And what have you shown us, follower of the religion of peace? That you immidiatly lash out at the slightest critism, in anger.
That you, a muslim, can't stand a bit of critism. Note how you totally fail to address the homophobic hatred practised by muslims around the world.
In a world where EVEN in Italy, homo sexuals are starting to have the right to get married, muslim run nations are the most primitive and hateful. Why does the west have endless streams of refugees seeking shelter from muslim goverments? Including homosexuals fleeing to save their lives?
The biggest problem with a faith like this is that its members cannot accept critism. It is part of the muslim faith, as a muslim you gotta defend the faith. Tell me honestly, as a true muslim, is the following true. In all matters, another muslim comes first over a person of another faith. You got to defend your brothers, no matter what. True or not?
When two male journalists pretend to be a gay couple and are harrased no matter where this experiment is performed by muslim youths, you got a problem. Acknowledge it and deal with it. Or your religion will for always be looked down upon.
It is sad because it is NOT the view of the majority of muslims or more important, of immigrants from muslim countries. Most I know have a very simple view of homosexuals shared by most whites. As long as they don't touch me, I can't actually be bothered to give a damn. Not exactly acceptance but in our world "not giving a damn" is perhaps the best we can hope for when it comes to living together. If you don't give damn about others you can never be bothered to round people up and kill them.
But your post is for me the typical muslim protest. You don't even bother denying that your religion is one of hate and war. You just claim, after posting in anger, that you are peaceful and since 1 person, who posted in anger, is peaceful, you are wrong to generalize an entire religion. True enough, but that is not the way the world works.
Do me a favor. Go to your next meeting and bring up this issue of homophobia among muslims. Attack the spreaders of hatred among your own first. Go ahead. Lets see how long you are welcome.
A religion is a social group, you can see this clearly if you ever are outside a church/temple/mosque after a session. This is especially true for muslim immigrants. NOT because they are muslim, but because they started out with little else. All imigrants tend to cluster together, to a place they can be among their own, follow their own traditions, remember the good old times, talk about going back but never actually doing it of course.
It is hard to break out of a social group and a social group can only function if it doesn't allow its members to leave. It is the nature of being a group. If you do not try to 'protect' your members, keeping them close, then you are not a group.
It really isn't about religion. African americans have got the same social pressure groups trying to keep blacks black and any who try to break out are pulled back in.
Part of the problem is that if you try to leave your native group, you will for always be an outcast. A black person living a white/asian/jewish life or whatever will still never truly be that. If you see a black amish guy, what do you see first. Amish or black? I use the skin color black because it is so obvious.
A muslim immigrant who truly intigrates into western society, and there are plenty, will still for always be considered by his new home to be an outsider. And of course an outcast by his old group. Having lived in foreign countries, it ain't that easy to always be the foreigner, the stranger. Sometimes it is just easier to stick with what you know because at least those people seem to accept you for you are. They don't, they only accept you if you are them, but at least they accept you.
Muslims are hardly the only homophobes on this earth and there are plenty of homosexual muslims. Part of the reason this sentiment seems so strong among muslims is because it allows them to have a clear identifier that differences them from their new society.
Basically, they got a choice, what fundemental rule do we follow.
Muslims are required by their faith to donate a percentage of their income to charity. So if you want to call yourself muslim, pay 10% of you salary. Nah.
Muslims are required by their faith to abstain from stimulants. So if you want to call yourself muslim, you got to stop smoking, drinking, chocolate etc etc. Nah.
Muslims are required by their faith to pay to the direction of Mekka 3 times a day. So if yu want to call yourself muslim your entire day schedule is dictated by your religion. Nah.
Muslims are required by their faith to look down onto gays. So if you if you want to call yourself muslims as a young teen in a world that doesn't like you and thinks you are the lowest form of life, you have to look down on another group. WINNER!
By that way, other groups got similar problems. US citizens when looking at the heroes and cowards of the world have two choices:
Look at their own war history, arriving late for every World War, getting their ass kicked in korea and having to settle for the current ceasefire. Being kicked out of vietnam. Being kicked out of somalie. Late the balkin wars and doing nothing to stop it. Afraid to interfere in various holocausts. Getting their ass kicked in Iraq and Afghanistan. Withdrawing after some suicide bombings etc etc. Nah
Look at the french war history where a country under massive attack surrundered after months of fighting with half the forces refusing to give up and to continue fighting no matter the risk and call them cheese eating surrender monkeys. WINNER!
