I think it's very sad that a violent game about killing police, stealing cars, and shooting pedestrians with shotguns only becomes M-rated if a male character can get intimate with a female character.
Would you rather expose your kid to sexual themes, or murder themes?
This is what I see... how much different is it with the correct images etc.? If not much different... then I can't imagine why it was picked over the runner up.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I rarely have game-breaking lag problems. Yes servers are down from early tuesday morning until mid tuesday afternoon, but I'm at work during those hours anyway.
Yes lag can get bad at times, and big patch days are iffy, but not as often as you'd think from this whole/. thread. Meanwhile, thousands of people have reached max level 60, raided through 40-man dungeons countless times, and have killed nearly every boss in the game. It's not like we're all sitting in login queues for 23 hours each day.
This works especially well in a corporate environment where the user's documents are all saved, or at least backed up, to a network drive. Reimage, apply a handful of patches/customizations, and you're back in business.
I agree that when you're truly obsessed with the game and it takes all your time, you may be hesitant to admit that you've been wasting your life. When you start calling in sick to work to spend more time playing WoW, you have a problem.
But it is entirely possible to play WoW, stop, look back, and think "Well, that was a fun way to spend my leisure time, what's next?" It doesn't always involve regret. Though I've since quit, I had fun in SWG and, aside from the grinding, I don't think my time was wasted - it was leisure time as well spent as watching TV or reading sci-fi novels. Maybe not as well spent as if I had been exercising, but we all have our indulgences:)
If you can play WoW responsibly, then it's just like instant messaging with friends, except you also have an avatar, and the chat room provides activities in which your avatars can interact and accomplish goals.
Like drinking alcohol, the key is to play MMORPG's responsibly, and also make it a social thing - the primary reason non-alcoholics go to bars is to be social, not to be drunk. Being drunk is just a way some people feel more free to be social. That's why they say you shouldn't drink alone, because then it's about the alcohol and you, not about socializing. Being drunk often makes people feel silly and comfortable with each other.
Likewise, becoming a powerful mage or sneaky rogue is a way people can feel more social, too. The tiniest kid can go become this big warrior, and stand between a dragon and his friends to protect them. Everyone can get together to work toward common accomplishments, and chat and laugh with each other all the while.
I realize these were just released, but how do you find affordable notebooks using currently available nVidia gaming chips? They always seem to come at a ridiculous premium.
And now you've got yourself a computer, an internet connection, a (presumed) technical inclination that brings you to slashdot, and you've learned to type reasonably well in English. How'd you do it?
And when you were pretty happy where you were, what was the incentive to improve your situation? I thought that once people reach subsistence levels (such as by their community sharing with them through social programs) they had no incentive to work any more?
And repub vs. democrat, and siding with guns: that happens in city slums around the USA today, in the form of city gangs, and it's spreading out of the cities, too. Maybe a little TLC from the community would help kids realize that promoting the group that has the most guns is just a quick way to a gunfight.
Would someone working 14 hour days at WalMart for minimum wage just to have enough to eat and a place live continue to work? Maybe not. Would a CEO making 20 million dollars continue to work? Absolutely.
Well suppose that same company fired the overpaid CEO, hired a new one for 2 million a year, and used the remaining 18 million to provide health care and day care to their lowest workers? Maybe then instead of a new yacht for the CEO, thousands of workers and their children would be happeir, healthier and wiser and make the company, not to mention the country, better overall.
i think he was talking more about making sure that people dont sleep on the streets at night
Correct. Even though we don't have the stereotypical bone thin african children picking through garbage dumps for food, we still have homeless people sleeping in cardboard boxes just a few blocks away from NYC's posh Upper East Side. Neither of these should exist when there's so much bounty in our country. I firmly believe that the measure of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable citizens.
I agree with you - there is MUCH greater poverty, desolation, despair in other countries than anywhere in the USA. Watch the infomercials on sunday morning to see a few of these places.
But keep in mind the people who argue against public welfare in the USA have never given the reason that "well, we should decrease welfare in the USA because the money would be better spent helping drought and famine victims in Africa".
So, sadly, the question is stuck at "should we use public money to help ANYONE at all?" I'd be pleased as pie if the question was "which needy people should all this public money go to?"
So you wouldn't consider this poverty: A single parent who lives in a city slum with 5 kids, a 12 year old 13" color tv, a $59 wal-mart air conditioner in the window, a job cleaning houses, who is overweight because they can only afford unhealthy fast foods, is one inch taller than WWII GI's because she's black and they were mostly white, and every other week there's a shooting in her neighborhood.
