> It's Blair Witch's first person camera work, applied to a small (for the genre) budget monster movie.
You know, if you tried REALLY hard, you could probably come up with a description that makes this movie sound even more wretched. For instance, you could say that all the major characters are in high school, or that the special effects are a lot like the ones in Star Trek: The Motion Picture...
When Duke Nukem Forever is released, you can donate your crusty old MacBook Air to a museum and buy yourself a much newer and thinner laptop with a 64TB solid-state drive and a 64-core CPU that can run OS X 10.15 and Windows Longhorn/Vienna/Seven/Fiesta/whatever at the same time in a hypervisor.
> 10 BaseT, 100 BaseT, 1000BaseT, etc etc are all measured in BITS.
Of course. Bandwidth is normally measured in bits per second...
> I was talking about BYTES. 2 MBps = 16 mbps. 802.11g is rated at 54 Mbps, but...
Oh. That's somewhat closer to the speed I would have guessed it would be. More or less.
And yeah, you don't always get the full theoretical 100 mbps out of FastEthernet either.
Sorry about the confusion. I wasn't paying much attention to capitalization because, you know, it's slashdot, and people capitalize weirdly all the time.
> At 2 MBps (more throughput than most people actually get with 802.11g), an actual DVD will take how long to transfer?
Waitasec, let me get this straight:
802.11g, the hot data-link-layer protocol everyone wants to use these days, is actually a good deal slower than old-fashioned 10BaseT ethernet, which is so old and slow nobody has bought or sold a new device that supports it exclusively for the better part of a decade. Have I got that about right?
Okay, I'm blessed with not having to travel much, so laptops aren't really my thing, and consequently I haven't paid a great deal of attention to wireless networking technologies, since I've got wired network everywhere I need it. So I'm not as informed about this as I might be. But your numbers are really catching me off-guard here.
I knew that wireless networks were slower than comparably-priced wired networks from the same era. Yeah, of course. So obviously 802.11g would be much slower than gigabit ethernet, and probably even a little slower than the 100BaseT "Fast Ethernet" that was the slowest wired network technology anybody wanted to deploy ten years ago. But, seriously, _five times_ slower than plain old 10BaseT? Really?
Wow.
Am I ever glad I don't have to deal with wireless networks. I can put up with slowness when accessing *remote* things, like, you know, over the internet. I expect that to be slow. But man, when something's in the same room with me, I expect network transfer times to be *faster* than sticking it on a removable USB mass storage device and carrying it over there. I mean, if it's gonna be that slow, what exactly is the *point* of having a local network?
Whether a WinXP system or a Gentoo system is easier to install depends on what you want installed.
If all you want is a basic functioning systme, Gentoo is easier. (Well, assuming you can follow a list of simple instructions it's easier. It's not point-and-click, though.)
If you want a GUI, but don't need many actual applications, XP is easier, because Windows makes the GUI a core part of the basic system.
If you want a fully functional system with everything, neither makes the install simple or instant, but XP is worse. You know, because after a few days you get really tired of clicking Next. Gentoo takes forever to download and install everything, but there's not much user interaction required for most packages.
Of course, Microsoft has trained people to expect a computer to come with a GUI but no significant applications. I'm not sure what *use* a GUI is without any real applications, but that's what you get out of the box.
Easy. You look on the CPAN and see what modules they maintain. If they maintain something like DBI or DateTime, they're a good programmer. OTOH if they maintain something like Matt's Script Archive you might want to give them a miss. HTH.HAND.
> What? 2009? Bush is out of here in 2008, unless something dastardly is being planned.
He'll probably be a lame duck starting in November, but he's not out of office until January 2009.
Unless he is prevented from continuing in office (e.g., by death), that is, in which case there's an established chain of succession (starting with the VP) for who would take over as acting President until the end of the term (or until the President returns, if the circumstance that took him out of active service was somewhat more temporary than death).
