"Nothing about it suggested that it was anything but the full legitimate game."
I had that version as well (only paid $5 in-store). It had the words "demo" on the cover and back of the jewel case. I know, because I did the same thing you did (although I remember playing it a lot longer for five minutes...) and I was pretty choked when I came to that screen. I still went ahead and bought it, and did not regret it at all.
"Macs are not replacing Windows PCs, they have become Windows PCs. Buyers no longer have to choose Mac OS X or Windows, they can have both. That is the catalyst that is driving the increased sales."
That's the main reason I picked up my iMac last year. I was teaching in Korea and had limited space in my tiny apartment, but I needed a new computer. I picked up an iMac because it's so tiny (smaller than a Mac Mini, if you consider the fact that a Mini requires a monitor *and* a box on your desk), installed Windows, and haven't looked back. I could really care less about Tiger or Leopard, but as far as I'm concerned, Apple's doing great things with its hardware.
The 4 disk set includes the original North American theatrical version (voiceover), the international cut (same as theatrical but with more violence), the director's cut (different ending, no voiceover, deckard's a replicant), and the new ultra-director's cut (no idea what's on it). There's also a 5 disk collector's set that includes the original workprint. 4 disk set is currently about $25 on Amazon.com, and the 5 disk collector's cut is roughly twice that. You *can* just get the new version for $15 or so, but why bother? This is the first time that the theatrical version's been on DVD.
"Some of them have, after that , adquired a legal license, but others, just sit there with their pirated copy."
And some of them just reinstall Windows, turn on Automatic Updates (don't download, let me choose) and deselect "WGA" in the updates. After this, Windows can be updated through Automatic Updates without a hitch.
The alternative babelfishing all, which you say to the hell and the back. The fastener, that you must translate and into word to and from of German, and a government in the world, who could split your code, does not give it! (The alternative is babelfishing everything you say to hell and back. Plug in what you need to say and translate back and forth into German, and there isn't a government in the world who could crack your code!)
On a more serious note, losing a language is very similar to losing a culture, if only because the stories orally transmitted in said language are forever lost. They could be translated, of course, but there's a lot to be said for certain truths and meanings being language-dependent.
I don't know how many people haven't played the game yet, so FAIR WARNING FOR SPOILERS:
The fact that you are reminded that you're playing a game in the first few seconds of playing makes perfect sense, given the "Would you kindly" scene with Ryan (think about the connexions between what we do when we play a game and what Ryan does). Bioshock is more than a game; it's a philosophical discussion on what it means to play games. What I'm trying to say is that it might break immersion at the beginning, but when you reach the climax, it all fits, beginning to end.
The submitter failed to link to the second half of the article, in which games from Rio Grande and Wizards of the Coast. An interesting mention by GamerDad was The Battle for Hill 218, including a playable version here.
"You expect OO.o to be 100% compatible? Is there something about secret, proprietary file formats that you don't understand?"
I understand it. You understand it. The people reading Slashdot understand it. The type of people that we have to deal with on a daily basis, people who are involved in sales, marketing, PR, etc., don't. These are the type of people who buy a new computer, happily upgrade to Word 2007, and start blithely sending their documents in.docx or.xlsx without understanding that these formats are not double-click and run for everybody. If OO wants to be a serious contender, then yes, 100% compatibility with its market-dominating competitor is essential. From my perspective, if I need Word in order to interact with clients but prefer to work with OO, it's just plain easier to stick with Word rather than use two different word processors.
The author missed several key points of comparison. First of all, like it or not, Word is the de facto standard word processor, period. OO is hampered by a lack of compatibility with Word. No matter how much I personally might like OO, if I can't open a Word 2003 document in OO from a client the way that it's supposed to be viewed, I'm going to have a problem. And forget about an easy way of loading.docx files in OO! No matter how advanced a user you are, it's still a huge PITA to convert several documents into a format readable by OO. Another practical matter ignored is the simple speed of opening Word. This might sound like a ridiculous complaint, but when I'm opening dozens of documents per day, I appreciate the speed at which Word loads up, as opposed to the longer waiting time of OO. Next, no mention of platform interoperativity? OO works on OSX, Windows, and Linux, whereas Word 2007 works on... Windows, and *maybe* Linux if you screw around with it. This is sort of important to mention.
