I would also like to add that I think the liberal return policies of the major retailers in the US are definitely hurting unique games.
It seems that "I don't like this game" is enough of a reason to allow an exchange now, so people will play one for an hour or two, decide they don't like it, and take it back. If they didn't have that option, maybe they'd play it for longer and end up liking it.
I bought Crimson Skies a month or so ago. I played it for two hours and thought it was okay. If I were younger and spoiled by these return policies, maybe I would have exchanged it. A few weeks later, I tried it again and ended up liking it so much that I used all my free time over the next few days to finish it.
Whenever I've heard someone from the Cato institute rolled out for some commentary or interview on the BBC, they've come across as nothing less than fascists.
While neo-conservativism basically is fascism (hyper-nationalism/imperialism, a big government that strictly controls its citizenry, worship of powerful military machines), other branches of right-wing politics embrace things like a small government and individual freedoms (e.g. the right to own firearms).
My limited knowledge of the Cato Institute definitely brands them as a right-wing group, but not a neo-conservative one. As others have mentioned, they support things like ending the drug war (a Libertarian view).
They also opposed the Iraq war, which also makes sense from a traditionally conservative point of view - it's not our country, and it's not affecting Americans, so it's not our business.
What negligible effect does my SUV have on the environment?
You seem to be asking this honestly, so I'll give you an honest answer.
Your SUV alone is having a very small impact on the atmosphere. But the many Americans who drive them needlessly are together having a huge impact.
It's similar to the "how does pirating one videogame hurt anyone?" question - it assumes that the person asking it is somehow special and should have a privilege that other people do not (IE driving a less gas-efficient vehicle, getting something without paying for it). In reality, it isn't just you driving an SUV, it is hundreds of thousands of Americans driving them unnecessarily, all potentially asking the same "why does it matter what one person does?" question.
A heavy SUV like the H2 burns 2-3 times as much fuel as a regular car, and 5-6 times as much as a hybrid like the new Prius. If even half of the people who drove one unnecessarily switched to something more fuel efficient, think of how much less pollution would be generated.
For all I know, you may have a legitimate need for an SUV - maybe you are a park ranger who drives on dirt roads or something - but the vast majority of people who own them do so because they are popular and/or give a false sense of security.
Mind you, this goes further than just visuals; a quick look down this week's chart shows it full of games like Medal Of Honor and Need For Speed - the fantastic seems less popular than the "realistic" in game setting as well.
Yes, definitely.
I think this may be a result of gaming's rise into the mass market - just like Hollywood blockbusters with "helicopters, explosions, and tits" end up generating a ton of money, the most successful games are often going to be the least innovative.
I don't have anything against big-budget Hollywood movies per se (James Bond films can often be reduced to helicopters, explosions, and tits, and I am fond of some of those), but they usually don't take risks that can result in a more interesting experience.
It's the same story in the game world - the developer that tries something new almost always ends up taking a lot of heat for it.
I'm a big fan of the Legacy of Kain series, and the newest one uses a cinematic-style cam (like Devil May Cry, for PS2 gamers). That design decision has been the single biggest complaint about it. When I've mentioned DMC and Ico (which had similar cameras) those same people almost always say they hated the cams in those games too, and want a standard 3rd-person follow-cam, despite the fact that cinematic cams allow game designers to use a whole new bag of cool techniques that the film industry has been using for years.
Homeworld2 is another example - Relic originally had planned what appeared to be a fairly large departure from the original game. There was some difficulty getting the project to move along (most of which is not being publicly discussed), so Sierra had them start again and make something that plays almost exactly like the original.
There's also Eternal Darkness for the Gamecube - one of the best games ever - which can't really be easily pinned down into a category (is it adventure? survival-horror light?), and seems to have sold only a relatively small number of copies.
Meanwhile, games that are simply well-executed takes on old formulas (e.g. Halo, Prince of Persia) are the ones selling millions of copies.