Education is a reserved power. It's supposed to come out of state and local budgets. And anyway, lack of funding is *not* the problem that the schools face; in real (adjusted for inflation) dollars, they're getting WAY more money than they did fifty years ago. (Of course, a lot of that money (in Ohio at least) is earmarked for specific programs so that the individual school districts can't necessarily just spend the money on whatever they think is appropriate. But even after that is taken into account, the decline in the schools is not due to funding issues. There are other, much worse problems.)
> Now, all we need to figure out is how to let the constituency modify it.
Do you really want your taxes to climb on the same geometric curve as the number of articles in Wikipedia? When new items are added to the budget, the money has to come from somewhere. I wouldn't mind letting the constituency vote on the items that are *already* in the budget, and possibly deny some of them, but the *LAST* thing we need is freeform public editing of the budget.
> I'll give the government this, they have more imagination than me, I couldn't > come up with 3000 pages of new ways to spend other people's money.
Oh, neither could they, but you don't seem to understand what a budget is. A budget is not a list of new ideas. It's a detailed accounting of where all the money is allocated. (This differs from a budget *report*, which is a detailed accounting of where all the money *went*, and how that differs from where the budget said it should go -- which, in the case of the US federal government, would probably be even more terrifying.)
In fact, there are probably very few new ideas in the budget. Most of the money goes to the same things it went to last time, although the exact numbers probably change slightly each year.
> The warranty service on defective music is basically "buy it again", this > attitude would put a stereo manufacturer out of business very quickly.
In the eighties it would have. Now, I'm not so sure. It's amazing how many people don't want to mess with warranty service these days and will just go out and buy a replacement instead. It seems the only real exceptions, the only things where people still expect a warranty, are big-ticket items like cars, major appliances, and maybe computers. (Houses, for some reason, have really never come with a warranty, so far as I am aware, which is strange if you think about it, since they're by quite far the most expensive thing most people ever buy.)
Yeah, crimial law in the US favors the defendant, but civil law favors the plaitiff. It's weird, but no country is perfect.
Regarding your signature: waitasec, you need a good day and good light to read the date on a dime, and they say your vision is *better* than normal? Normal must be pretty lousy. I can read the dates on dimes by the light of a dim computer monitor in an otherwise dark basement room, and my vision's not what it used to be. (I'm not fifty, but I'm past thirty, and I have begun to notice a reduction in my vision's quality over the last ten years or so. In the eighties I could *glance* at a coin and read off the date, any time, in any light, sideways, upside-down, through oxidization that turned the whole coin green, whatever, no problem. Now I have to pause for a second to focus on it, and maybe tilt the coin to the right angle.)
Silverlight is a thing Microsoft wants everybody to use instead of standard web technologies, but fortunately pretty much nobody actually uses it (unlike $#@! Flash).
I should note too that Chinese is a special case, because it isn't a phonetically-defined language in the same way as English, Russian, and for that matter most other languages. When you transliterate from one phonetic writing system to another, you aren't really changing very much (except in cases where the target writing system doesn't have letters for all the phonemes you need, which admittedly does happen). It's still fundamentally the same word, with the same pronunciation and the same meaning, just written in a different alphabet.
Chinese is different because the shapes of the characters carry meaning beyond the sounds they make. In a phonetic writing system the letters just stand for sounds, so when you go from one of them to another, as long as you transliterate in a way that gives you the same sound, the meaning is still carried in exactly the same way as before. Some languages even have more than one different writing system that it's normal to write them in, e.g., some east-European Slavic languages are routinely written in either Latin or Cyrillic.
That should read "self life writing". If it were "self life message" it would be autobiology, but we use -ology to mean the study of something, so I guess autobiology would be the study of your own life. Or something.
> I'm not sure if translation is just used due to the lack of a word to describe the process. > Maybe more like transcribing?