Of course, it's also somewhat amusing that OO has "won" the author's three comparisons in 02, 05, and 07, given his obvious predilection for Linux, and the fact that the article is published on linux.com. I wonder if it would have been published had he said that Word 2007 was superior?
There's no excuse for one human being to torture another. There's no reason to joke about it, either. Jack should be stripped of his ability to practice law in the United States, but being an obnoxious and pedantic lawyer isn't a reason to deprive him of his basic human rights and inflict pain on him. In fact, there's no reason why torture should be acceptable in the 21st century world.
You said: "Im a christian, And i should hope any other person who considers themselves a christian would see this stuff for what it really is. Just another step toward a mark of the beast system." Then you used the Revelation passage to back up what you were saying. Your interpretation of the Revelation passage was that the mark of the beast system is literally tags implanted into the right hand or forehead, which is a very literal interpretation of the passage.
"However there are certain things such as this topic which i dont believe should be reconciled." That's assuming that a literal interpretation of the passage is warranted, given the fact that the passage is nearly two thousand years old. Are you familiar with the difference between episteme and gnosis? The Western intellectual system has declared meaning (gnosis) to be dead, and that only rationality (episteme) is important. You're looking at the lens through the viewpoint of two thousand years of Western history without considering the time or place in which it was originally written, or to whom it was originally written. Given the fantastical nature of Revelation, in other words, how sure are you that John's vision was literal rather than metaphorical?
What I'm trying to say is that Western culture has mostly dismissed the idea of meaning found within stories. Something can be true without it necessarily being literally true. Since we're not the intended audience of the text and cannot even identify all the elements in the passage (who is the beast? what does his number mean? what is his mark?), it's a bit premature to say that RFID tagging is akin to the mark of the beast.
My question is how you reconcile my post with your statement that "Islam demands believers to be completely submissive to an Islamic, theocratic form of government in which the State acknowledges the legal supremacy of God and the teachings of Muhammad." By your ridiculous statement, either there are no Muslims in the United States, or there are no good Muslims in the United States because the United States government neither acknowledges the legal supremacy of God nor the teachings of Mohammed. So which is it?
If you disagree about dhimmis, let me ask you this: no good Muslim would live in the United States, Canada, Britain, or any other Western country because the law of the land isn't based on sharia? Does that seem like a reasonable statement to you?
You won't find that in Islam, either. Your portrayal of "non-Muslims" is extremely broad and glosses over the entire idea of the "people of the book," Christians and Jews living in an Islamic state. Look up dhimmis.
That's a very, very, very literal interpretation of that passage. There are many wildly different interpretations of the book in the first place, and there is absolutely no consensus on one of them within any group in the 2 billion strong Christian church. There's nothing inherently evil about sticking a piece of silicon underneath your right hand or forehead, any more than getting a pacemaker or a pin.
I don't know about the other games, but CnC 3 in boot camp runs perfectly smooth on my Late 2006 iMac (2.0 GHz, 2 GB RAM, x1600) in 1440x900 with all details on medium.
"Think long and hard about this one. There are parents who can do a wonderful, or at least decent, job teaching their own kids full-time. Those parents are a minority (though you may be in that minority). The ones who can make it work typically are the ones who keep things structured well enough. The kids do have to get through basic subjects that may not be their favorite things to do, and the parents have to police that rather than let those subjects slide."