After hearing so much about Rez, I finally ordered a copy last week. I wish I'd known about it when it was first released. It looks awesome, but my purchase is far too late to have any impact on whether a sequel or another similarly abstract game is made.
I still have a little faith in the market, since the Metroid and GTA series sell well, but I think GTA's success is due more to its violent content than bringing open-ended action gameplay with a story to the current generation of consoles.
If you want a liberal slant you've got ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC
You are joking, right?
ABC: Who just spent a ton of money trying to convince Americans that there was no conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy and that they should just trust their government.
CNN: The news source who is second in friendliness to Emperor Dubyah after Fox News, and who had no coverage of the Miami FTAA riots and the police brutalization of protesters on their web site.
The best way to fight this is to buy free ranged meat, not adopt a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle.
Most of us who chose a vegan diet do so because we believe that eating meat at all is just as unethical as treating the animals badly. Whether it's free range or not, the animal still ends up being killed.
You see, the #1 UI wisdom that M$ will never get is that different people have different wants and needs.
?
Outlook has so many different sort and filter options for viewing email that you can end up with a view that looks as far from the default as you like.
What doesn't it have that would cater more to people with diverse ways of reading email?
like the free flying camera during the Burly Brawl....and the freeway chase. There was some really excellent virtual camera work in that film that couldn't have been achieved any other way.
It would really be too bad if that at least wasn't recognized.
Technology far in advance of your own, (or even moderately in advance of your own) would be unfathomable.
You bring up some very good points (and I really enjoyed the post), but I think that if genuine alien technology ended up in our laps, we would be able to learn at least something from it.
History isn't my forte, but I would think that an F-16 crashing in America of 1862 would give the US a head-start on technologies like radio and television, lasers, and jet engines.
You are right that they wouldn't be able to build a plane using those technologies, but having jet engines might be useful for something else, like watercraft.
I very much doubt that the modern US has gotten its hands on alien technology. There are some interesting theories that use it to explain how we got our hands on transistors, for example, but I think they are best used as an inspiration for historical fiction, not an understanding of how the technology was invented.
However, the infrastructure will benefit millions daily while the sub, bomber, and carrier will just keep costing with little tangible payoff. (since we already have several of each of those).
I am saddened that someone with a four-digit UID (along with a bunch of others) couldn't put two and two together to see that the post they are citing was using sarcasm to mock the original poster's claim that it was just a super-expensive tunnel.
All of the Canon equipment I've seen from the past couple of years on looks like it was designed as a prop for a sci-fi film. Finally the 21st century is really starting to look the part.
I read about this a few days ago. It reminded me of the cancelled Xbox fighting game based on Stephen Spielberg's AI. Hopefully an exec overseeing this project will realize what a huge mistake it is before they spend too much money. It can't be too far along, or there would be screenshots of other characters, right?
Do people actually buy enough of this kind of licensed crap to make it profitable? The last time I got suckered in by one of these games was with Acclaim's Alien Trilogy for the PC, and that was all I needed to see that nothing good was ever going to come of them.
(+1 bonus pre-emptively removed for being offtopic)
The UN had its thumb up its ass and was unwilling to do a thing to stop the murder, rape, and torture carried out on a daily basis in Iraq.
The US is not the world's police force. If you are trying to justify going to war with Iraq based on how poorly its citizens were treated by their leaders, then by that same logic we should be invading North Korea, China, and a host of smaller nations.
Emperor Dubyah "justified" his invasion by lying to the citizens of the US about an alleged threat against them when there was none. If the case was so strong based on the way Hussein treated his people, then why didn't he use that as the basis for his argument?
The answer is obvious - while most Americans will support a war to prevent an imagined danger against their own country, they will NOT support one to remove a foreign dictator who has no effect on them and never will. Dubyah is a deluded fascist, but he's smart enough to figure that out.
It's funny how Republicans wanted to impeach Clinton for lying about a blowjob, but they don't see anything wrong with their president having his lackeys fabricate evidence to support a war that gets hundreds of dedicated US soldiers killed.