There is a word for taking a word and importing it phoneme-for-phoneme into a different writing system, but most non-linguists don't know the term. It's called "transliteration". Translation, technically, means that you move from one *language* to another, so as a general rule more changes than just the writing system. So, for instance, if you're going from Greek to English, translating gives you "messenger" where transliterating gives you "angelos". (Yeah, we get the English word "angel" from this Greek word.) With close cognates sometimes not *much* more than the writing system changes. For instance, going from Russian to English transliterating will give you "avtobiografiya" where translating gives you "autobiography". That's pretty similar, but only because the words in both languages have a shared etymology, i.e., they both get it from the same original words in Greek (literally, "self life message"; autos also has other meanings (primarily, it is the third-person personal pronoun), but here it means self).
Anyway...
Introducing a parallel system wherein sites can be registered with domains containing either Cyrillic *or* Latin characters will only exacerbate the confusion. Under an all-ASCII domain system people just have to learn that in domains p is a Latin pi, not the same letter as rho, and if they see what they think is a rho it's really a Latin pi. Under a parallel system that supports both, if you see a p you don't know if it's a Latin pi or a Cyrillic rho; they look so similar that they can be hard to tell apart even when you see them side-by-side, much less in isolation from one another. In some font faces (especially sans-serif ones) they may even be exactly the same glyph, visually identical. There are a number of other letters that will have this problem, too, e.g., Cyrillic В (i.e., v) and Latin B (capital b), Cyrillic М and Latin M (same phonetic value), Cyrillic Н (n) and Latin H, Cyrillic О (omicron, i.e., short o) and Latin O, and so on and so forth.
The Mozilla folks have put a lot of thought and effort into figuring out the best ways to deal with these issues.
Yeah, I thought about that, but the appeal of riding a pogo stick in first person pulls me to want it that way. I suppose it would be good for the game to support both first-person and third-person view, though, and the player could toggle between them with a key.
> I was talking about the freeways, eg 101 and 280, up through the SF bay area.
Huh. Well, I can't say I've ever been to California, so maybe it's different from the rest of the country... or maybe the whole western part of the country is different from the eastern half -- that seems unlikely, but I've not been out west much.
In the midwest, where I live, the freeways go *around* the cities, not through them. There's often an older version of the route that goes into or through the city, but there's always a bypass that goes around, and that's what you drive on if the city isn't your destination. This is also true in the other parts of the US that I have visited, but I've not been out west much. I've been south and east, and north as far as Kitchener (and narrowly missed an opportunity to visit the U.P. once), but (apart from one time back in '92 when I flew into Phoenix and took a charter bus up to Flagstaff) I've not been west of the Mississippi.
> It may be that games that were developed with a closed source model and then > later the source was released were not considered, I dunno, it's slashdotted.
I assume they only considered games that are completely available freely.
A number of commercial games have had their source code released, so that the community can do things like port it to various operating systems and make UI improvements, but the open source license only covers the *program*, not the content (artwork, levels, whatnot), so you can't play the game with _just_ the open-source components; you still need a copy of the commercial item. Descent for instance is in this category. In some cases there is substitute content available so that you can play _a_ game without the commercial product, so there's a somewhat blurry line, but I'm guessing that they probably only considered games that are completely open, program _and_ content.
IMO, pretty much all first-person shooters are basically the games of yesteryear coming back in yet another iteration.
I mean, you get new maps, obviously, and the technical quality of the graphics (in terms of things like bit depth) is rather a lot better than twenty years ago, and the objects are more complex (in Doom I think everything but the actual building was just a flat sprite; Descent had polymodels for the baddies, and things have progressed from there), and the physics have improved (e.g., gravity is more realistic now), and occasionally there are even changes in the basic rules (e.g., how friendly fire works in multiplayer), but in terms of how the game is played, for the most part, the overwhelming majority of FPS games are pretty much just a newer, better version of Wolfenstein. And new FPS games aren't necessarily more fun to play than older ones.
There is an FPS I want to see made, though. I want to see Commander Keen done in 3D, with the cartooney style of the original, enemies that you can stun and they get a dazed look in their eyes and stars orbiting their heads, and the vertical platformer style of level design, and the pogo stick, and giant slugs that produce hazardous poo, and flying grasshoppers you can squish with the pogo stick, and all that, but in first-person 3D. I'd pay good money for that one. I might even install a Microsoft OS, if necessary, to play that one. Bonus points if it supports multiplayer mode.