This is a common criticism of homeschooling, but what most people don't understand is that the core curriculum in elementary school literally takes about an hour or two every day to cover. Also, subjects don't need to be taught in isolation: making a cake with a third grader incorporates math, science, and home economics. You can take him/her to a park and let them use a digital camera to take pictures, after which you download the pictures onto your computer and let them write a story about one picture: language arts, computers, photography, and P.E.
Also, the nice thing about homeschooling is you can encourage your child to take up interests that they want. The above example includes photography, which is extremely rare in secondary schools, let alone elementary schools. Know any schools that offer Latin American hand percussion instruments? Or, what if you know a second language and want your children to study literature in English and your first language? Not an option in the public school system.
The only difficulty with homeschooling is a lack of a cooperative atmosphere with other children. This problem is rectified if you have more than one child, and even in a public school it's not guaranteed that a child will learn anything but competition with his/her peers. If you do have more than one child, having the older children tutor your younger children will benefit everybody: the older children will learn the material more thoroughly if they teach it and they'll be able to learn how to properly interact with younger students. Younger children typically learn material a lot faster if it's compounded with instruction from older peers, as they use language that's closer to theirs than an adult's.
I agree with the grandparent, in that there are a lot of problems with public schools, but rather than the problems resting with teachers, administrators, or parents, I think the problem is a systemic reliance on standardised testing, and an emphasis of competition over collaborative learning. The drive for grades precludes learning, as I mentioned in a previous post, so I won't say any more on the issue.
I'd go so far as to say that it's not your attitude that brings retailiation, but the entire school system that encourages competition over cooperation. The school system that most of us endured is hopelessly outdated. The idea that competition in a classroom while listening to a teacher lecture allows students to learn better is patently false, as constructivists such as Piaget, Vygotsky, and Kohn have shown. The entire climate of testing in schools causes students to care more about grades than learning. This is where the US and Canada is failing where the rest of the world is excelling in our public schools.
What Gibson writes isn't hard sf by any stretch of the imagination. Neuromancer, as I'm sure most of the/. audience is aware, was written by Gibson when he had very little, if any, knowledge of how computers work. Bundles of fiber-optic lines as thick as a horse's tail, for instance. Second, technology isn't the point in most of his stories. In Neuromancer, we have one superhuman entity attempting to merge with another one. Do we have intricate passages in which the technology of this is discussed? Nope. The AIs in Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, I'd argue, are closer to traditional definitions of gods than pieces of technology. Look at what we know about the Aleph in MLO: it's a mother-huge slab of nanotech, infinite storage space, and can somehow connect Earth with Alpha Centauri. We're definitely lacking some technical details here. I'm a bit fuzzier on the Bridge technology, but certainly Pattern Recognition isn't sf at all, given that it took place in the recent past at the time of its publication.
Rather than hard sf, let's call Gibson's early writings what they are: cyberpunk, stories about high technology, low lifes, and their interactions in a social millieu. The emphasis isn't technology at all, but social change. I mean, look at the importance of megacorporations and zaibatsus in Gibson's writings, something that's not characteristic of Vinge or Kim Stanley Robinson (who'd I argue is more of a hard sf writer than Charles Stross). Look at Case's first reaction when he is able to punch deck again: there's no technical details for what's been repaired in his brain, but the description of an ecstatic (in the strictest definition of the word) experience. Even the development of the relationship between humanity and AIs over the course of the first trilogy overshadows the technology that drives AIs. There aren't any scientific details and there's no attempt to reconcile science with plot in Gibson's writings. This isn't a bad thing.
To quickly wrap it up, I've always believed that cyberpunk, with its emphasis on heroes, higher [technological] beings, and grand conflicts that change the course of society are new myths for a technological society. Look at Greg Bear's "Petra," Stephenson's _Snow Crash_, Cadigan's _Mindplayers_... the emphasis on the religious/spiritual/pseudo-religious/spiritual is seemingly more important than the technology that drives each of these works. I'm very sad that Gibson is moving away from this, but given Pattern Recognition, he's moving towards an exploration of mass media and society, which is also very fascinating. (And what's this about space operas not being considered sf? Who would say this?)
