I agree, it's pretty sad that they've got "Buy Now" links for games they claim suck. However...
reveal them for the captialists that they really are (i.e. not independent press)
How is that a contradiction? The _independent_ presses pretty much need to be capitalistic. After all, by definition, if they're independent than no one else is going to be paying their bills. The problem occurs when they can make more money pushing products that they can by unbiased reporting to attract readers and/or advertisers.
but then they actually have a category called "Most Disappointing Delay" populated with games that are not out now and (in the case of Half-life 2, at least) may not be out for several months yet.
This is a problem how? Very few people are disapointed by the delays _after_ a game comes out. It's while you're still waiting that every additional delay seems interminable. I would expect "Most Disapointing Delay" to be about games that are yet to be.
There are plenty of things you can do outside of peeing on dead people. I personally find it funny to collect a bunch of cats, go into a kitchen with a stove on and set all the cats on fire. After setting them on fire, watch them run around and burn the whole town down. I find cats setting people on fire amusing, but it's probably just me.
Yes, it's just you.
Plus, you didn't mention taking out the anal raping of cats with shotguns, the priests with guns, making women vomit and pee themselves by shocking them with a tazer, the insane amount of politically incorrect humor in the game, etc etc.
Still just you.
This is kind of like the quip about free speach and nazi-ism. I'll defend your right to play those kinds of games, but those games are sick, and some part of you has to be sick to enjoy them.
I hope it's just your sense of humor that's so twisted, and that you keep such activities to fantasy scenarios such as video games. I'm not one of those whacked out PETA people, i don't rate animals' lives over humans' lives, but i'd certainly rate an animal's welfare over the life of the type of sadistic bastard who would actually do the type of things you're describing.
"Giant International Fusion Reactor"? So it generates power from the energy produced by forcing nations together? Maybe it's a good thing they can't agree then. Nations in an excitied state should produce more energy when fused together, right?
but given that humanity survived for millions of pre-historic years without music, literature, or science, it seems probable that one could survive with one of the three.
A: There are 10,000 year old cave paintings that show that humans were artistic, and probably spiritual, beings long before they were scientific beings. I suspect that the tradition continues long before we have any record of it. For as long as we've had brains sufficiently complicated that emotional well being was an important concern, we've probably been trying to figure out our place in the world. At the earliest points it would most likely have been through spirituality and storytelling, and possibly some forms of art.
B: The Hierarchy of Needs is a fairly well accepted theory of psychology. If you're eternally on the edge of starving to death, your emotional devlopment or lack thereof isn't going to concern you much.
C: Given current human psychology any attempt to perform this experiment will fail. The person in the example given in the grand-parent(?) post eventually found a form of art that allowed him to develop his spiritual/emotional/artistic/whatever side. If nothing else such a society would eventually develop something like case moding into a national art form.
Despite the attempts of both the other democratic runners and Bush to slander him, Dean is actually fairly moderate. He's socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Bush on the other hand is social conservative and fiscally incompetent. Dean actually has a chance of stealing away those conservatives who are more concerned with real economic isses (rather than how big their tax break will be) than with "moral majority" issues.
Apparently he's upset that so much is being spent onmonitor sized displays? I'd really like to know where he got his "figures" though, and at what point research into display technologies was limited to a specific size and couldn't be applied to any others.
I was watching for that too. As best as i can tell, they were very carefull to keep his left hand out of sight at all times, at least i never saw it in a scene close enough to be able to see that kind of detail. (They simplified the issue by having him only lose the first joint.)
The one place they did specifically show his left hand was when it was resting on the pages of the book he was writing. His left hand was resting on the left side of the open book, so the hand was over a blank white page, making it easy to CG the finger out. Or maybe since the hand wasn't moving much they just used a model.
This isn't one i made up, but since we're telling lightbulb jokes...
This is one of those "about physicists" instead of "about physics" joke. Harvey Mudd is a small tech college in california with a notriously male heavy male/female ratio. (Apparently in recent years they've gotten up to an astounding one-third females in incoming classes!)
Q: How many female Mudders does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Both of then.
Q: How many male Mudders does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Mudders don't get screwed!
Funny, i would expect a graduate student to be smart enough to know the real reason to wash your hands after using the bathroom, which has nothing to do with whether or not you pissed or yourself. This joke has certainly annoyed the hell out of me because of how stupid and inconsiderate the last person in the joke is.
