (since Steam made the whole practice redundant). However, if I was a pirate, I would still feel better about myself than if I ever felt the urge to be calling people scum on Slashdot for advocating something that my tiny little brain could not distinguish from stealing.
Well, you should. I haven't bought OR pirated an Ubisoft game for the last six months for the exact same reason: they suck. The last game I did buy was the new Prince of Persia, which I was deeply disappointed with. Prior to that, I bought Assassin's Creed, which I was mildly disappointed with and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent which was terrible.
I usually do not pirate Ubisoft games because they don't warrant the effort. The only one I have ever pirated was Beyond Good and Evil, which I might have enjoyed if it didn't come up so often as a "perfect game" in the rhetoric of a certain kind of critic.
Ubisoft, next time someone pirates one of your games, thank them. Because that's far more than I would be willing to do with one of them.
One billion yuan is currently equal to about $146,000,000. I'm pretty sure it was a typo.
It would be awesome for tourists though, I've eaten a meal at a decent enough restaurant for as little as 12 yuan, street food goes for 1/4 that. If instead of $2 it equaled .2c I would feel even more frugal. I'm currently being paid in them so I'm glad it's not the case.
Internally, the PRC's official name is pronounced: "Zhonghua renmin gongheguo" (sadly /. doesn't seem to work with Chinese characters). That "renmin" bit means "the people", whereas thee other two words mean "China" and "Republic" respectively. In English, they usually just call themselves "China" these days, even in official documents like a Chinese visa, but when they use the full name, they always put the "People's" bit in.
GLSL stands for openGL Shader Language. It's a high level way of specifying vertex programs (functions run on each vertex) and fragment programs (functions run on each pixel as it is drawn). Basically, it provides a language environment similar to c that can be used to program the GPU to do calculations that the CPU would otherwise have to do. Another similar technology is Microsoft HLSL which does something very similar for DirectX (though using slightly different terminology such as "vertex shaders", "pixel shaders" and "geometry shaders").
Then don't play the second half, it's not as if the game was particularly short. Crysis suffered from the same "second half syndrome" that Farcry did (where you fight those mutants), Halo did (where you fight those zombies), Drake's Fortune did (where you fight those mutant zombies) and happens time and again. It is a law that every outstanding game where you fight intelligent enemies needs a terrible second half where everything just runs right for you, like FEAR's mercifully short "shooting at ghosts" bit. I was surprised that Gears of War didn't degenerate into merely a fight against wretches half way through.
In my opinion, Crysis was a far above average FPS with far above average gameplay. The tactical options it gives you with the open game world and its weapons and suit capabilities are amazing, there is just so much fun that can be had, doing things just a little bit differently each time, sneaking up on guys, blowing up shacks, jumping onto things, crashing vehicles into enemies, etc.
Compare it to the games released around the same time, Bioshock is an immersive atmosphere with grinding combat and stupid AI, Halo 3 was essentially an upgraded version of the last two (not a such a bad thing), UT3 never pretended to not be a reskin of an old franchise, Resistance: Fall of Man was a fairly good execution of a game I swear I've played before, I'll admit that CoD4 was awesome. These ganes were all good (2007 was an AMAZING year for the FPS genre), but I don't see any of them having clearly better gameplay than Crysis as far as the parts of the game you can actually interact with, I'm having to say that Crysis was one of the better ones, yet it always seems to get the criticism.
If all Crytek cared about was the tech, why would they have bothered with the first half? My theory is that Crysis' problem is that it had brilliant tech, which has become a very fashionable thing to complain about these days for some reason. They put in some awesome gameplay, some terrific game art (those alien things look really good) and as good a story as you can expect from this genre. The tech shines so much that people can't look at these things though.
Nope, Australia has a fairly open immigration policy. You don't need to be sponsored for a visa to get permanent residence, you just need to be skilled at a particular trade or profession, have a clean record, be healthy, speak English and be aged between 18 and 45. The process takes a while and can be quite bureaucratic, but the government does give out tens of thousands of these visas every year. In any case, if you match the criteria, you probably stand a much better chance of acceptance than winning the US greencard lottery. I know Canada is the same and it is also a very nice country
Correction: 19 Billion dollars is only $60 from every American. I think proper entertainment of this sort is worth $x per capita (where X > 60). It was mainly just rhetorical anyway.
Can I point out something that the parent poster might have missed? Sending people to Mars is actually quite cool.
Now, if we think about this for a second, meat and potato aerospace research is done in many places, spacecraft manufacturers, communications companies, the Airforce etc. Because they actually have to do useful things with the research, the research must therefore be done. On the other hand NASA's purpose is to make Americans feel good about themselves. The idea is to show the national contempt for the universe by lobbing a group of jocks as far out into it as possible then brining them back alive.
Now, with the amount Americans currently spend on entertainment, I think it is quite financially sane to invest money primarily on doing cool stuff. Nobody cares about the ISS, nobody cares about permanent bases, nobody cares about where the next robot is going. But if you stick some airforce guys on the end of a giant rocket and send them to another planet and everyone's going to start paying attention. You can have news coverage, you can have books, you can have documentaries, you can have movies and everyone's happy and entertained.