Wait a minute, I can do this. Don't help. 100x$50 lets see. eh, $5000. Did I do it right.
For a 100+ person company 5k should be peanuts. To get email for everyone in that company? You can't even buy a decent server for that. An admin for your own server would costs at least that per month and that gets you a guy who only works 40 hours a week.
If 5k is a siginificant amount of money in your 100+ company, then you need to look for a new job.
Take a step back for a moment... Against this wall? No thanks, I don't smoke, why do you want me to wear a blindfold?Your email is down for a day. Eek! So what? So what? For most people, this is really no big deal.What people, cavemen? Especially if it only happens once in a blue moon.Everytime the moon is blue I loose email, you are scaring ME!
Have you never experienced a local failure of any kind?Well, once when I spend an 12 hour session checking my mail I sorta had a leak... You never had a day without a computer before?Yikes, stop being so nasty, even in a post apolyptic world there must be computers, how else am I going to run my pip boy. Your local net connection never went down?Nothing ever went down on me. I got quadrupple redundancy and keep a stack of modems in air thight containers just in case. Never had a power failure?Please, my coffee machine got UPS
I'm sure some guy on here has some worst-case, niche scenario where losing email for a day means the end of the world - but for most of us, it just means people who REALLY need us use a phone. If your email is so important, you need some kind of redundancy that a single provider is just not going to ever give you. You'd better have a hell of a data center with redundant connections through multiple providers.You are SPYING ON ME? Which of my dozen webcams have you hacked into?
If you see someone talking about SS2, well that is just because they are to young to know better.
The trick for me to make a scary game is NOT darkness or making the player helpless but rather to give him just enough power to be cautious. Give me a grenade that I can use to clear a room, killing everything in sight, but I got ONE grenade, and there are 5 rooms. When do I use it. Now, in the first room or save it for monsters yet to come. Are there monsters beyond this room. Do I use the health potion now or later?
Call of Chutulu starts you off being chases by monsters with no way to defend. That ain't scary. I know what this levels is, a timed puzzle. Just got to do the puzzles in the right order quickly enough and I know the level designer wouldn't make the puzzles impossible or allow me to get stuck because I used up my tools at the wrong time.
For me to be scared I must be afraid that what I am going to do next is going to get me killed. Not that what the game throws at me is going to get me killed. I must feel in control over my actions, the illusion that I can affect my own destiny in the game but that it could so easily go wrong.
This is hard to pull off. Most Doom clones fail for me because your weapons just ain't powerful enough. A shotgun blast should always kill instantly. Then I can count my bullets and worry about wether I have enough. But if every critter needs three shot gun blats anywhere on its bodies, well, then it just seems silly and I know I am just playing a game, not fighting for my life. The more powerful you are, the weaker you are.
Outlaws, an ancient FPS set in the west had scary moments. 1 bullet left, 3 enemies. If I kill one I can take its ammo, but can I popup and hit him dead center quickly enough before the others start blasting away at me? There was little doubt that if I pulled off the shot the enemy would be down, but what if I missed. That is scary. Being afraid to fail BUT that only works if there is a guarantee of success.
That is why 10 little indian movies no longer scare me. I know they are going to die one by one, so I no longer care, just want to see who is going to bite the dust first. That was why Doom the movie was so bad. You knew they were all doing to die and none of them were likable so who the fuck gave a damn.
Give me the tools to fight the game, but limit them and make my own actions cause my success or failure. At no point make me completely powerless or force me to butcher my way through waves of enemies that don't die quickly. Doom style enemies that need 3 rocket blasts to the head are not SCARY.
Enlightment (e16) has been used for a longtime as the actual window manager for Gnome.
But PC's have gotten more powerful, we are now dual core. That means a window manager no longer locks up because the CPU is busy. Even windows (and windows has ALWAYS been terrible as a window manager) runs smoothly now.
E17 doesn't use the GPU, the most powerful component on your PC that is often idle when showing the desktop, by design. That idea was GOOD when GPU's weren't common, but on the PC they are now.
In fact mobile phones are now getting GPU's. Since E17 is far from ready, even if goes to the mobile phones, will it be needed?