If you were in that situation, you certainly wouldn't consider yourself to have even close to a decent living.
This is the USA... here there's more to poverty than distended bellies, flies crawling on eyeballs, and children picking through garbage for something to eat.
Regardless of whether soldiers have a right to uncensored internet access, congress needs to look into biased filtering.
If the military wants to block political-opinion websites, that's fine, but block ALL political opinion websites. The category and reason for blocking is "Politics/Opinion" , not "Liberal Politics/Opinion" or "Politics/Opinion that the Bush administration doesn't like".
and a wealthy populace is a very difficult populace to control as they have too much to lose.
That'd be true if Republican administrations actually created wealth gains all around. But the current one, at least, has enriched the lives of only the wealthiest Americans, and paid for it by cutting all the programs that used to help non-wealthy Americans live a decent life. As soon as it seemed we had a little extra money in the budget (and it turns out we never really did), Bush ignored the country's long term needs and instead paid off the wealthiest Americans with huge personal income and investment tax cuts.
And as for deficit spending... if I sold out the country to China, I'd have enough free money to make myself and my policies look good too. Wow, I can run a 400 billion dollar war AND cut taxes? The miracle of deficit spending! But as any credit-card waving American knows, the bill does show up in the mail eventually, and all that deficit spending catches up to you and your economy.
for a sheeplike constituency
More like a pride of lions than a flock of sheep. People were proud of the American way, and the American promise that we'd never let our poor and elderly go without. I'd much rather have a country where the "haves" help out the "have-nots" than a country of selfish people who'd would rather hoard their extra bread and let it rot than share a bit with a starving man. How can you be proud of being selfish?
Most Republicans would rather have a hopefully salvageable Republican administration in charge than a neo-socialist Democratic one....the Democrats have become a new socialist party...
The current Democratic party is Socialist, to the extent that they favor using public money to provide services to people that private companies could have provided - like health care, education, construction, retirement benefits, etc.
The current Republican party is Facist, to the extent that they favor using public money to benefit large corporations and their leaders, and they collude with the media to keep the public in a misinformed frenzy.
I'll take Democratic Socialism over Republican Facism ANY day.
I don't see how being untrusting of black box voting machines is political in any way.
With paper ballots, would you trust a private company to take all the ballots into a private room, count up the votes, come out and tell you who won? Of course not. But that's what we're doing when we let black box voting machines run our elections.
You're willing to blame the user for fraud, but not stupidity or mistakes?
The only entity with access to enough voting machines to make any difference is either the state election commission or the company who made the machines.
Probably more likely that they were having "moron operating the machine" issues.
These machines are built like ATM's, minus the accountability, so there's no point in blaming the user. They're set up by professionals, and are supposed to be simply to use and operate.
As a side note to fellow Republicans, his closing advice is just as valid for us. Contact the RNC and make your opinion known. Write to your representatives and senate and let them know that you disagree with executive branch policies. This is your party: step up and take charge of it.
This is a great point! While I think Kerry is a democrat who is on par with the rest of his party's values, etc., Bush is WAY out of line with what the republican party was known for - and what longtime republican voters were assuming.
When I think traditional republican, I think personal privacy, constitutional protection, fiscal conservatism, and social conservatism. But Bush, who got all those always-vote-republican votes, has completely departed from those first three key traditional republican values!
I wouldn't mind so much if traditional republicans were in power, but the Republican party has been hijacked. Just like they used Colin Powell's reputation to trick people into believing them, they're using the Republican party to push their own selfish, money-driven agendas instead of what the Republican party used to be about and what voters were expecting.
Longtime republicans should be careful who they're voting for in the coming elections. You can't just trust the (R) next to a name anymore.
So basically you're inferring that the machines setup and run by Democrats illegally gave votes to Bush right?
Sequoia can't even build machines that pass the federal standards, and you're blaming the local volunteer operators? Funny how whenever these black box voting machines "just don't work", they error in favor of republicans.
I scared a telemarketer back in the mid-nineties when he called by answering "Hello??!? My goodness who is this?? This is a computer modem telephone line! You can't call this line!!"
Slashdot Mirror
/agree
I think it's very sad that a violent game about killing police, stealing cars, and shooting pedestrians with shotguns only becomes M-rated if a male character can get intimate with a female character.
Would you rather expose your kid to sexual themes, or murder themes?