It claims Nintendo is in 1st place after Thanksgiving weekend, but appears to be combining sales of the GBA and GC. Either way, interesting news, if tricky...
It's the way announcements by companies work. If you can massage the numbers so they make you look like you're doing well, you trumpet them to the media. Otherwise you just stay quiet and publish the stats a few months later as part of required financial disclosures and such and hope no one notices.
Tribes 2, Counter-Strike. Real world examples and evidence. Don't give in to the whims of players. The vast majority of players like things the way they are. Only the few idiot fanboy types are asking for changes. Don't listen to them. They may seem like the majority on the forums, because they are the majority on the forums. But they aren't the majority of your players.
When Westwood was working on Red Alert 2, they experimented with lots of different strengths for the superweapons, and finally settled for something slightly on the heavy side of the spectrum, but not extremely so.
When the game was released a lot of people complained that they were too powerful. A lot of people complained that they weren't powerful enough. (Unfortunatly i forget if there was any particular bias to one side or the other.) So while working on Yuri's Revege, they put a poll up on the website, asking if people thought the superweapons were too strong, too weak, or about right.
I forget the exact numbers, but it came out pretty close to 1/3 for each answer. The lead designer concluded that this meant they'd balanced the superweapons pretty well. On the other hand i wonder how far out of whack something would have to be before you'd get responses very far out of line of a random distribution. Unless something is blatantly out of whack, i suspect for any individual element you'll frequently end up with equal amounts of people thinking something is too weak, too strong, or just right, and one group being more vocal than the other about their opinion is not sufficient reason to make a change.
And of course even if there _had_ been a significant percent in favor of a chance in one direction, they'd have to wonder about the nature of their source of data, a poll on a website isn't exactly an unbiased information source.
With a movie, it's pretty easy to stick a drone at the entrance of the auditorium to ensure no one under 17 gets into an R rated movie. With games though, while they may restrict the sales to minors, all it takes is an older friend or clueless parent to pick up the latest Grand Theft Auto and hand it to a 7 year old.
Sure, the ratings may help for more conscious parents whom read the box before they buy, but for the majority of people out there, the ratings are useless. Same goes for ratings on DVD/videos- people either just don't look or don't care.
So let's call the whole thing off? As you said, the situation is no different than that with DVDs and videos, and i'm sure younger kids can convince older kids to buy tickets for them at a theatre.
What exactly do you propose as an alternative? Perhaps we should imbed microchips in all children, and consoles can be programed not to let Mature or Adult games play unless the person holding the controller is over 18 according to the chip? There's no way to enforce strict adherence to the ratings without going completly Orwellian.
No rating system will ever be perfect, but they at least give the parents an idea of what to watch out for, especially if they list the reasons for the rating on the packaging. I've got a lot of friends my age who say they would have no problem with their children (either existing now or planned for in the future) seeing consensual sex from an early age, but have problems with violence. A lot of older people i know think sex is a sin but don't seem to mind violence. Others have problems with both.
Obviously no rating system is going to simply solve the problem for all people. However all those groups know that if the movie is rated R or higher or the game is rated M or higher that they ought to examine the contents a little more carefully.
As has been pointed out whenever this issue comes up, no rating system is going to replace the job of being a parent. Rating systems can make parenting easier, but they don't eliminate the need.
"giving them the opportunity to choose their focuse within the wider scope of the story"?
Does that actually mean that it won't be linear? Or is that just corporate speak for "it's linear, but we don't want people to think that it's linear"?
Might have had something to do with having the game ported from XBox to PC by an entirely different company while they told Bungie to focuse on Halo 2.
honor students... get just as drunk and have just as much sex as every other teenager.
They do? What the hell was i doing wrong then??!?
Do the two have to be linked? I never had much interest in drinking after the age of two or three (my parents used to let me have small sips of wine at the dinner table, but i guess i grew out of liking it) but i'd hate to think that was to blame for the 23 year dry spell. I would have been willing to drink some of that crap in high school if someone had just told me! Somehow i doubt it would have helped though *sigh*
As can the Red Alert 2 bundle pack. (Has Red Alert 2 and the Yuri's Revenge expansion)
Galactic Civilizations is a great game as well. You can buy it and download it off the net at www.galciv.com for $40, but i think it's going for $20 now at actual stores.
I actually did most of my growing up with Atari, Colleco, and NES, the SNES was mostly high school for me, and PSX in college.