Umm, dude, some of my best friends have been dogs (and definitely rather more than fourteen inches tall), but they are, nonetheless, animals, not another race of people. They don't have human rights, and they certainly don't have the right to move to Beijing and live there if they so choose. Even in the USA, pets don't get to choose where they live; legally they are property, and they go wherever their owners take them, period.
> > (on very good roads -- we have the best roads of any country in the world) > This isn't my experience. In fact, my opinion is that, although the road *system* is good, the > roads themselves are, at worst, pretty darned aweful, and at best, 'variable' (ie depends on > the city you happen to be driving through). [...] This opinion is based on roads in the SF bay area
Oh, city streets. Those can be pretty bad, yeah, depending on the city. But the traffic is also bad in cities, so you don't want to drive there anyway. That's why the roads go *around* the cities. We don't drive through cities. There's no reason to drive through cities. Ever. Stay on the interstates, and take the bypasses around the big cities. You can drive from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back without ever slowing below 65 mph, if your gas tank is sufficiently enormous.
The only time we ever drive on city streets is if our actual destination is in the city (e.g., if we are visiting someone who lives there).
> judging from my opinion formed from other sources, which is mostly movies/tv shows/news, I guess.
Television and movies are, in many ways, extremely different from anything you would ever encounter in the real world, in any country.
> blind nationalistic pride exhibited on TV shows, for example.
As a rule, Americans have very little in the way of nationalistic feelings. There are exceptions, of course. E.g., for about three weeks after 9/11 there was a lot of flag-waving going around. Decorating with red, white, and blue is popular enough, but then, the colors actually look pretty good together. Admittedly, there *is* a fair amount of pride, but it's not all directed at the nation. Frankly many Americans are more excited about the specific state or region they're from than about the US in general. Indeed, most Americans are a good deal more excited about their favorite athletic team than they are about their country.
Bear in mind, the US is a fairly large country, and there are only two other countries on the same continent with us. From where I sit, the only country I could *conceivably* drive to in a single long day (on very good roads -- we have the best roads of any country in the world) is Canada, which is barely even a foreign country at all. (I mean, it's *another* country, yeah, technically, but it's not really *foreign* in any meaningful way. They don't speak another language, and you don't have to go on an airplane to get there, and you don't need a passport, or didn't the time I went (which, admittedly, was a few years ago). They do have really really high sales tax, and their money looks funny, but apart from those details... Frankly California seems more foreign than Canada.) Foreign countries are places you read about on the internet or study in college or maybe visit once in a lifetime (e.g., on your honeymoon). For normal vacations there's no real reason to go to a foreign country; you can fly hundreds, even thousands of miles, to such exotic places as Florida or Alaska or Montana or Hawaii or Manhattan or Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon or Hilton Head or Hollywood or Yosemite or Nashville or Mertyl Beach or Yellowstone, and you don't need to worry about special immunizations or passports or any of the other headaches that accompany travel to a foreign country (yet another way in which Canada isn't really quite like a foreign country). In this kind of environment, it's very VERY easy to take your country for granted, and most Americans do. Nationalism? We barely even know what that is.
Also, there is very little love for the government, especially the federal government. For representative democracy as a system in principle, yes, but for our specific government, no. If you want to hear criticism of the US government, there's probably no better place to hear a lot of it than in the US. At any given time, at least 30% of the population is utterly fed up with the current administration. (That's always true, irrespective of which party holds the Presidency. The current administration has more enemies than average, but not as many more as watching television will lead you to believe.) At least half of the population considers the US Congress to be shamefully wasteful, ineffective, and corrupt. The general perception of local government is somewhat better, but not what I'd call good.
Slashdot Mirror
> It's Blair Witch's first person camera work, applied to a small (for the genre) budget monster movie.