This is what I see... how much different is it with the correct images etc.? If not much different... then I can't imagine why it was picked over the runner up.
e designwinner3za.jpg
http://img290.imageshack.us/img290/8806/slashdotr
I hope it's missing images, because right now the winner looks awfully plain and flat and sharp edges compared to the runner up.
Breaking News: Sony Overcharges for Needlessly Proprietary Electronics! Film at 11.
Violent video games even permeate the highest levels of government: http://americasarmy.com/
Not to mention, the hottest parties and sexiest females.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I rarely have game-breaking lag problems. Yes servers are down from early tuesday morning until mid tuesday afternoon, but I'm at work during those hours anyway.
/. thread. Meanwhile, thousands of people have reached max level 60, raided through 40-man dungeons countless times, and have killed nearly every boss in the game. It's not like we're all sitting in login queues for 23 hours each day.
Yes lag can get bad at times, and big patch days are iffy, but not as often as you'd think from this whole
This works especially well in a corporate environment where the user's documents are all saved, or at least backed up, to a network drive. Reimage, apply a handful of patches/customizations, and you're back in business.
I agree that when you're truly obsessed with the game and it takes all your time, you may be hesitant to admit that you've been wasting your life. When you start calling in sick to work to spend more time playing WoW, you have a problem.
:)
But it is entirely possible to play WoW, stop, look back, and think "Well, that was a fun way to spend my leisure time, what's next?" It doesn't always involve regret. Though I've since quit, I had fun in SWG and, aside from the grinding, I don't think my time was wasted - it was leisure time as well spent as watching TV or reading sci-fi novels. Maybe not as well spent as if I had been exercising, but we all have our indulgences
If you can play WoW responsibly, then it's just like instant messaging with friends, except you also have an avatar, and the chat room provides activities in which your avatars can interact and accomplish goals.
Like drinking alcohol, the key is to play MMORPG's responsibly, and also make it a social thing - the primary reason non-alcoholics go to bars is to be social, not to be drunk. Being drunk is just a way some people feel more free to be social. That's why they say you shouldn't drink alone, because then it's about the alcohol and you, not about socializing. Being drunk often makes people feel silly and comfortable with each other.
Likewise, becoming a powerful mage or sneaky rogue is a way people can feel more social, too. The tiniest kid can go become this big warrior, and stand between a dragon and his friends to protect them. Everyone can get together to work toward common accomplishments, and chat and laugh with each other all the while.
After the first miscommunication over email, pick up the damn phone. Could have cleared this up in 5 minutes, no matter how idiotic the customer.
This is, after all, a country that builds roads around boulders because the elves live in them.
And I suppose you could think of a better reason to build roads around boulders?
I realize these were just released, but how do you find affordable notebooks using currently available nVidia gaming chips? They always seem to come at a ridiculous premium.
And now you've got yourself a computer, an internet connection, a (presumed) technical inclination that brings you to slashdot, and you've learned to type reasonably well in English. How'd you do it?
And when you were pretty happy where you were, what was the incentive to improve your situation? I thought that once people reach subsistence levels (such as by their community sharing with them through social programs) they had no incentive to work any more?
And repub vs. democrat, and siding with guns: that happens in city slums around the USA today, in the form of city gangs, and it's spreading out of the cities, too. Maybe a little TLC from the community would help kids realize that promoting the group that has the most guns is just a quick way to a gunfight.
Would someone working 14 hour days at WalMart for minimum wage just to have enough to eat and a place live continue to work? Maybe not. Would a CEO making 20 million dollars continue to work? Absolutely.
Well suppose that same company fired the overpaid CEO, hired a new one for 2 million a year, and used the remaining 18 million to provide health care and day care to their lowest workers? Maybe then instead of a new yacht for the CEO, thousands of workers and their children would be happeir, healthier and wiser and make the company, not to mention the country, better overall.
i think he was talking more about making sure that people dont sleep on the streets at night
Correct. Even though we don't have the stereotypical bone thin african children picking through garbage dumps for food, we still have homeless people sleeping in cardboard boxes just a few blocks away from NYC's posh Upper East Side. Neither of these should exist when there's so much bounty in our country. I firmly believe that the measure of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable citizens.
I agree with you - there is MUCH greater poverty, desolation, despair in other countries than anywhere in the USA. Watch the infomercials on sunday morning to see a few of these places.
But keep in mind the people who argue against public welfare in the USA have never given the reason that "well, we should decrease welfare in the USA because the money would be better spent helping drought and famine victims in Africa".
So, sadly, the question is stuck at "should we use public money to help ANYONE at all?" I'd be pleased as pie if the question was "which needy people should all this public money go to?"