If Howard Dean had his way...
If Ronald Reagan hadn't had his way - financing Taliban "freedom fighters" in the 80s and allowing the US to sell Hussein weapons - we wouldn't have gotten into this mess in the first place.
FUCK YOU to the anti-fair-use people who won't let me skip previews on DVDs.
Are there actually previews that can't be skipped? I remember freaking out at a DVD with a long preview at the beginning which disabled the chapter select, but I found out that choosing "next" bypassed it just fine.
This is in PowerDVD. I don't know if standalone players have the same function.
Here is a real life example, a friend of mine went to EB to buy Jedi Acadamy (A game that came out a few months ago). He wants to play Jedi Acadamy online, even though there is a small community (maybe about 30-50 players online at a time on all of the servers put together). They told him it was $50. He asked for a used version and they told him $44. He promptly told them he was going to buy it from ebay or pirate it.
I don't see your friend's problem. Halo has been out for the XBox for how long? It *just* dropped from the $49.99 price point recently, because it's been so popular.
I fail to understand why it's unreasonable for a retailer to charge $50 for a 1.5-month-old game that is very popular (maybe not online, but off). If your friend wants it for less, he can wait six months.
So bugs don't happen right? Well Knights of the Republic had a very long list of bugs on the X-box.
...almost all of which had easy workarounds. I played through it twice on the XBox and encountered one random bug. It cost me all of two minutes of game time.
I personally walked into the bug on the game "broken sword" on the gameboy. NO FUCKING FIX and NO MONEY BACK. If a pc company tried that they would be lynched.
Uh huh. Try reading the Homeworld2 forums. There is a fatal bug in multiplayer which makes it not worth playing online, as well as possible issues with the dynamic difficulty that make it next to impossible to play through certain levels for about half of all players. There is no patch, and the game has been out for two months.
It's 25 years from now, you seem to think of 2030 as something out of Flash Gordon.
When I was in grade school, I remember being amazed at my mom going in for the then brand-new laser surgery on her knee. Now people have it done all the time, even voluntarily to improve their vision.
The computer we had (which was a rarity - I knew two other kids with access to one) ran at 1MHz and had 128k of RAM. The DVD-Rs I bought yesterday each hold something like 75,000 times as much data as its floppy disks.
If you could afford a modem at the time, all it was good for was hooking up to a corporate/university mainframe or a one-user-at-a-time bulletin board, with communication only slightly faster than a teletype. Now we can communicate with people in any country online.
In 1978, the closest you could get to a cellphone was the radio phones that emergency workers carried in their vehicles.
We may not be sending manned missions to Jupiter or riding hoverboards, but a lot of things we take for granted now *were* Flash Gordon material back then. I don't think there's anything wrong with dreaming about the possibilities for nanotechnology manufacturing in 2030. Twenty-five years is a LONG time for technology.
Amtrak has not once ever been on time anywhere but Boston-New York-Washington
I used to take it between Seattle and Vancouver BC all of the time and it was fine. I also took the Seattle/Portland round-trip once and it was the same (although I hear that one is less reliable).
It sure beats sitting on a bus, IMO. The seats are nicer and so is the scenery out the window.
I remember a game, similar to Fallout years ago that too had its sequal cancelled: Wasteland
Fallout was intentionally designed as a sequel to Wasteland, but I guess Interplay didn't have the rights to the name. If you look at the box for the first Fallout, one of the tag-lines is "Remember Wasteland?"
I loved Wasteland, but I couldn't really get into Fallout. I didn't feel like there was enough direction in where I was supposed to go. I ended up getting captured by some mutants fairly early in the game, and then due to what I think was a bug (I was never sure) I was able to roam their base at will, stealing super high-powered weaponry and robbing any of them I wanted to with no consequences.
Somehow I blew up their base, and I couldn't figure out what was supposed to happen after that.
Wasteland didn't spell everything out for you, but it was fairly obvious where you were supposed to go because of the L-shaped map.