Regardless of the relationship between Scully and Doggett, the episodes in Season 8 rival any of those in the other seasons. It was time for a change, and the writers really showed that they knew what they were doing.
I'm going to chime in with the others and say that the X-Files mythology was what made X-Files so great. ***SPOILERS:***
At the end of the series, we're waiting for the alien apocalypse (or *something* significant*) in 2012. Mulder and Scully are finally together. Everything's pointing towards an end of the world scenario, and they're going to give us a MotW? Why bother? Unless, of course, there's a third movie planned to cover the events in 2012... or X-Files 2 is a Jose Chung-style "episode." That I'd pay to see. It'd be great to see Mulder back on the screen - he was missed during S8&9 - but honestly, I'd prefer a new mythology ep.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I'll bite. What fix are you talking about?
"Nothing about it suggested that it was anything but the full legitimate game."
I had that version as well (only paid $5 in-store). It had the words "demo" on the cover and back of the jewel case. I know, because I did the same thing you did (although I remember playing it a lot longer for five minutes...) and I was pretty choked when I came to that screen. I still went ahead and bought it, and did not regret it at all."Macs are not replacing Windows PCs, they have become Windows PCs. Buyers no longer have to choose Mac OS X or Windows, they can have both. That is the catalyst that is driving the increased sales."
That's the main reason I picked up my iMac last year. I was teaching in Korea and had limited space in my tiny apartment, but I needed a new computer. I picked up an iMac because it's so tiny (smaller than a Mac Mini, if you consider the fact that a Mini requires a monitor *and* a box on your desk), installed Windows, and haven't looked back. I could really care less about Tiger or Leopard, but as far as I'm concerned, Apple's doing great things with its hardware.
It's the most important thing in my life, you insensitive clod!
-Jeff BezosThe 4 disk set includes the original North American theatrical version (voiceover), the international cut (same as theatrical but with more violence), the director's cut (different ending, no voiceover, deckard's a replicant), and the new ultra-director's cut (no idea what's on it). There's also a 5 disk collector's set that includes the original workprint. 4 disk set is currently about $25 on Amazon.com, and the 5 disk collector's cut is roughly twice that. You *can* just get the new version for $15 or so, but why bother? This is the first time that the theatrical version's been on DVD.
"Some of them have, after that , adquired a legal license, but others, just sit there with their pirated copy."
And some of them just reinstall Windows, turn on Automatic Updates (don't download, let me choose) and deselect "WGA" in the updates. After this, Windows can be updated through Automatic Updates without a hitch.The alternative babelfishing all, which you say to the hell and the back. The fastener, that you must translate and into word to and from of German, and a government in the world, who could split your code, does not give it! (The alternative is babelfishing everything you say to hell and back. Plug in what you need to say and translate back and forth into German, and there isn't a government in the world who could crack your code!)
On a more serious note, losing a language is very similar to losing a culture, if only because the stories orally transmitted in said language are forever lost. They could be translated, of course, but there's a lot to be said for certain truths and meanings being language-dependent.
I don't know how many people haven't played the game yet, so FAIR WARNING FOR SPOILERS:
The fact that you are reminded that you're playing a game in the first few seconds of playing makes perfect sense, given the "Would you kindly" scene with Ryan (think about the connexions between what we do when we play a game and what Ryan does). Bioshock is more than a game; it's a philosophical discussion on what it means to play games. What I'm trying to say is that it might break immersion at the beginning, but when you reach the climax, it all fits, beginning to end.
"Extreme religion should be correctly called piety, not terrorism."
Piety is reverence towards one's God. The word you're looking for is "religious extremism."The submitter failed to link to the second half of the article, in which games from Rio Grande and Wizards of the Coast. An interesting mention by GamerDad was The Battle for Hill 218, including a playable version here.