I use the Duke Nukem Forever reference for a reason. Part of the reason for its eternal delays is that they took so long that each time the engine they used got outdated. As the industry moved on, DNF got left behind and had to get started again. E17 is running the same risk.
Linux is good, a low powered OS is good, but is anybody waiting for say an 8 bit OS? That is low power, but we moved on.
As said, I use E17 because it is good at something else beside being fast, being minimal. I don't need desktop icons and don't want them. Nor sounds not bells and whistles. I just want the basics to look pretty and E17 does that. But I don't need it anymore, I only still run it because I really do NOT like KDE or Gnome. I do NOT want a coherent desktop where everything works together. I run an app, the app does what I want and the window manager draws the window and THAT is it.
But I am a very small market. Others want transparancy, something e17 doesn't do. Others want hardware accelerated graphics, something e17 doesn't do.
When raster first showed a vid of E17 running on a mobile app (Zaurus if I remember right) it was nice looking. But we got more power now. We got iPhone and Android and Nokia's phones. E17 is out of date before it every launched, just like every build of DNF.
Notice that everyone who says TNG was great when PRESSED, talks about the middle seasons. You mention 5 and 7. The first seasons are RARELY mentioned.
The same of course goes for TOS, not everything is a city on the edge of forever. No sir.
Picard certainly had some good proper sci-fi episodes. The torture one, the being part of an alien civilization about to be wiped out was good.
TNG, for a few eps was really good, but it has so many seasons that the ratio of good vs bad episodes is less then in TOS.
Frankly I think TNG started out as to big. TOS has the trinity of kirk, spock, mccoy. The rest have their place but that is the core. There is no such core in TNG. Picard, piker and data? No. Data, wesley and geordie? No. As you said, the characters just didn't mesh for a long time and the best episodes are eps that don't focus on the entire crew together. Other really good eps in fact focus on incidentel characters like the one about three juniors competing for a position and one being send of on a suicide mission.
No series can be consider truly good is four seasons are totally discarded by all by the most hardcore fans as 'must watch'.
What is there to cover. Enlightenment "1" was out a decade ago and since then work has been going on E17 with countless 'restarts' on the core libraries to make it all work.
Others have taken e17 on occasion and tried to make a working desktop out of it all, with some success if you are willing to go without essential tools working consistently, it is a good window manager but only for the hardcore.
It is the Duke Nukem Forever of the Linux world. After a certain amount of time you just have to produce SOMETHING and Raster hasn't.
The problem is now that e17 really has to look for a new home. So what that e17 is lightweight when every PC has a dual core, 4 gigs of ram and a powerful gpu? 10 years ago E17 would have been groundbreaking. 5 years ago it would have ruled the desktop. Today. Who needs it. You can have a PC that can run any hardware accelerated window manager for peanuts, even laptops got GPU's for ages now.
For that matter, this is hardly the first time e17 been shown on a phone.
Raster make some intresting concepts and some of libraries are widely used, but e17 is a pipedream by now outdated by advancing tech. The world has moved on. Don't get me wrong, I got e17 installed and with a lot of tweaking I got it working just as I want it, but I have had to work at it for over half a decade at now to get it working and keep it working with each 'rewrite'. ENOUGH.
Linus is the best known hero of opensource, because he delivers. Stallman has shown real vision and delivered the GNU but gets flack for HERD (or however it is spelled), Raster did E16, then started E17 and not produced anything but core libraries for some future project. Useful they may be to others but some of us are getting tired of waiting.
You do not make sense, a phone that just makes calls doesn't need an OS as complex as this. This OS is needed ONLY for smart phones. You might as well ask for a ferrari to put their engines into mopeds. No moped needs a 800 horse power en... I WANT ONE!
There are two kind of people in this world. Those who think Star Trek TOS is the best and those who think Enterprise could be watched without suffering major brain damage. The first group is right, the second is wrong.
The simple fact is that while the name continued, the product changed.
Telephones. I remember a day when there were public phones with phone books in the booth. Now you need a card to even make a call and directory inquiries is something like 2 euro per call. Same product, even same company but totally different market and experience.
TOS was Sci-Fi with balls, you either had sex with the aliens or beat them up.
TNG was the 80's, lots of sex, lots of carebear but not actually getting your hands dirty because someone might object.