Wasteland also had the best crew photo ever - all of the dev team dressed up Mad Max style with prop weaponry in the desert.
How can you derive a generally acceptible idea of "right" (I don't see how, without becoming religious pretty quickly--lack of an absolute truth claim leads to everything being rationalizable)
The two branches of utilitarianism work toward the end of defining ethics without religion. Its first incarnation (Act Utilitarianism) is impractical for human society, IMO, because it doesn't account for human emotions and reactions to situations, but Rule Utilitarianism is very useful.
Act Utilitarianism is basically the viewpoint of Star Trek's Vulcans - the greatest good for the greatest number, even if the lesser number are being sacrificed completely.
The idea behind Rule Utilitarianism is that you determine the ethics of a situation based on how applying any given choice in it would affect society if it were used as a rule to always be followed in similar situations.
The example in my ethics course at university years ago was of a hypothetical small town in the segregated/racist South of the US in the early 20th century.
In the hypothetical situation, a black man is accused of raping a white woman. The sheriff has no leads, but he knows if he doesn't come up with a suspect, a lynch mob is going to go to the black part of town and start burning down houses.
Act Utilitarianism says that he should find one random black man and frame him, because it will save the lives and property of a bunch of other people.
Rule Utilitarianism says that he should not do this, and just do his best to stop the mob, because if the police can arrest and frame anyone they want, no one will trust them and the current society will collapse.
As someone pointed out the other day, there was plenty of quality art available before copyright. Shakespeare and Mozart were happy to create art without it, and (AFIAK) made money from performance and patronage.
Mozart (and other "classical" composers) were funded by the royalty and/or the church.
As long as you don't mind listening exclusively to religious and/or patriotic music, I guess there's no problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I would also like to add that I think the liberal return policies of the major retailers in the US are definitely hurting unique games.
It seems that "I don't like this game" is enough of a reason to allow an exchange now, so people will play one for an hour or two, decide they don't like it, and take it back. If they didn't have that option, maybe they'd play it for longer and end up liking it.
I bought Crimson Skies a month or so ago. I played it for two hours and thought it was okay. If I were younger and spoiled by these return policies, maybe I would have exchanged it. A few weeks later, I tried it again and ended up liking it so much that I used all my free time over the next few days to finish it.
Whenever I've heard someone from the Cato institute rolled out for some commentary or interview on the BBC, they've come across as nothing less than fascists.
While neo-conservativism basically is fascism (hyper-nationalism/imperialism, a big government that strictly controls its citizenry, worship of powerful military machines), other branches of right-wing politics embrace things like a small government and individual freedoms (e.g. the right to own firearms).
My limited knowledge of the Cato Institute definitely brands them as a right-wing group, but not a neo-conservative one. As others have mentioned, they support things like ending the drug war (a Libertarian view).
They also opposed the Iraq war, which also makes sense from a traditionally conservative point of view - it's not our country, and it's not affecting Americans, so it's not our business.
What negligible effect does my SUV have on the environment?
You seem to be asking this honestly, so I'll give you an honest answer.
Your SUV alone is having a very small impact on the atmosphere. But the many Americans who drive them needlessly are together having a huge impact.
It's similar to the "how does pirating one videogame hurt anyone?" question - it assumes that the person asking it is somehow special and should have a privilege that other people do not (IE driving a less gas-efficient vehicle, getting something without paying for it). In reality, it isn't just you driving an SUV, it is hundreds of thousands of Americans driving them unnecessarily, all potentially asking the same "why does it matter what one person does?" question.
A heavy SUV like the H2 burns 2-3 times as much fuel as a regular car, and 5-6 times as much as a hybrid like the new Prius. If even half of the people who drove one unnecessarily switched to something more fuel efficient, think of how much less pollution would be generated.
For all I know, you may have a legitimate need for an SUV - maybe you are a park ranger who drives on dirt roads or something - but the vast majority of people who own them do so because they are popular and/or give a false sense of security.