I don't know about others, but my business (one of them, anyway) is editing. I absolutely need decent proofing tools and 100% compatibility.
I understand it. You understand it. The people reading Slashdot understand it. The type of people that we have to deal with on a daily basis, people who are involved in sales, marketing, PR, etc., don't. These are the type of people who buy a new computer, happily upgrade to Word 2007, and start blithely sending their documents in .docx or .xlsx without understanding that these formats are not double-click and run for everybody. If OO wants to be a serious contender, then yes, 100% compatibility with its market-dominating competitor is essential. From my perspective, if I need Word in order to interact with clients but prefer to work with OO, it's just plain easier to stick with Word rather than use two different word processors.
Of course, it's also somewhat amusing that OO has "won" the author's three comparisons in 02, 05, and 07, given his obvious predilection for Linux, and the fact that the article is published on linux.com. I wonder if it would have been published had he said that Word 2007 was superior?
Human Rights Watch
"However there are certain things such as this topic which i dont believe should be reconciled." That's assuming that a literal interpretation of the passage is warranted, given the fact that the passage is nearly two thousand years old. Are you familiar with the difference between episteme and gnosis? The Western intellectual system has declared meaning (gnosis) to be dead, and that only rationality (episteme) is important. You're looking at the lens through the viewpoint of two thousand years of Western history without considering the time or place in which it was originally written, or to whom it was originally written. Given the fantastical nature of Revelation, in other words, how sure are you that John's vision was literal rather than metaphorical?
What I'm trying to say is that Western culture has mostly dismissed the idea of meaning found within stories. Something can be true without it necessarily being literally true. Since we're not the intended audience of the text and cannot even identify all the elements in the passage (who is the beast? what does his number mean? what is his mark?), it's a bit premature to say that RFID tagging is akin to the mark of the beast.
My question is how you reconcile my post with your statement that "Islam demands believers to be completely submissive to an Islamic, theocratic form of government in which the State acknowledges the legal supremacy of God and the teachings of Muhammad." By your ridiculous statement, either there are no Muslims in the United States, or there are no good Muslims in the United States because the United States government neither acknowledges the legal supremacy of God nor the teachings of Mohammed. So which is it?
If you disagree about dhimmis, let me ask you this: no good Muslim would live in the United States, Canada, Britain, or any other Western country because the law of the land isn't based on sharia? Does that seem like a reasonable statement to you?
You won't find that in Islam, either. Your portrayal of "non-Muslims" is extremely broad and glosses over the entire idea of the "people of the book," Christians and Jews living in an Islamic state. Look up dhimmis.
That's a very, very, very literal interpretation of that passage. There are many wildly different interpretations of the book in the first place, and there is absolutely no consensus on one of them within any group in the 2 billion strong Christian church. There's nothing inherently evil about sticking a piece of silicon underneath your right hand or forehead, any more than getting a pacemaker or a pin.
I don't know about the other games, but CnC 3 in boot camp runs perfectly smooth on my Late 2006 iMac (2.0 GHz, 2 GB RAM, x1600) in 1440x900 with all details on medium.
This is a common criticism of homeschooling, but what most people don't understand is that the core curriculum in elementary school literally takes about an hour or two every day to cover. Also, subjects don't need to be taught in isolation: making a cake with a third grader incorporates math, science, and home economics. You can take him/her to a park and let them use a digital camera to take pictures, after which you download the pictures onto your computer and let them write a story about one picture: language arts, computers, photography, and P.E.
Also, the nice thing about homeschooling is you can encourage your child to take up interests that they want. The above example includes photography, which is extremely rare in secondary schools, let alone elementary schools. Know any schools that offer Latin American hand percussion instruments? Or, what if you know a second language and want your children to study literature in English and your first language? Not an option in the public school system.