DS9 was the soaps. Lets introduce a continues story but one that never moves. We also need a kid. And a father, single father because that shows he cares.
Voyager was the 90's. The US is right, oops Federation is right no matter what. We don't help others because it violates the prime directive but take from others because that doesn't.
Enterprise was... well just crap. Gone was ANY notion of a united earth. US vs them and the US was the US of A.
Slowly overtime any ideal the original had of a united earth together with other species trying to create a better world was gone. It was never that strong to begin with but each series turned the franchise more into just another US telivion series with US sentiments about how the world, including the future should be.
I see the varous series as reflections of US politics of the time (or rather the politics of the producers at the time).
Sorry, but saying you enjoyed Enterprise robs you of any credibility. It was the worsed of all Star Trek ever created. Only the most braindead morons spoonfed on reality tv and informarcials could like that show.
Voyager was not much better, that you mention the two worsed series as examples shows that you are about 12yr olds and have yet to develop taste.
Once you grow up you will realize that there are only TWO star trek captains. Kirk and Picard. Everything else is crap.
There are lies, there are damn lies and then there are statistics. recidivism rates is a statistic even the devil himself would be loathe to utter. It is the ULTIMATE lie.
We know that the majority of crime goes UNSOLVED, worse for sex crimes most even go UNREPORTED.
Yet what does "recidivism rates" measure, the number of times one of the rarely REPORTED and CAUGHT and CONVICTED offenders if REPORTED and CAUGHT and CONVICTED again WITHIN a LIMITED period of time in the SAME JURISDICTION and THE SAME DATABASE!
recidivism rates is actually pretty damn high, depending on who you believe. The majority of criminals do NOT re-offend. They are CAUGHT re-offending, CONVICTED for it and then this act is RECORDED and COUNTED.
If you know anything about the legal system and the database systems they use you know why "recidivism rates" are such a joke.
Roughly speaking, it is like concluding that if I catch you once in London and then ten years later I look in the same street and don't see you, you are in a space colony on mars.
There is one very important thing to remember when looking at recidivism rates. Who reports them? People involved in the BILLION DOLLAR industry of "curing" criminals. This industry is GIGANTIC. Yet they have no proof their methods work because you can't proof innocence. All that person who has been released who isn't RECONVICTED shows is that they haven't been re-convicted. NOT that they haven't committed any crimes.
The politcians don't help either, crime prevention is expensive. Just shoving them out of the door is a lot less expensive, well in the short-term anyway.
Robert Martinson committed suicide after claiming "nothing works" on the subject of rehabbilitation. This is not a popular theory but so far no real evidence has been shown to counter his conclusion.
The simple fact is that if you travel a lot you see different systems. I am familiar with the very light Dutch system and we got organised crime. The japanese got a very strict but 'fair' system and they got organised crime. The americans got a very hard system and they got organised crime. The chinese shoot anyone who crosses the line and they got organised crime.
Racial tensions? France, holland, england, america, russia. Different countries with different attitudes and all had race riots.
The simple fact might be that yes, a child rapists and many other types of offenders might indeed not be safe to ever release. Good luck with that. The left can't accept the idea that some people are just not for to be in society and the right won't want to pay the taxes to deal with this.
Much easier to just release them on the street, in poor areas were nobody votes anyway. Note how NO half-way houses are EVER constructed in well to do areas.
I think most sensible people agree that a child rapist has only one right. A last meal. End of story.
Clearly this person is a sex offender. Sadly the label has been applied to WAY to many offenses that are not as serious.
Rape is the insertion of a penis into a vagina against either person's will. So anal sex does NOT count. Neither does female on female rape. Male on male rape. Oral rape.
Peeing in public (it is not pissing against a building that gets you labelled) could be considered camoflage for exposing yourself. Most normal people would go into the bushes and I never been hassled over that even with police on foot passing by. Going against buildings is just jucky and I suggest the police taser people who do that. In an exposed body part to ensure the darts hit skin.
But to be serious, the problem with this type of discussion is that there are two elements to it. What do you label as a sex offender and then what do wish to be done to them. A child rapist obviously deserves anything they get, someone who took a naked picture of themselves for their own use doesn't deserve the same fate.
But you can't discuss the punishment of crime X unless you make clear what crime X exactly is. Sadly, few politicians seem willing to hold both discussions at once.