So you wouldn't consider this poverty: A single parent who lives in a city slum with 5 kids, a 12 year old 13" color tv, a $59 wal-mart air conditioner in the window, a job cleaning houses, who is overweight because they can only afford unhealthy fast foods, is one inch taller than WWII GI's because she's black and they were mostly white, and every other week there's a shooting in her neighborhood.
If you were in that situation, you certainly wouldn't consider yourself to have even close to a decent living.
This is the USA... here there's more to poverty than distended bellies, flies crawling on eyeballs, and children picking through garbage for something to eat.
Regardless of whether soldiers have a right to uncensored internet access, congress needs to look into biased filtering.
If the military wants to block political-opinion websites, that's fine, but block ALL political opinion websites. The category and reason for blocking is "Politics/Opinion" , not "Liberal Politics/Opinion" or "Politics/Opinion that the Bush administration doesn't like".
and a wealthy populace is a very difficult populace to control as they have too much to lose.
That'd be true if Republican administrations actually created wealth gains all around. But the current one, at least, has enriched the lives of only the wealthiest Americans, and paid for it by cutting all the programs that used to help non-wealthy Americans live a decent life. As soon as it seemed we had a little extra money in the budget (and it turns out we never really did), Bush ignored the country's long term needs and instead paid off the wealthiest Americans with huge personal income and investment tax cuts.
And as for deficit spending... if I sold out the country to China, I'd have enough free money to make myself and my policies look good too. Wow, I can run a 400 billion dollar war AND cut taxes? The miracle of deficit spending! But as any credit-card waving American knows, the bill does show up in the mail eventually, and all that deficit spending catches up to you and your economy.
for a sheeplike constituency
More like a pride of lions than a flock of sheep. People were proud of the American way, and the American promise that we'd never let our poor and elderly go without. I'd much rather have a country where the "haves" help out the "have-nots" than a country of selfish people who'd would rather hoard their extra bread and let it rot than share a bit with a starving man. How can you be proud of being selfish?
Most Republicans would rather have a hopefully salvageable Republican administration in charge than a neo-socialist Democratic one. ...the Democrats have become a new socialist party...
The current Democratic party is Socialist, to the extent that they favor using public money to provide services to people that private companies could have provided - like health care, education, construction, retirement benefits, etc.
The current Republican party is Facist, to the extent that they favor using public money to benefit large corporations and their leaders, and they collude with the media to keep the public in a misinformed frenzy.
I'll take Democratic Socialism over Republican Facism ANY day.
I don't see how being untrusting of black box voting machines is political in any way.
With paper ballots, would you trust a private company to take all the ballots into a private room, count up the votes, come out and tell you who won? Of course not. But that's what we're doing when we let black box voting machines run our elections.
You're willing to blame the user for fraud, but not stupidity or mistakes?
The only entity with access to enough voting machines to make any difference is either the state election commission or the company who made the machines.
Probably more likely that they were having "moron operating the machine" issues.
These machines are built like ATM's, minus the accountability, so there's no point in blaming the user. They're set up by professionals, and are supposed to be simply to use and operate.
As a side note to fellow Republicans, his closing advice is just as valid for us. Contact the RNC and make your opinion known. Write to your representatives and senate and let them know that you disagree with executive branch policies. This is your party: step up and take charge of it.
This is a great point! While I think Kerry is a democrat who is on par with the rest of his party's values, etc., Bush is WAY out of line with what the republican party was known for - and what longtime republican voters were assuming.
When I think traditional republican, I think personal privacy, constitutional protection, fiscal conservatism, and social conservatism. But Bush, who got all those always-vote-republican votes, has completely departed from those first three key traditional republican values!
I wouldn't mind so much if traditional republicans were in power, but the Republican party has been hijacked. Just like they used Colin Powell's reputation to trick people into believing them, they're using the Republican party to push their own selfish, money-driven agendas instead of what the Republican party used to be about and what voters were expecting.
Longtime republicans should be careful who they're voting for in the coming elections. You can't just trust the (R) next to a name anymore.
So basically you're inferring that the machines setup and run by Democrats illegally gave votes to Bush right?
Sequoia can't even build machines that pass the federal standards, and you're blaming the local volunteer operators? Funny how whenever these black box voting machines "just don't work", they error in favor of republicans.
I scared a telemarketer back in the mid-nineties when he called by answering "Hello??!? My goodness who is this?? This is a computer modem telephone line! You can't call this line!!"