I'll admit that nostalgia plays a factor in the games i like and like to replay, but that doesn't seem to be all it. NES games i just want to replay because of nostalgia, SNES games i want to replay both because of nostalgia and because they're fun.
I didn't like most PSX games as much, but that are still some i get nostalgic for even though they're after games that i feel no nostalgia for. FF7 was okay, FF8 sucked. However FF tactics was great, as was Xenogears. I'm only 3/4ths through FF9 right now but so far it's the best FF since 6 and i think i'll probably be looking back on it with nostalgia in about five years.
So i don't think it's _just_ nostalgia, although nostalgia certainly helps.
Does anyone else find the name 'Final Fantasy XII' rather odd? Shouldn't the final fantasy be once and for all? Great series and probably the most famous of all RPG's, but a better name would have been nice. Still, I suppose it is too late to stop now...
Welcome out from under whatever rock you've been hiding under for the past fifteen years! After you've finished scraping off all the moss that must have accumlated over that time, i'd like you to read through this six foot stack of printouts detailing every one of the hundreds of thousands of instances in which someone has made an "OMG it's called _Final_ Fantasy but there's been more than one of them! HAHAHAHAH!" joke.
Once you've familarized yourself with the long, boring, and not anywhere near anything even remotely resembling funny histoy of the topic you will be prepared to participate in a real discusion.
Hmm, i'm in my very late 20s now, and am _still_ saying the series started sliding downhill after FF6, with brief respites in FFT and FF9. I haven't tried FF10 yet though, so i'll have to see how that goes. FF8 was definitely the crap though.
My understanding is that companies pay "unemployment insurance" or something similar to cover the cost of unimployment benefits. Of course theoretically this means that if you're always working and never collect unimployment you're kind of screwed. However the government is assuming that if they don't collect the money either A: the company would just keep it for itself rather than raising wages, so the workers would be screwed, or B: even if the money was passed on to the workers most of them wouldn't be wise enough to save the extra away for hard times and they'd get screwed.
Now _that_ is an interesting idea. No idea how feasible it his from a plot hole perspective (if he could avoid the deletion that was supposed to happen when he was "killed," why not this deletion as well?) but symbolically it's really cool.
Well, okay, what about Ender's Game in which we're led to believe the buggers to be a vile alien which is bent out on destroying the human race and then in the end we find out that they're just trying to communicate and didn't understand that humans weren't part of a hive mind and in fact each human being was an individual "aiua" in and of itself?
Actually, i just recently reread Emder's Game. They specifically say that can't communicate with the Buggers, so they don't know why they killed the humans they first encountered. The actually ask the question of if they should be trying to kill the Buggers, they ask if they should be sending a fleet to attack the Buggers when they might have "learned their lesson" after the second war. They ask a lot of similar questions. The final answer is, they don't know, they can't know because they can't talk so they can't ask. But what they do know is if they don't destroy the Buggers, the Buggers might destroy them, so they have no choice. I believe Ender actually considers the fact (before he actually finds the message from the Buggers) that they might have been friends if only they had known how to talk to each other.
Whether or not the reader picks up on that subtext on the first reading, it is made perfectly clear that the humans don't understand why the Buggers attacked, and because the author has shown that the humans do not know he is free to have it be because of any reason he wants.
There's PLENTY to suggest that Neo is a religious character
Yes, that's blindingly obvious and no one is trying to claim otherwise. However the movie is portrayed as a science fiction movie with religious symbolism, _not_ as a religious movie. We do not expect Yahweh itself to come down from heaven and fix their problems for them at the end. A Machine who symbolizes god is acceptable, god itself is not.
Although everything is meant to symbolize religion very little occurs that is outside the realm of science. It's now well known that people can be "dead" for several minutes and still be revived. As such, someone going flatline only to have a loved one give them CPR and or scream over their body that they can't leave them yet and then the person revives has become a cliche. Furthermore the idea that prophecies or conditions dependant on a character's death can be gotten around by having the character clinically die for a minute but then be ressurected is quickly becoming cliched as well.
For reasons that i don't really understand and could be debated at quite some length, precognition and prophesy has become accepted as a stock item for the science fiction genre, and is a frequent "gimme," as it was established early on in the Matrix.