Ideally we should get rid of the term sex offender and just label people with exactly the crime they committed. If you are going down for peeing against a building you get labelled for that. Nothing more, nothing less. No sex offender list, just a criminal offender list with every crime listed and action taken that is needed for each crime.
For instance a person who exposes himself to kids and that is all and a shrink is willing to bet his life on it can be let into society, just be barred from being near kids un-supervised. A child rapist is kept locked up, comfortably but forever. No "one size fits all" lists or solutions. Deal with each case on its own. But of course it would make it harder to make catchy headlines from an act called "label each crime seperately and create unique measures to deal with the criminals of each crime to ensure the right and correct punishement and future prevention of said crime being repeated."
You are only supposed to register AFTER being convicted of being a sex offender. So they already did harm (wether the setup works is another discussion).
So basically you want to sell to the public that this will harm honest child rapists. Hmmm, good luck. Send me a note when you are going to pitch this idea on the streets. I want to be on a different continent when that shit hits the fan.
The hardcore PC market is near dead. Two games sell. WoW and The Sims. WoW because you can't pirate it and appeals to everyone. The Sims because it appeals to everyone else and they don't know how to pirate it.
Selling a single game with no expansions and no online mode is suicide. Sure, you might be able to recover your investment, if you are lucky but the road is long and difficult and so why bother when their are two examples of games that are not just succesful but massive cash cows.
Will Wright isn't looking at a difference of a million or 2 million in profit but at 100k in profit vs half a billion. Oh okay, I made those numbers up but look at the sales results for the The Sims and ANY other game except WoW.
Spore is NOT The Sims, it lacks the creativity for that. The editors are there but they don't edit anything. You can't really create anything in Spore. Not like in The Sims. Neither can you introde art or have entire websites making money selling hair styles.
Spore for now is selling because it is a simple game. Not sure if it is ever going to appeal as The Sims but you can't blame Will Wright for going this route. It is were the money is.
EA is following the market. If you can't make money with straight box sales of complete hardcore games then rake in the dough by casual games with a ton of expansion packs.
It also explains their DRM, trivial to circumvent but just hard enough to make casual copying impossible, together with the online mode, making it easier for the adults this game is aimed at to just fork over the cash. Same as it is easier to just pay Blizzard for WoW even when not playing until the expansion then letting it lapse or playing on a free server.
Maybe going after the money makes for lesser games, but frankly I think Spore sucked from the start for the hardcore gamer. We wanted an evolution sim, a creature designer for survival. What we got was a creature designer for looks. I lost intrest when I realized the build of my creature didn't matter at all. Just slap things on and you got the points. You couldn't even bulk up on parts to get better stats.
Your logic is flawed, my locking/hiding the door to my dungeon where I keep my daughter is to stop me incrimincating myself by her being found. ALL criminals hide data from the sight of others to stop them from showing their criminal activities.
If you accept that the police under the rules of law can demand access to things then this includes digital data. I have always been loath to see the internet and computers in general as some kind of new world where we can have a different set of rules. If I can be ordered to hand over my swiss bank account number (just a number for a service) then so can I be ordered to hand over the key to my encrypted files.
If you want to change it, chance ALL the laws related to the gathering of evidence. No cyber laws, just laws.
Terrorism isn't anything new, neither are things like gangs and organised crime. It just seems to get more attention now, or perhaps we are more influenced by it.
I remember reading about the days of the 'diligence' in holland, stage-coach for the americans, and the amount of violence in those days makes our age seem very peaceful indeed. When was the last time a train was robbed or even an aircraft hijacked? On the other hand, piracy (the real kind) never went away and seems to have a rivival of sorts with even a no-go area where the more powerful nations on the planet fear to go with their most advanced vessels.
So why do we need tools now to govern we didn't need before? Because the people breaking the rules got tools they didn't have before?
That leads to the question, do we need rules.
The answer to that is obvious, just look at a busy intersection when the lights failed. Chaos. Now imagine if ALL the rules for traffic were gone. No maximum width/height/length. No max weight. No max speed, no min speed. No drive on the left/right side. Remove the rules and not only will you have speeders trying to set new records down your street, you will have SOMEONE trying to move a 100ton bridge over the highway with tank threads and nuclear explosive propulsion without shielding.