You know, if you tried REALLY hard, you could probably come up with a description that makes this movie sound even more wretched. For instance, you could say that all the major characters are in high school, or that the special effects are a lot like the ones in Star Trek: The Motion Picture...
Actually, I believe the ides falls on the _thirteenth_ in February. It's easy to get confused, since it's not on the same day every month.
When Duke Nukem Forever is released, you can donate your crusty old MacBook Air to a museum and buy yourself a much newer and thinner laptop with a 64TB solid-state drive and a 64-core CPU that can run OS X 10.15 and Windows Longhorn/Vienna/Seven/Fiesta/whatever at the same time in a hypervisor.
HTH.HAND.
> 10 BaseT, 100 BaseT, 1000BaseT, etc etc are all measured in BITS.
Of course. Bandwidth is normally measured in bits per second...
> I was talking about BYTES. 2 MBps = 16 mbps. 802.11g is rated at 54 Mbps, but...
Oh. That's somewhat closer to the speed I would have guessed it would be. More or less.
And yeah, you don't always get the full theoretical 100 mbps out of FastEthernet either.
Sorry about the confusion. I wasn't paying much attention to capitalization because, you know, it's slashdot, and people capitalize weirdly all the time.
> At 2 MBps (more throughput than most people actually get with 802.11g), an actual DVD will take how long to transfer?
Waitasec, let me get this straight:
802.11g, the hot data-link-layer protocol everyone wants to use these days, is actually a good deal slower than old-fashioned 10BaseT ethernet, which is so old and slow nobody has bought or sold a new device that supports it exclusively for the better part of a decade. Have I got that about right?
Okay, I'm blessed with not having to travel much, so laptops aren't really my thing, and consequently I haven't paid a great deal of attention to wireless networking technologies, since I've got wired network everywhere I need it. So I'm not as informed about this as I might be. But your numbers are really catching me off-guard here.
I knew that wireless networks were slower than comparably-priced wired networks from the same era. Yeah, of course. So obviously 802.11g would be much slower than gigabit ethernet, and probably even a little slower than the 100BaseT "Fast Ethernet" that was the slowest wired network technology anybody wanted to deploy ten years ago. But, seriously, _five times_ slower than plain old 10BaseT? Really?
Wow.
Am I ever glad I don't have to deal with wireless networks. I can put up with slowness when accessing *remote* things, like, you know, over the internet. I expect that to be slow. But man, when something's in the same room with me, I expect network transfer times to be *faster* than sticking it on a removable USB mass storage device and carrying it over there. I mean, if it's gonna be that slow, what exactly is the *point* of having a local network?
Whether a WinXP system or a Gentoo system is easier to install depends on what you want installed.
If all you want is a basic functioning systme, Gentoo is easier. (Well, assuming you can follow a list of simple instructions it's easier. It's not point-and-click, though.)
If you want a GUI, but don't need many actual applications, XP is easier, because Windows makes the GUI a core part of the basic system.
If you want a fully functional system with everything, neither makes the install simple or instant, but XP is worse. You know, because after a few days you get really tired of clicking Next. Gentoo takes forever to download and install everything, but there's not much user interaction required for most packages.
Of course, Microsoft has trained people to expect a computer to come with a GUI but no significant applications. I'm not sure what *use* a GUI is without any real applications, but that's what you get out of the box.
Easy. You look on the CPAN and see what modules they maintain. If they maintain something like DBI or DateTime, they're a good programmer. OTOH if they maintain something like Matt's Script Archive you might want to give them a miss. HTH.HAND.
> What? 2009? Bush is out of here in 2008, unless something dastardly is being planned.
He'll probably be a lame duck starting in November, but he's not out of office until January 2009.
Unless he is prevented from continuing in office (e.g., by death), that is, in which case there's an established chain of succession (starting with the VP) for who would take over as acting President until the end of the term (or until the President returns, if the circumstance that took him out of active service was somewhat more temporary than death).