Not to mention, whichever nation first successfully recovers a crew that has been to Mars is going to feel awesome. Look at the Apollo program, America was having a rough decade with foreign relations, Bay of Pigs, Vietnam etc. but when 2 Americans flew to the moon, everyone generally considered that to be a good thing. Nobody even cared that the rocket was designed by a Nazi, everyone just likes big engines with lots of fire and adventure.
19 Billion dollars is only $6 from every American. I think proper entertainment of this sort is worth $50 per capita. I'm not even American but I would gladly chip in that amount to NASA or any other country's space program putting a serious effort into putting someone where they don't belong and bringing them back again.
When Japan started booming economically the world was still largely run by those who remember Japan practicing history's biggest genocide in China, humiliating the once mighty British Empire in Singapore, blowing apart the United States Pacific fleet in Hawaii and fighting the United States and British Commonwealth for half a decade until they finally succumbed to two nuclear blasts. Sixty four years of peace has changed the way Japanese people are seen and rightly so, but anyone who scoffs at the idea of the Japanese ever being a threat in the next century has no memory.
Then you don't understand it correctly. The "instant" bit comes from the fact that voters only show up once and write a series of choices. The vote travels by itself in the counting room from 1->2->3->4->etc. whenever the top choice is eliminated.
How silly. whoever told you that (citation needed) is comparing the total CO2 output of the factories that assemble the car and the raw material against simply what comes out of a car's exhaust pipe. This is forgetting how much energy is used extracting, transporting, refining and distributing the fuel that the car runs on. It also neglects that oil much rarer than the coke and coal burned to smelt steel and run the grid; whatever replaces it will likely be much less efficient to create than oil is to dig up. Rarity is also a factor with how much energy needs to be used invading countries for their oil.
If there was any validity to the claim at all, the places that make cars would be more notoriously polluted than the ones that use them. This is not the case, How many cars are made in Las Angeles for example.
The whole story is pure bollocks anyway. Both US and Soviet agencies used pencils in space. The space pen was developed independently by Paul C. Fisher without being requested to do so by NASA. In the end, I've been told that both agencies ended up ordering them.
You've never watched CCTV have you? They run 18 channels of pure shit 24/7. Soap operas, inane stock-character comedies that just drag on for hours (which I admit might be funnier if I were a native speaker) and news that tells you the exact same trivial things three times an hour. On other channels there are some form of reality shows and all the mind numbing goodness you'd expect in the west.
Food is a huge part of China, Sure, the rural poor may be living off bowls of congee but if anything the urban middle class generally eat far more lavishly than those of western countries with both dishes, more exotic ingredients, more complex preparation and larger portions (even KFC's menu is roughly double its normal size).
As for booze, everyone should try Tsing Tao or Harbin beer when over there. It just costs a few RMB, comes in massive bottles and due to its sparse flavor you can keep drinking it and drinking it and be thoroughly drunk well before your mouth feels like you've been drinking beer. If you ordering, make sure you pronounce "Tsing Tao" as "Tchingdao" and emphasize the "r" in Harbin or they won't know what you are asking for.
Anyway, I'm not going to do any further analysis here, apart from mentioning that the Chinese government is not stupid in these matters and has probably realised the exact same thing as you and most western governments have.
We've known that a shopper has no privacy for a while now, retail chains, credit card companies etc are watching your every move through any distinguishing information they can possibly find, discount cards, rewards cards, credit cards and even debit cards, this surprises nobody that is not living under a rock. The difference is that here, the companies in question sent this guy a firmware update disc. The upshot of this is not only does he get to upgrade his firmware on his Blueray without any additional effort, but things like this serve to remind shoppers that they are not anonymous unless they are extremely careful, which is a damn good lesson.
OK, I'm not sure what special requirements different government departments have but I'm pretty positive that they are all quite similar. Each bureaucrat has a computer which they use to make documents on, documents are sent between them and kept on a central server. Department keeps a database with all the government type info on it as well as internal administrative stuff.
It's a shallow analysis of course, but my point is that they are not producing embedded systems, they are not editing or streaming media, they do not have hard realtime limits such as in flight control systems or medial systems, they are pushing paper and they want something simple and universal to do this while being free and open. The other alternatives are the BSDs (similar to Linux but with even less focus on the desktop), ReactOS (a much less stable version of Windows), Haiku (unusably unstable), Darwin (BSD with no desktop). Why exactly should a government department be considering using any of these for use outside some incredibly specialized applications that probably come outside of this mandate anyway?
I believe most of the comments have been along the lines of "What the hell is Bordeaux?" because the summary doesn't say what it does. As for the "fanboys" (an unfair, derogatory term in this context); Linux users are quite welcome to be "freeloaders" since the software itself is free and code contribution is not a requisite to using it; Academics make up an extremely small, but relatively useful part of the Linux community, when I worked for a university, I wrote some pretty interesting and useful software (all open source). As for Stallman, most Linux users are quite embarrassed by him, which is sad because his only real crime is his commitment to his ideology, which shouldn't be a thing to be ridiculed. Otherwise he's a hard working, passionate and intelligent guy (and this is coming from a guy who writes proprietary software and RMS would personally hate).