So does the UK goverment need this new tool? Don't know. The UK goverment like all goverments faces the fundemental problem of trying to rule people who don't want the rules to apply to them but need the rules to apply to everyone else. I of course can speed, drive through red lights but if everyone else does it, I suffer for it so they can't. Just me.
Since the rest of the world isn't yet aware that I am the center of the universe the "Me me me" style goverment won't work and so the goverment must do the unpopular, applying the same rules to everyone, including me.
As for goverment surveilance. Would you spy on your neighbour? No? To 1984? Would you report a car driving on the wrong side of the highway? Why is that different? Do you think that camera surveilance in road tunnels to watch for problems so that lanes can be closed of is a good idea? Or should tunnels be anarchy, every man for himself, no surveilance?
Then how is this different from surveilance in other areas?
Should the goverment have the right to wiretap phones with court orders? Then why is email different?
I think the UK goverment is doing the wrong thing here. Not so much for privacy reasons although they are huge but because the tool won't work. They are just applying a band aid to appear to be doing something.
But I also think the typical kneejerk reaction of "surveilance == bad" is to short-sighted. We have had our phone records logged since telephones were invented, how else do you think they bill you. Why should email be different? Snail mail has gone through goverment hands for ages, why should email be different?
The question we as a society should ask ourselves is WHAT kind of society we want. We can't have our cake and eat it to. If you want traffic rules, you need someone to enforce them and give them the means to do so. Rules without means to enforce them and observe them being broken are meaningless. People often forget this last part.
So, do we want communications un-monitored with all that entails (and please anarchists, point me to a forum run by an anarchist that is TRULY open. No firewal rules, no moderation, no post limits, nothing.) or do we want a society with certain rules and the enforcement of those rules?
Either choice has its problems but you can't want it both ways.
If you want freedom of communication, then you must embrace spam and browse slashdot at -1. If you browse slashdot at higher levels then you have given the powers that be control of the communications send to you. Hell, since slashdot doesn't allow really small posts or really large ones, this is true no matter what level you read it at.
So, you assign an entire personality just on looks, no not even looks. Facial STRUCTURE? Because that is all that changed. The 2nd photo doesn't have more make-up, different clothes or a new hairdo. it is the SAME woman, just with a different facial structure.
So, pretty but not quite beautiful girls can only be intrested in shopping right?
AoC has finishing moves, certain critical hits spark an animation showing you killing the enemy with a single attack, chopping of their head, sticking your sword in them and laughing in their face etc etc.
Nice, except it only works on human opponents since of course the animation needs two actors to work.
But for some reason, the game did NOT make all human enemies the same size. Fair enough, you need some variety, but still, the animation needs to align up. So during a finishing move, you and your enemy would grow/shrink to match up to play the finishing move.
Is this a bug? No, it is a "what the fuck were they thinking" situation. It breaks all immersion, it is just plain silly, you might as well run the entire game in wireframe mode. Why not have big hand at the end of A New Hope reach out replace the deathstar witha firecracker to show it exploding?
The bugs, people can life with. it is the design mistakes that are the real killers.
Lotro is the least ambitious of all titles. It is the game that tries nothing new, nothing original, nothing ground-breaking.
What it instead delivers is simple. It works.
It is the volvo of MMORPG's. It will never get the chicks like a McLaren or inspire the love of a volkswagen, but it simply works.
Lotro ain't the best, it is just that everything else if worse.
WoW, to many 12yr olds.
Eve, to competitve.
AoC, to buggy.
Vanguard, aged incredibly badly.
SWG, patched to death.
Warhammer, we shall have to see.
Lotro by no means is perfect, but if what you really want is an easy fantasy MMORPG that is just fun to play with just enough depth to keep things intresting, it delivers.
The goat famously said that AoC was Steak and Wine vs WoW's Hamburger and coke.
Lotro is no steak and wine, it is a McD Hamburger and Coca Cola. There is reason those two brands are the biggest in their field. WoW is huge for a reason, lotro just caters for those who want WoW, with less grind and less 12yr olds.
I am a player who still longs for Star Wars Galaxies pre-'doc buff', tried Everquest 2, a bit of WoW, varioues Free-to-Play and is currently a lifer in Lord of the Rings Online. I tried AoC for 3 months, or rather, I bought 3 months, tried it for two.