Education is a reserved power. It's supposed to come out of state and local budgets. And anyway, lack of funding is *not* the problem that the schools face; in real (adjusted for inflation) dollars, they're getting WAY more money than they did fifty years ago. (Of course, a lot of that money (in Ohio at least) is earmarked for specific programs so that the individual school districts can't necessarily just spend the money on whatever they think is appropriate. But even after that is taken into account, the decline in the schools is not due to funding issues. There are other, much worse problems.)
> Now, all we need to figure out is how to let the constituency modify it.
Do you really want your taxes to climb on the same geometric curve as the number of articles in Wikipedia? When new items are added to the budget, the money has to come from somewhere. I wouldn't mind letting the constituency vote on the items that are *already* in the budget, and possibly deny some of them, but the *LAST* thing we need is freeform public editing of the budget.
> I'll give the government this, they have more imagination than me, I couldn't
> come up with 3000 pages of new ways to spend other people's money.
Oh, neither could they, but you don't seem to understand what a budget is. A budget is not a list of new ideas. It's a detailed accounting of where all the money is allocated. (This differs from a budget *report*, which is a detailed accounting of where all the money *went*, and how that differs from where the budget said it should go -- which, in the case of the US federal government, would probably be even more terrifying.)
In fact, there are probably very few new ideas in the budget. Most of the money goes to the same things it went to last time, although the exact numbers probably change slightly each year.
> The warranty service on defective music is basically "buy it again", this
> attitude would put a stereo manufacturer out of business very quickly.
In the eighties it would have. Now, I'm not so sure. It's amazing how many people don't want to mess with warranty service these days and will just go out and buy a replacement instead. It seems the only real exceptions, the only things where people still expect a warranty, are big-ticket items like cars, major appliances, and maybe computers. (Houses, for some reason, have really never come with a warranty, so far as I am aware, which is strange if you think about it, since they're by quite far the most expensive thing most people ever buy.)
Yeah, crimial law in the US favors the defendant, but civil law favors the plaitiff. It's weird, but no country is perfect.
Regarding your signature: waitasec, you need a good day and good light to read the date on a dime, and they say your vision is *better* than normal? Normal must be pretty lousy. I can read the dates on dimes by the light of a dim computer monitor in an otherwise dark basement room, and my vision's not what it used to be. (I'm not fifty, but I'm past thirty, and I have begun to notice a reduction in my vision's quality over the last ten years or so. In the eighties I could *glance* at a coin and read off the date, any time, in any light, sideways, upside-down, through oxidization that turned the whole coin green, whatever, no problem. Now I have to pause for a second to focus on it, and maybe tilt the coin to the right angle.)
Silverlight is a thing Microsoft wants everybody to use instead of standard web technologies, but fortunately pretty much nobody actually uses it (unlike $#@! Flash).
I should note too that Chinese is a special case, because it isn't a phonetically-defined language in the same way as English, Russian, and for that matter most other languages. When you transliterate from one phonetic writing system to another, you aren't really changing very much (except in cases where the target writing system doesn't have letters for all the phonemes you need, which admittedly does happen). It's still fundamentally the same word, with the same pronunciation and the same meaning, just written in a different alphabet.
Chinese is different because the shapes of the characters carry meaning beyond the sounds they make. In a phonetic writing system the letters just stand for sounds, so when you go from one of them to another, as long as you transliterate in a way that gives you the same sound, the meaning is still carried in exactly the same way as before. Some languages even have more than one different writing system that it's normal to write them in, e.g., some east-European Slavic languages are routinely written in either Latin or Cyrillic.
> (literally, "self life message"
*smacks forehead*
That should read "self life writing". If it were "self life message" it would be autobiology, but we use -ology to mean the study of something, so I guess autobiology would be the study of your own life. Or something.
> I'm not sure if translation is just used due to the lack of a word to describe the process.
> Maybe more like transcribing?