And so we come to the nature of Neo's powers. He starts getting precog dreams at the begining of the second movie, which is a little odd, but we've already established precog as one of the gimmes in the first film, so no foul. However we have never been given any hint that anyone has ever been able to manipulate the matrix without being jacked in. yet at the end of the second movie Neo does exactly that. Or he suddenly develops TK or magic powers, which are only slightly more unlikely. The audience predictably says, "what the fuck?" The audience predictably and justifiably expects to have that explained in the third movie.
instead they are told it's because Neo has a "connection to the Source," and then the subject is dropped. What exactly does a connection to the source mean, and how does he have it? Is it a wireless connection with the Matrix? If so, how did he get it? Is it a hidden feature in all the jacks implanted in people? If so, why can only Neo use it? Or is Neo some mutant freak who can telepathically communicate with the Matrix? Or is it some other weird explanation that i haven't thought up yet?
Neo has "a connection to the Source," is just a half-assed copout as far as i can tell. And saying it's because they're religious figures is a copout too. No one would accept "and Y
Can't say I'm terribly worried about mishaps relating to this type of technology. We've been working with Microwaves for a very long time.
Yeah! After all, look at fire! We've been using that for thousands of years and hardly anything ever gets chared to a crisp anymore!:)
Not to say that i think a well designed microwave system would be very dangerous, but how long we've been using a technology isn't a singularly useful metric.
Slashdot Mirror
reveal them for the captialists that they really are (i.e. not independent press)
How is that a contradiction? The _independent_ presses pretty much need to be capitalistic. After all, by definition, if they're independent than no one else is going to be paying their bills. The problem occurs when they can make more money pushing products that they can by unbiased reporting to attract readers and/or advertisers.
but then they actually have a category called "Most Disappointing Delay" populated with games that are not out now and (in the case of Half-life 2, at least) may not be out for several months yet.
This is a problem how? Very few people are disapointed by the delays _after_ a game comes out. It's while you're still waiting that every additional delay seems interminable. I would expect "Most Disapointing Delay" to be about games that are yet to be.
Yes, it's just you.
Plus, you didn't mention taking out the anal raping of cats with shotguns, the priests with guns, making women vomit and pee themselves by shocking them with a tazer, the insane amount of politically incorrect humor in the game, etc etc.
Still just you.
This is kind of like the quip about free speach and nazi-ism. I'll defend your right to play those kinds of games, but those games are sick, and some part of you has to be sick to enjoy them.
I hope it's just your sense of humor that's so twisted, and that you keep such activities to fantasy scenarios such as video games. I'm not one of those whacked out PETA people, i don't rate animals' lives over humans' lives, but i'd certainly rate an animal's welfare over the life of the type of sadistic bastard who would actually do the type of things you're describing.
"Giant International Fusion Reactor"? So it generates power from the energy produced by forcing nations together? Maybe it's a good thing they can't agree then. Nations in an excitied state should produce more energy when fused together, right?
A: There are 10,000 year old cave paintings that show that humans were artistic, and probably spiritual, beings long before they were scientific beings. I suspect that the tradition continues long before we have any record of it. For as long as we've had brains sufficiently complicated that emotional well being was an important concern, we've probably been trying to figure out our place in the world. At the earliest points it would most likely have been through spirituality and storytelling, and possibly some forms of art.
B: The Hierarchy of Needs is a fairly well accepted theory of psychology. If you're eternally on the edge of starving to death, your emotional devlopment or lack thereof isn't going to concern you much.
C: Given current human psychology any attempt to perform this experiment will fail. The person in the example given in the grand-parent(?) post eventually found a form of art that allowed him to develop his spiritual/emotional/artistic/whatever side. If nothing else such a society would eventually develop something like case moding into a national art form.
Despite the attempts of both the other democratic runners and Bush to slander him, Dean is actually fairly moderate. He's socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Bush on the other hand is social conservative and fiscally incompetent. Dean actually has a chance of stealing away those conservatives who are more concerned with real economic isses (rather than how big their tax break will be) than with "moral majority" issues.
Apparently he's upset that so much is being spent onmonitor sized displays? I'd really like to know where he got his "figures" though, and at what point research into display technologies was limited to a specific size and couldn't be applied to any others.
The one place they did specifically show his left hand was when it was resting on the pages of the book he was writing. His left hand was resting on the left side of the open book, so the hand was over a blank white page, making it easy to CG the finger out. Or maybe since the hand wasn't moving much they just used a model.