The game was started BEFORE WoW came out. Remember that WoW by now is a very old game indeed. MMORPG's ain't all that old to begin with and AoC was pretty much started in the early days.
The best explenation I have come up with for AoC is that the dev's locked themselves up five years ago and never came out. The game just didn't learn from the developments that happened. Not from WoW, but also not from the SWG NGE, Dark&Light, SOE's constant misses, Lotro smooth launch etc etc, Vanguards dismall failure.
AoC launched with almost year 2000 like values. The screenshots look pretty but the interface is... well crap. Crap tastic. So crap that crap doesn't even begin to describe it. It doesn't do anything for game, it ain't just ugle, is unwieldy, makes the game hard to control and doesn't give the players the options they have come to expect.
The odd thing is that the map display is very useful, precisly indicating where each quest area is. Clearly someone at AoC went into the development dungeon 5 years ago having looked at the MMO's and their pisspoor maps of that age and came up with a clearly superior solution. But with no outside contact for all those years, they didn't learn that uses would expect a better UI in all areas in 2008.
Other problems like the famous female attack speed, (females attack slower because their animation is longer) show that the game really had no testing. Did NO dev notice that female toons needed longer to kill enemies?
While the game is pretty, most dungeons looked like the first amateur levels designed for the first Doom game. Nothing but HUGE square corridors filled with enemies, all the same. No setup, no scripts, settings, no atmosphere.
And then the real killer. The game was bugged, resource hungry, memory leaking, with a lousy interface but hey, that never stopped an MMO before.
No, what killed the game was Funcom. They denied all problems. Female attack speed quickly identified? If you mean two months after launch, yeah sure, that is quick. NOT.
Problems were ignored, things that didn't need fixing nerfed and solutions introduced that just took all the fun out of the game. The "grey elite" has to be one of most ill advised nerfs in the history of gaming. To stop gold sellers (Funcom came up with a far better way to kill them, no more players and all in game items being WAY to expensive in real money, 1500 euro for a horse) they made enemies below your level HIT HARDER. They also made every enemy in group content an elite. This meant that a game that is OUTSIDE about you slaughtering waves of enemies suddenly becomes a 6 players on 1 enemy type game. No fun. The messy finishing moves disappeared and every dungeon just became a long boring crawl. Because of the way healing works in the game none of the elites was a challenge, just of staying awake.
And now, the server merges. So much for all the fanboys claiming that there are still plenty of players and nobody has left. Server merges are the death of any MMORPG. If you number slightly decrease people just move on their own, you only need to merge servers if their is an exodus and you can no longer afford to keep redundant servers running. It is basically saying, the people left and we ain't going to get them back.
No, AoC is the third failure of Funcom and this makes me sad, because The Longest Journey developer is working on his own MMORPG and it is also being done by Funcom. Luckily not by the goat who has been shown the door but still. Funcom has had its three strikes (they had a cancelled MMO between Anarchy Online and AoC) a fourth is hardly likely to be different is it?
Hint to anyone working on a MMORPG. PLAY OTHER MMORPG's and LEARN FROM THEM! You don't have to make a WoW clone, but understand WHY people play WoW.
The RAF despite its obvious claims certainly acted as a religious group rathen the a political group.
I think you need to seperate the actual following of a god from being a religious group. An 'atheist' religion is after all possible despite of course not following a god.
The think that makes a group behave religious, in the way the grand-parent probably intended, is if its 'believes' are a matter of fate, not fact. The RAF believed they were right, that their leaders had the wisdom. There was no room for discussion, evidence or dissent.
An ideological fanatic will still have to come up with clear scientific evidence. He can never say 'because' or 'this is the truth'.
Granted, the terms are very vague. Not all people who believe in god behave religious after all.
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Rather telling perhaps that for instance jews have lived in India for centuries and never been prosecuted.
And what have you shown us, follower of the religion of peace? That you immidiatly lash out at the slightest critism, in anger.
That you, a muslim, can't stand a bit of critism. Note how you totally fail to address the homophobic hatred practised by muslims around the world.
In a world where EVEN in Italy, homo sexuals are starting to have the right to get married, muslim run nations are the most primitive and hateful. Why does the west have endless streams of refugees seeking shelter from muslim goverments? Including homosexuals fleeing to save their lives?