There is a word for taking a word and importing it phoneme-for-phoneme into a different writing system, but most non-linguists don't know the term. It's called "transliteration". Translation, technically, means that you move from one *language* to another, so as a general rule more changes than just the writing system. So, for instance, if you're going from Greek to English, translating gives you "messenger" where transliterating gives you "angelos". (Yeah, we get the English word "angel" from this Greek word.) With close cognates sometimes not *much* more than the writing system changes. For instance, going from Russian to English transliterating will give you "avtobiografiya" where translating gives you "autobiography". That's pretty similar, but only because the words in both languages have a shared etymology, i.e., they both get it from the same original words in Greek (literally, "self life message"; autos also has other meanings (primarily, it is the third-person personal pronoun), but here it means self).
Anyway...
Introducing a parallel system wherein sites can be registered with domains containing either Cyrillic *or* Latin characters will only exacerbate the confusion. Under an all-ASCII domain system people just have to learn that in domains p is a Latin pi, not the same letter as rho, and if they see what they think is a rho it's really a Latin pi. Under a parallel system that supports both, if you see a p you don't know if it's a Latin pi or a Cyrillic rho; they look so similar that they can be hard to tell apart even when you see them side-by-side, much less in isolation from one another. In some font faces (especially sans-serif ones) they may even be exactly the same glyph, visually identical. There are a number of other letters that will have this problem, too, e.g., Cyrillic В (i.e., v) and Latin B (capital b), Cyrillic М and Latin M (same phonetic value), Cyrillic Н (n) and Latin H, Cyrillic О (omicron, i.e., short o) and Latin O, and so on and so forth.
The Mozilla folks have put a lot of thought and effort into figuring out the best ways to deal with these issues.
Yeah, I thought about that, but the appeal of riding a pogo stick in first person pulls me to want it that way. I suppose it would be good for the game to support both first-person and third-person view, though, and the player could toggle between them with a key.
> I was talking about the freeways, eg 101 and 280, up through the SF bay area.
Huh. Well, I can't say I've ever been to California, so maybe it's different from the rest of the country... or maybe the whole western part of the country is different from the eastern half -- that seems unlikely, but I've not been out west much.
In the midwest, where I live, the freeways go *around* the cities, not through them. There's often an older version of the route that goes into or through the city, but there's always a bypass that goes around, and that's what you drive on if the city isn't your destination. This is also true in the other parts of the US that I have visited, but I've not been out west much. I've been south and east, and north as far as Kitchener (and narrowly missed an opportunity to visit the U.P. once), but (apart from one time back in '92 when I flew into Phoenix and took a charter bus up to Flagstaff) I've not been west of the Mississippi.
I mean, I know *I* have more trouble getting to sleep when somebody's on the phone nearby.
Television has the same effect...
> It may be that games that were developed with a closed source model and then
> later the source was released were not considered, I dunno, it's slashdotted.
I assume they only considered games that are completely available freely.
A number of commercial games have had their source code released, so that the community can do things like port it to various operating systems and make UI improvements, but the open source license only covers the *program*, not the content (artwork, levels, whatnot), so you can't play the game with _just_ the open-source components; you still need a copy of the commercial item. Descent for instance is in this category. In some cases there is substitute content available so that you can play _a_ game without the commercial product, so there's a somewhat blurry line, but I'm guessing that they probably only considered games that are completely open, program _and_ content.
IMO, pretty much all first-person shooters are basically the games of yesteryear coming back in yet another iteration.
I mean, you get new maps, obviously, and the technical quality of the graphics (in terms of things like bit depth) is rather a lot better than twenty years ago, and the objects are more complex (in Doom I think everything but the actual building was just a flat sprite; Descent had polymodels for the baddies, and things have progressed from there), and the physics have improved (e.g., gravity is more realistic now), and occasionally there are even changes in the basic rules (e.g., how friendly fire works in multiplayer), but in terms of how the game is played, for the most part, the overwhelming majority of FPS games are pretty much just a newer, better version of Wolfenstein. And new FPS games aren't necessarily more fun to play than older ones.