The list seems to be completly lacking in turn based strategy or simulation games of any kind.
This is one of those "about physicists" instead of "about physics" joke. Harvey Mudd is a small tech college in california with a notriously male heavy male/female ratio. (Apparently in recent years they've gotten up to an astounding one-third females in incoming classes!)
Q: How many female Mudders does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Both of then.
Q: How many male Mudders does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Mudders don't get screwed!
Funny, i would expect a graduate student to be smart enough to know the real reason to wash your hands after using the bathroom, which has nothing to do with whether or not you pissed or yourself. This joke has certainly annoyed the hell out of me because of how stupid and inconsiderate the last person in the joke is.
It's the way announcements by companies work. If you can massage the numbers so they make you look like you're doing well, you trumpet them to the media. Otherwise you just stay quiet and publish the stats a few months later as part of required financial disclosures and such and hope no one notices.
When Westwood was working on Red Alert 2, they experimented with lots of different strengths for the superweapons, and finally settled for something slightly on the heavy side of the spectrum, but not extremely so.
When the game was released a lot of people complained that they were too powerful. A lot of people complained that they weren't powerful enough. (Unfortunatly i forget if there was any particular bias to one side or the other.) So while working on Yuri's Revege, they put a poll up on the website, asking if people thought the superweapons were too strong, too weak, or about right.
I forget the exact numbers, but it came out pretty close to 1/3 for each answer. The lead designer concluded that this meant they'd balanced the superweapons pretty well. On the other hand i wonder how far out of whack something would have to be before you'd get responses very far out of line of a random distribution. Unless something is blatantly out of whack, i suspect for any individual element you'll frequently end up with equal amounts of people thinking something is too weak, too strong, or just right, and one group being more vocal than the other about their opinion is not sufficient reason to make a change.
And of course even if there _had_ been a significant percent in favor of a chance in one direction, they'd have to wonder about the nature of their source of data, a poll on a website isn't exactly an unbiased information source.
Sure, the ratings may help for more conscious parents whom read the box before they buy, but for the majority of people out there, the ratings are useless. Same goes for ratings on DVD/videos- people either just don't look or don't care.
So let's call the whole thing off? As you said, the situation is no different than that with DVDs and videos, and i'm sure younger kids can convince older kids to buy tickets for them at a theatre.
What exactly do you propose as an alternative? Perhaps we should imbed microchips in all children, and consoles can be programed not to let Mature or Adult games play unless the person holding the controller is over 18 according to the chip? There's no way to enforce strict adherence to the ratings without going completly Orwellian.
No rating system will ever be perfect, but they at least give the parents an idea of what to watch out for, especially if they list the reasons for the rating on the packaging. I've got a lot of friends my age who say they would have no problem with their children (either existing now or planned for in the future) seeing consensual sex from an early age, but have problems with violence. A lot of older people i know think sex is a sin but don't seem to mind violence. Others have problems with both.
Obviously no rating system is going to simply solve the problem for all people. However all those groups know that if the movie is rated R or higher or the game is rated M or higher that they ought to examine the contents a little more carefully.
As has been pointed out whenever this issue comes up, no rating system is going to replace the job of being a parent. Rating systems can make parenting easier, but they don't eliminate the need.
Does that actually mean that it won't be linear? Or is that just corporate speak for "it's linear, but we don't want people to think that it's linear"?
Okay, where'd you learn The Rope Joke? :)
Might have had something to do with having the game ported from XBox to PC by an entirely different company while they told Bungie to focuse on Halo 2.
They do? What the hell was i doing wrong then??!?
Do the two have to be linked? I never had much interest in drinking after the age of two or three (my parents used to let me have small sips of wine at the dinner table, but i guess i grew out of liking it) but i'd hate to think that was to blame for the 23 year dry spell. I would have been willing to drink some of that crap in high school if someone had just told me! Somehow i doubt it would have helped though *sigh*
As can the Red Alert 2 bundle pack. (Has Red Alert 2 and the Yuri's Revenge expansion)
Galactic Civilizations is a great game as well. You can buy it and download it off the net at www.galciv.com for $40, but i think it's going for $20 now at actual stores.
I'll admit that nostalgia plays a factor in the games i like and like to replay, but that doesn't seem to be all it. NES games i just want to replay because of nostalgia, SNES games i want to replay both because of nostalgia and because they're fun.