That's an interesting feeling, particularly since many small software companies already do support Linux. The company I work for (15 programmers or so) makes closed source, proprietary software that runs on Linux. The GPL doesn't obstruct us since we can run on Linux just fine without using GPLed code.
I will say something about BSD, the FreeBSD development team has a good sense of pragmatism in how they write software and are happy to let the jackasses go off and do their thing while they set to work writing good code. However out of those who have switched to the various BSDs in the last ten years, the majority have been looking for a political crusade more than an operating system. Not so much something to abstract and manage their hardware, but something to defend to other nerds (of which, more don't use BSD than don't use Linux). I think the saying that: "Linux users hate Windows, BSD users love Unix" does not apply anymore. The BSD users I've met seem to love attacking Linux, attacking other BSDs and sometimes even praising Windows for shock value, with far more fury than I've ever heard a Linux user over 20 years old bash anything. Sure, if you're a BSD user that I haven't met it may not apply to you and of course there are plenty of stupid jackasses in the Linux world as well, but saying Linux users are comparatively a bunch of fanboy trolls just flies in the face or reality.
The Total War games are each set in a single time period. All of the units are drawn from the same general technology level and the cities are in fixed places. Sure, they don't hit the mark every time, e.g. the chariots and scythes being the primary weapons of Ptolemaic Egypt but they deviate to make the game more fun, not because they are ignorant. I think you're referring to the Civilization series here, Civ 3 to be precise since you have 3 units under the one general, though you should have upgraded your chariots to cavalry before you put them in McArthur's army since they cannot be upgraded when they're in there.
They did. They had always had auxiliary archer units and/or Roman archers called sagiterii. The Roman military during the Republic and early Empire was built around a core of heavy infantry but they realized early on that they had to field a diverse and flexible army or face devastation.
The Romans employed large amounts of cavalry units, originally mostly supplied by allied kingdoms. In fact the word "ally" comes from the Latin "allae" meaning squadrons of cavalry. The Romans won the favor friendly chieftains in places like Germania in order to supply units that the Roman legions lacked. The Tutonic Knights themselves were a later military founded well after the fall of the Western Empire and the Germans at that time were more likely to fight on foot, however the idea of a Roman general commanding German horsemen is very possible.
You mean Celtic warriors wearing nothing save a torc and a liberal coating of woad on their faces? Much was exaggerated about the "barbarity" of the northern barbarians by classical Roman and Greek historians, but they certainly did have some quite unorthodox battle tactics.
Creative Assembly is based in the UK and Australia. These countries both teach Roman and medieval European history but do not teach much American history at school. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that Empire: Total War will be more based around the European powers such as the British, French, Spanish, Russian, Dutch etc. empires rather than the US which was not an empire before it conquered Cuba and the Philippines in the Spanish American war in the 1890s.
Actually, it has moved backwards in time until Medievil 2 Total War. Shogun: Total war was set in the Sengoku period (15th - 17th centuries AD), Medievil: Total War was set in the High and Late Middle Ages 11th - 15th centuries AD. Rome: Total War was set from the founding of Rome to the beginning of the Roman Empire (3rd century BC - 1st century AD). That said, having one in the industrial period is going to be awesome... I'm going to turn the whole map red the way it should have been.
I think if it were to limit itself to real events and persons it would limit the scope of player involvement as the events of the campaign would have to follow reality rather than depend on the player's actions. It would be nice if the factions could be a bit more realistic, I think the Roman factions in R:TW having four totally separate empires was kind of silly, they would be squabbling within one. Also, the bronze age armies in Ptolemaic Egypt were pretty silly too, though I admit that I found it more fun than having yet another side made up with different types of pikemen.
I don't know, but in this instance, I'd like to thank Airstrip One for taking the attention off Australia.
The parent said Australia was not founded upon freedom like the US was. Whether comparing the moral history of two countries proves anything in todays society is another question, but I felt that the question had been asked and someone should discuss it a bit better than it had been in this thread.
I'm not sure how many issues I brought up. As for the factuality of this "issue" I did bring up; is the Fourteenth amendment in the bill of rights or not? If not, then who were the other ten written to protect? Did or did not the man who wrote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." own slaves?
I think that Americans as a general rule have a slightly warped picture of their own founding. Many Americans picture the British Empire of 1775 as being run by a king, rather than the House of Commons and an elected Prime Minister. Many Americans feel that the thirteen colonies did not already have a large amount of self government. Many Americans feel that people like Thomas Jefferson had a view on freedom which extended to all Americans rather than just land owners. If these were true, then it would stand to reason that they idolise their founders. But in reality, they weren't men ahead of their time, they were men of their time, just like us all. America gained independence so as not to pay tax to an external government and to keep all decisions closer to home, much the same as Australia. This is not in any way ignoble but it was mainly practical rather than ideological. Both the British Empire at that time and the United States of America at that time were flawed democracies, known for upholding the rights of some and not of others, succession was not really a step in either direction.