Mind you, this goes further than just visuals; a quick look down this week's chart shows it full of games like Medal Of Honor and Need For Speed - the fantastic seems less popular than the "realistic" in game setting as well.
Yes, definitely.
I think this may be a result of gaming's rise into the mass market - just like Hollywood blockbusters with "helicopters, explosions, and tits" end up generating a ton of money, the most successful games are often going to be the least innovative.
I don't have anything against big-budget Hollywood movies per se (James Bond films can often be reduced to helicopters, explosions, and tits, and I am fond of some of those), but they usually don't take risks that can result in a more interesting experience.
It's the same story in the game world - the developer that tries something new almost always ends up taking a lot of heat for it.
I'm a big fan of the Legacy of Kain series, and the newest one uses a cinematic-style cam (like Devil May Cry, for PS2 gamers). That design decision has been the single biggest complaint about it. When I've mentioned DMC and Ico (which had similar cameras) those same people almost always say they hated the cams in those games too, and want a standard 3rd-person follow-cam, despite the fact that cinematic cams allow game designers to use a whole new bag of cool techniques that the film industry has been using for years.
Homeworld2 is another example - Relic originally had planned what appeared to be a fairly large departure from the original game. There was some difficulty getting the project to move along (most of which is not being publicly discussed), so Sierra had them start again and make something that plays almost exactly like the original.
There's also Eternal Darkness for the Gamecube - one of the best games ever - which can't really be easily pinned down into a category (is it adventure? survival-horror light?), and seems to have sold only a relatively small number of copies.
Meanwhile, games that are simply well-executed takes on old formulas (e.g. Halo, Prince of Persia) are the ones selling millions of copies.
After hearing so much about Rez, I finally ordered a copy last week. I wish I'd known about it when it was first released. It looks awesome, but my purchase is far too late to have any impact on whether a sequel or another similarly abstract game is made.
I still have a little faith in the market, since the Metroid and GTA series sell well, but I think GTA's success is due more to its violent content than bringing open-ended action gameplay with a story to the current generation of consoles.
If you want a liberal slant you've got ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC
You are joking, right?
ABC: Who just spent a ton of money trying to convince Americans that there was no conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy and that they should just trust their government.
CNN: The news source who is second in friendliness to Emperor Dubyah after Fox News, and who had no coverage of the Miami FTAA riots and the police brutalization of protesters on their web site.
The best way to fight this is to buy free ranged meat, not adopt a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle.
Most of us who chose a vegan diet do so because we believe that eating meat at all is just as unethical as treating the animals badly. Whether it's free range or not, the animal still ends up being killed.
You see, the #1 UI wisdom that M$ will never get is that different people have different wants and needs.
?
Outlook has so many different sort and filter options for viewing email that you can end up with a view that looks as far from the default as you like.
What doesn't it have that would cater more to people with diverse ways of reading email?
It's horrible that T3 was ever made
Oh, come on. It was worth it for the end. No one in Hollywood does that kind of thing anymore.
like the free flying camera during the Burly Brawl. ...and the freeway chase. There was some really excellent virtual camera work in that film that couldn't have been achieved any other way.
It would really be too bad if that at least wasn't recognized.
Technology far in advance of your own, (or even moderately in advance of your own) would be unfathomable.
You bring up some very good points (and I really enjoyed the post), but I think that if genuine alien technology ended up in our laps, we would be able to learn at least something from it.
History isn't my forte, but I would think that an F-16 crashing in America of 1862 would give the US a head-start on technologies like radio and television, lasers, and jet engines.
You are right that they wouldn't be able to build a plane using those technologies, but having jet engines might be useful for something else, like watercraft.
I very much doubt that the modern US has gotten its hands on alien technology. There are some interesting theories that use it to explain how we got our hands on transistors, for example, but I think they are best used as an inspiration for historical fiction, not an understanding of how the technology was invented.
What's wrong with this math? Is some Slashdot editor dicking with me?