I didn't like most PSX games as much, but that are still some i get nostalgic for even though they're after games that i feel no nostalgia for. FF7 was okay, FF8 sucked. However FF tactics was great, as was Xenogears. I'm only 3/4ths through FF9 right now but so far it's the best FF since 6 and i think i'll probably be looking back on it with nostalgia in about five years.
So i don't think it's _just_ nostalgia, although nostalgia certainly helps.
Welcome out from under whatever rock you've been hiding under for the past fifteen years! After you've finished scraping off all the moss that must have accumlated over that time, i'd like you to read through this six foot stack of printouts detailing every one of the hundreds of thousands of instances in which someone has made an "OMG it's called _Final_ Fantasy but there's been more than one of them! HAHAHAHAH!" joke.
Once you've familarized yourself with the long, boring, and not anywhere near anything even remotely resembling funny histoy of the topic you will be prepared to participate in a real discusion.
Hmm, i'm in my very late 20s now, and am _still_ saying the series started sliding downhill after FF6, with brief respites in FFT and FF9. I haven't tried FF10 yet though, so i'll have to see how that goes. FF8 was definitely the crap though.
Unfortunatly they may be right on both counts =P
Now _that_ is an interesting idea. No idea how feasible it his from a plot hole perspective (if he could avoid the deletion that was supposed to happen when he was "killed," why not this deletion as well?) but symbolically it's really cool.
Actually, i just recently reread Emder's Game. They specifically say that can't communicate with the Buggers, so they don't know why they killed the humans they first encountered. The actually ask the question of if they should be trying to kill the Buggers, they ask if they should be sending a fleet to attack the Buggers when they might have "learned their lesson" after the second war. They ask a lot of similar questions. The final answer is, they don't know, they can't know because they can't talk so they can't ask. But what they do know is if they don't destroy the Buggers, the Buggers might destroy them, so they have no choice. I believe Ender actually considers the fact (before he actually finds the message from the Buggers) that they might have been friends if only they had known how to talk to each other.
Whether or not the reader picks up on that subtext on the first reading, it is made perfectly clear that the humans don't understand why the Buggers attacked, and because the author has shown that the humans do not know he is free to have it be because of any reason he wants.
There's PLENTY to suggest that Neo is a religious character
Yes, that's blindingly obvious and no one is trying to claim otherwise. However the movie is portrayed as a science fiction movie with religious symbolism, _not_ as a religious movie. We do not expect Yahweh itself to come down from heaven and fix their problems for them at the end. A Machine who symbolizes god is acceptable, god itself is not.
Although everything is meant to symbolize religion very little occurs that is outside the realm of science. It's now well known that people can be "dead" for several minutes and still be revived. As such, someone going flatline only to have a loved one give them CPR and or scream over their body that they can't leave them yet and then the person revives has become a cliche. Furthermore the idea that prophecies or conditions dependant on a character's death can be gotten around by having the character clinically die for a minute but then be ressurected is quickly becoming cliched as well.
For reasons that i don't really understand and could be debated at quite some length, precognition and prophesy has become accepted as a stock item for the science fiction genre, and is a frequent "gimme," as it was established early on in the Matrix.
And so we come to the nature of Neo's powers. He starts getting precog dreams at the begining of the second movie, which is a little odd, but we've already established precog as one of the gimmes in the first film, so no foul. However we have never been given any hint that anyone has ever been able to manipulate the matrix without being jacked in. yet at the end of the second movie Neo does exactly that. Or he suddenly develops TK or magic powers, which are only slightly more unlikely. The audience predictably says, "what the fuck?" The audience predictably and justifiably expects to have that explained in the third movie.
instead they are told it's because Neo has a "connection to the Source," and then the subject is dropped. What exactly does a connection to the source mean, and how does he have it? Is it a wireless connection with the Matrix? If so, how did he get it? Is it a hidden feature in all the jacks implanted in people? If so, why can only Neo use it? Or is Neo some mutant freak who can telepathically communicate with the Matrix? Or is it some other weird explanation that i haven't thought up yet?
Neo has "a connection to the Source," is just a half-assed copout as far as i can tell. And saying it's because they're religious figures is a copout too. No one would accept "and Y
Yeah! After all, look at fire! We've been using that for thousands of years and hardly anything ever gets chared to a crisp anymore! :)
Not to say that i think a well designed microwave system would be very dangerous, but how long we've been using a technology isn't a singularly useful metric.