The only difficulty with homeschooling is a lack of a cooperative atmosphere with other children. This problem is rectified if you have more than one child, and even in a public school it's not guaranteed that a child will learn anything but competition with his/her peers. If you do have more than one child, having the older children tutor your younger children will benefit everybody: the older children will learn the material more thoroughly if they teach it and they'll be able to learn how to properly interact with younger students. Younger children typically learn material a lot faster if it's compounded with instruction from older peers, as they use language that's closer to theirs than an adult's.
I agree with the grandparent, in that there are a lot of problems with public schools, but rather than the problems resting with teachers, administrators, or parents, I think the problem is a systemic reliance on standardised testing, and an emphasis of competition over collaborative learning. The drive for grades precludes learning, as I mentioned in a previous post, so I won't say any more on the issue.
I'd go so far as to say that it's not your attitude that brings retailiation, but the entire school system that encourages competition over cooperation. The school system that most of us endured is hopelessly outdated. The idea that competition in a classroom while listening to a teacher lecture allows students to learn better is patently false, as constructivists such as Piaget, Vygotsky, and Kohn have shown. The entire climate of testing in schools causes students to care more about grades than learning. This is where the US and Canada is failing where the rest of the world is excelling in our public schools.
What Gibson writes isn't hard sf by any stretch of the imagination. Neuromancer, as I'm sure most of the /. audience is aware, was written by Gibson when he had very little, if any, knowledge of how computers work. Bundles of fiber-optic lines as thick as a horse's tail, for instance. Second, technology isn't the point in most of his stories. In Neuromancer, we have one superhuman entity attempting to merge with another one. Do we have intricate passages in which the technology of this is discussed? Nope. The AIs in Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, I'd argue, are closer to traditional definitions of gods than pieces of technology. Look at what we know about the Aleph in MLO: it's a mother-huge slab of nanotech, infinite storage space, and can somehow connect Earth with Alpha Centauri. We're definitely lacking some technical details here. I'm a bit fuzzier on the Bridge technology, but certainly Pattern Recognition isn't sf at all, given that it took place in the recent past at the time of its publication.
Rather than hard sf, let's call Gibson's early writings what they are: cyberpunk, stories about high technology, low lifes, and their interactions in a social millieu. The emphasis isn't technology at all, but social change. I mean, look at the importance of megacorporations and zaibatsus in Gibson's writings, something that's not characteristic of Vinge or Kim Stanley Robinson (who'd I argue is more of a hard sf writer than Charles Stross). Look at Case's first reaction when he is able to punch deck again: there's no technical details for what's been repaired in his brain, but the description of an ecstatic (in the strictest definition of the word) experience. Even the development of the relationship between humanity and AIs over the course of the first trilogy overshadows the technology that drives AIs. There aren't any scientific details and there's no attempt to reconcile science with plot in Gibson's writings. This isn't a bad thing.
To quickly wrap it up, I've always believed that cyberpunk, with its emphasis on heroes, higher [technological] beings, and grand conflicts that change the course of society are new myths for a technological society. Look at Greg Bear's "Petra," Stephenson's _Snow Crash_, Cadigan's _Mindplayers_... the emphasis on the religious/spiritual/pseudo-religious/spiritual is seemingly more important than the technology that drives each of these works. I'm very sad that Gibson is moving away from this, but given Pattern Recognition, he's moving towards an exploration of mass media and society, which is also very fascinating. (And what's this about space operas not being considered sf? Who would say this?)
Regardless of the relationship between Scully and Doggett, the episodes in Season 8 rival any of those in the other seasons. It was time for a change, and the writers really showed that they knew what they were doing.
At the end of the series, we're waiting for the alien apocalypse (or *something* significant*) in 2012. Mulder and Scully are finally together. Everything's pointing towards an end of the world scenario, and they're going to give us a MotW? Why bother? Unless, of course, there's a third movie planned to cover the events in 2012... or X-Files 2 is a Jose Chung-style "episode." That I'd pay to see. It'd be great to see Mulder back on the screen - he was missed during S8&9 - but honestly, I'd prefer a new mythology ep.