1 + 3 (interesting) + 2 (insightful) = 5 (cap of +5 per post)
5 - 2 (troll) = 3
However, the infrastructure will benefit millions daily while the sub, bomber, and carrier will just keep costing with little tangible payoff. (since we already have several of each of those).
I am saddened that someone with a four-digit UID (along with a bunch of others) couldn't put two and two together to see that the post they are citing was using sarcasm to mock the original poster's claim that it was just a super-expensive tunnel.
All of the Canon equipment I've seen from the past couple of years on looks like it was designed as a prop for a sci-fi film. Finally the 21st century is really starting to look the part.
I read about this a few days ago. It reminded me of the cancelled Xbox fighting game based on Stephen Spielberg's AI. Hopefully an exec overseeing this project will realize what a huge mistake it is before they spend too much money. It can't be too far along, or there would be screenshots of other characters, right?
Do people actually buy enough of this kind of licensed crap to make it profitable? The last time I got suckered in by one of these games was with Acclaim's Alien Trilogy for the PC, and that was all I needed to see that nothing good was ever going to come of them.
Haha, not only is that a great doc, but it's fun to read as well:
Sorry for the translation, english it's not my mother tongue, but I will try to do my best.
In short, explorer it's a shit...
(+1 bonus pre-emptively removed for being offtopic)
The UN had its thumb up its ass and was unwilling to do a thing to stop the murder, rape, and torture carried out on a daily basis in Iraq.
The US is not the world's police force. If you are trying to justify going to war with Iraq based on how poorly its citizens were treated by their leaders, then by that same logic we should be invading North Korea, China, and a host of smaller nations.
Emperor Dubyah "justified" his invasion by lying to the citizens of the US about an alleged threat against them when there was none. If the case was so strong based on the way Hussein treated his people, then why didn't he use that as the basis for his argument?
The answer is obvious - while most Americans will support a war to prevent an imagined danger against their own country, they will NOT support one to remove a foreign dictator who has no effect on them and never will. Dubyah is a deluded fascist, but he's smart enough to figure that out.
It's funny how Republicans wanted to impeach Clinton for lying about a blowjob, but they don't see anything wrong with their president having his lackeys fabricate evidence to support a war that gets hundreds of dedicated US soldiers killed.
If Howard Dean had his way...
If Ronald Reagan hadn't had his way - financing Taliban "freedom fighters" in the 80s and allowing the US to sell Hussein weapons - we wouldn't have gotten into this mess in the first place.
FUCK YOU to the anti-fair-use people who won't let me skip previews on DVDs.
Are there actually previews that can't be skipped? I remember freaking out at a DVD with a long preview at the beginning which disabled the chapter select, but I found out that choosing "next" bypassed it just fine.
This is in PowerDVD. I don't know if standalone players have the same function.
Here is a real life example, a friend of mine went to EB to buy Jedi Acadamy (A game that came out a few months ago). He wants to play Jedi Acadamy online, even though there is a small community (maybe about 30-50 players online at a time on all of the servers put together). They told him it was $50. He asked for a used version and they told him $44. He promptly told them he was going to buy it from ebay or pirate it.
I don't see your friend's problem. Halo has been out for the XBox for how long? It *just* dropped from the $49.99 price point recently, because it's been so popular.
I fail to understand why it's unreasonable for a retailer to charge $50 for a 1.5-month-old game that is very popular (maybe not online, but off). If your friend wants it for less, he can wait six months.
I personally walked into the bug on the game "broken sword" on the gameboy. NO FUCKING FIX and NO MONEY BACK. If a pc company tried that they would be lynched.
Uh huh. Try reading the Homeworld2 forums. There is a fatal bug in multiplayer which makes it not worth playing online, as well as possible issues with the dynamic difficulty that make it next to impossible to play through certain levels for about half of all players. There is no patch, and the game has been out for two months.
It's 25 years from now, you seem to think of 2030 as something out of Flash Gordon.