There is an FPS I want to see made, though. I want to see Commander Keen done in 3D, with the cartooney style of the original, enemies that you can stun and they get a dazed look in their eyes and stars orbiting their heads, and the vertical platformer style of level design, and the pogo stick, and giant slugs that produce hazardous poo, and flying grasshoppers you can squish with the pogo stick, and all that, but in first-person 3D. I'd pay good money for that one. I might even install a Microsoft OS, if necessary, to play that one. Bonus points if it supports multiplayer mode.
Umm, dude, some of my best friends have been dogs (and definitely rather more than fourteen inches tall), but they are, nonetheless, animals, not another race of people. They don't have human rights, and they certainly don't have the right to move to Beijing and live there if they so choose. Even in the USA, pets don't get to choose where they live; legally they are property, and they go wherever their owners take them, period.
> > (on very good roads -- we have the best roads of any country in the world)
> This isn't my experience. In fact, my opinion is that, although the road *system* is good, the
> roads themselves are, at worst, pretty darned aweful, and at best, 'variable' (ie depends on
> the city you happen to be driving through). [...] This opinion is based on roads in the SF bay area
Oh, city streets. Those can be pretty bad, yeah, depending on the city. But the traffic is also bad in cities, so you don't want to drive there anyway. That's why the roads go *around* the cities. We don't drive through cities. There's no reason to drive through cities. Ever. Stay on the interstates, and take the bypasses around the big cities. You can drive from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back without ever slowing below 65 mph, if your gas tank is sufficiently enormous.
The only time we ever drive on city streets is if our actual destination is in the city (e.g., if we are visiting someone who lives there).
> judging from my opinion formed from other sources, which is mostly movies/tv shows/news, I guess.
Television and movies are, in many ways, extremely different from anything you would ever encounter in the real world, in any country.
> blind nationalistic pride exhibited on TV shows, for example.
As a rule, Americans have very little in the way of nationalistic feelings. There are exceptions, of course. E.g., for about three weeks after 9/11 there was a lot of flag-waving going around. Decorating with red, white, and blue is popular enough, but then, the colors actually look pretty good together. Admittedly, there *is* a fair amount of pride, but it's not all directed at the nation. Frankly many Americans are more excited about the specific state or region they're from than about the US in general. Indeed, most Americans are a good deal more excited about their favorite athletic team than they are about their country.
Bear in mind, the US is a fairly large country, and there are only two other countries on the same continent with us. From where I sit, the only country I could *conceivably* drive to in a single long day (on very good roads -- we have the best roads of any country in the world) is Canada, which is barely even a foreign country at all. (I mean, it's *another* country, yeah, technically, but it's not really *foreign* in any meaningful way. They don't speak another language, and you don't have to go on an airplane to get there, and you don't need a passport, or didn't the time I went (which, admittedly, was a few years ago). They do have really really high sales tax, and their money looks funny, but apart from those details... Frankly California seems more foreign than Canada.) Foreign countries are places you read about on the internet or study in college or maybe visit once in a lifetime (e.g., on your honeymoon). For normal vacations there's no real reason to go to a foreign country; you can fly hundreds, even thousands of miles, to such exotic places as Florida or Alaska or Montana or Hawaii or Manhattan or Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon or Hilton Head or Hollywood or Yosemite or Nashville or Mertyl Beach or Yellowstone, and you don't need to worry about special immunizations or passports or any of the other headaches that accompany travel to a foreign country (yet another way in which Canada isn't really quite like a foreign country). In this kind of environment, it's very VERY easy to take your country for granted, and most Americans do. Nationalism? We barely even know what that is.
Also, there is very little love for the government, especially the federal government. For representative democracy as a system in principle, yes, but for our specific government, no. If you want to hear criticism of the US government, there's probably no better place to hear a lot of it than in the US. At any given time, at least 30% of the population is utterly fed up with the current administration. (That's always true, irrespective of which party holds the Presidency. The current administration has more enemies than average, but not as many more as watching television will lead you to believe.) At least half of the population considers the US Congress to be shamefully wasteful, ineffective, and corrupt. The general perception of local government is somewhat better, but not what I'd call good.