When I was in grade school, I remember being amazed at my mom going in for the then brand-new laser surgery on her knee. Now people have it done all the time, even voluntarily to improve their vision.
The computer we had (which was a rarity - I knew two other kids with access to one) ran at 1MHz and had 128k of RAM. The DVD-Rs I bought yesterday each hold something like 75,000 times as much data as its floppy disks.
If you could afford a modem at the time, all it was good for was hooking up to a corporate/university mainframe or a one-user-at-a-time bulletin board, with communication only slightly faster than a teletype. Now we can communicate with people in any country online.
In 1978, the closest you could get to a cellphone was the radio phones that emergency workers carried in their vehicles.
We may not be sending manned missions to Jupiter or riding hoverboards, but a lot of things we take for granted now *were* Flash Gordon material back then. I don't think there's anything wrong with dreaming about the possibilities for nanotechnology manufacturing in 2030. Twenty-five years is a LONG time for technology.
Amtrak has not once ever been on time anywhere but Boston-New York-Washington
I used to take it between Seattle and Vancouver BC all of the time and it was fine. I also took the Seattle/Portland round-trip once and it was the same (although I hear that one is less reliable).
It sure beats sitting on a bus, IMO. The seats are nicer and so is the scenery out the window.
I remember a game, similar to Fallout years ago that too had its sequal cancelled: Wasteland
Fallout was intentionally designed as a sequel to Wasteland, but I guess Interplay didn't have the rights to the name. If you look at the box for the first Fallout, one of the tag-lines is "Remember Wasteland?"
I loved Wasteland, but I couldn't really get into Fallout. I didn't feel like there was enough direction in where I was supposed to go. I ended up getting captured by some mutants fairly early in the game, and then due to what I think was a bug (I was never sure) I was able to roam their base at will, stealing super high-powered weaponry and robbing any of them I wanted to with no consequences.
Somehow I blew up their base, and I couldn't figure out what was supposed to happen after that.
Wasteland didn't spell everything out for you, but it was fairly obvious where you were supposed to go because of the L-shaped map.
Wasteland also had the best crew photo ever - all of the dev team dressed up Mad Max style with prop weaponry in the desert.
How can you derive a generally acceptible idea of "right" (I don't see how, without becoming religious pretty quickly--lack of an absolute truth claim leads to everything being rationalizable)
The two branches of utilitarianism work toward the end of defining ethics without religion. Its first incarnation (Act Utilitarianism) is impractical for human society, IMO, because it doesn't account for human emotions and reactions to situations, but Rule Utilitarianism is very useful.
Act Utilitarianism is basically the viewpoint of Star Trek's Vulcans - the greatest good for the greatest number, even if the lesser number are being sacrificed completely.
The idea behind Rule Utilitarianism is that you determine the ethics of a situation based on how applying any given choice in it would affect society if it were used as a rule to always be followed in similar situations.
The example in my ethics course at university years ago was of a hypothetical small town in the segregated/racist South of the US in the early 20th century.
In the hypothetical situation, a black man is accused of raping a white woman. The sheriff has no leads, but he knows if he doesn't come up with a suspect, a lynch mob is going to go to the black part of town and start burning down houses.
Act Utilitarianism says that he should find one random black man and frame him, because it will save the lives and property of a bunch of other people.
Rule Utilitarianism says that he should not do this, and just do his best to stop the mob, because if the police can arrest and frame anyone they want, no one will trust them and the current society will collapse.
This is false.
Which one of us studied music history at university? I think I know what I'm talking about.
Stop proposing welfare for the children of famous composers and musicians.
Yes, because that was exactly the case I made in my post. How could I have missed it?
As someone pointed out the other day, there was plenty of quality art available before copyright. Shakespeare and Mozart were happy to create art without it, and (AFIAK) made money from performance and patronage.
Mozart (and other "classical" composers) were funded by the royalty and/or the church.
As long as you don't mind listening exclusively to religious and/or patriotic music, I guess there's no problem.