The biggest problem with a faith like this is that its members cannot accept critism. It is part of the muslim faith, as a muslim you gotta defend the faith. Tell me honestly, as a true muslim, is the following true. In all matters, another muslim comes first over a person of another faith. You got to defend your brothers, no matter what. True or not?
When two male journalists pretend to be a gay couple and are harrased no matter where this experiment is performed by muslim youths, you got a problem. Acknowledge it and deal with it. Or your religion will for always be looked down upon.
It is sad because it is NOT the view of the majority of muslims or more important, of immigrants from muslim countries. Most I know have a very simple view of homosexuals shared by most whites. As long as they don't touch me, I can't actually be bothered to give a damn. Not exactly acceptance but in our world "not giving a damn" is perhaps the best we can hope for when it comes to living together. If you don't give damn about others you can never be bothered to round people up and kill them.
But your post is for me the typical muslim protest. You don't even bother denying that your religion is one of hate and war. You just claim, after posting in anger, that you are peaceful and since 1 person, who posted in anger, is peaceful, you are wrong to generalize an entire religion. True enough, but that is not the way the world works.
Do me a favor. Go to your next meeting and bring up this issue of homophobia among muslims. Attack the spreaders of hatred among your own first. Go ahead. Lets see how long you are welcome.
A religion is a social group, you can see this clearly if you ever are outside a church/temple/mosque after a session. This is especially true for muslim immigrants. NOT because they are muslim, but because they started out with little else. All imigrants tend to cluster together, to a place they can be among their own, follow their own traditions, remember the good old times, talk about going back but never actually doing it of course.
It is hard to break out of a social group and a social group can only function if it doesn't allow its members to leave. It is the nature of being a group. If you do not try to 'protect' your members, keeping them close, then you are not a group.
It really isn't about religion. African americans have got the same social pressure groups trying to keep blacks black and any who try to break out are pulled back in.
Part of the problem is that if you try to leave your native group, you will for always be an outcast. A black person living a white/asian/jewish life or whatever will still never truly be that. If you see a black amish guy, what do you see first. Amish or black? I use the skin color black because it is so obvious.
A muslim immigrant who truly intigrates into western society, and there are plenty, will still for always be considered by his new home to be an outsider. And of course an outcast by his old group. Having lived in foreign countries, it ain't that easy to always be the foreigner, the stranger. Sometimes it is just easier to stick with what you know because at least those people seem to accept you for you are. They don't, they only accept you if you are them, but at least they accept you.
Muslims are hardly the only homophobes on this earth and there are plenty of homosexual muslims. Part of the reason this sentiment seems so strong among muslims is because it allows them to have a clear identifier that differences them from their new society.
Basically, they got a choice, what fundemental rule do we follow.
Muslims are required by their faith to donate a percentage of their income to charity. So if you want to call yourself muslim, pay 10% of you salary. Nah.
Muslims are required by their faith to abstain from stimulants. So if you want to call yourself muslim, you got to stop smoking, drinking, chocolate etc etc. Nah.
Muslims are required by their faith to pay to the direction of Mekka 3 times a day. So if yu want to call yourself muslim your entire day schedule is dictated by your religion. Nah.
Muslims are required by their faith to look down onto gays. So if you if you want to call yourself muslims as a young teen in a world that doesn't like you and thinks you are the lowest form of life, you have to look down on another group. WINNER!
By that way, other groups got similar problems. US citizens when looking at the heroes and cowards of the world have two choices:
Look at their own war history, arriving late for every World War, getting their ass kicked in korea and having to settle for the current ceasefire. Being kicked out of vietnam. Being kicked out of somalie. Late the balkin wars and doing nothing to stop it. Afraid to interfere in various holocausts. Getting their ass kicked in Iraq and Afghanistan. Withdrawing after some suicide bombings etc etc. Nah
Look at the french war history where a country under massive attack surrundered after months of fighting with half the forces refusing to give up and to continue fighting no matter the risk and call them cheese eating surrender monkeys. WINNER!
Human nature. It ain't pretty.
Wait a minute, I can do this. Don't help. 100x$50 lets see. eh, $5000. Did I do it right.
For a 100+ person company 5k should be peanuts. To get email for everyone in that company? You can't even buy a decent server for that. An admin for your own server would costs at least that per month and that gets you a guy who only works 40 hours a week.
If 5k is a siginificant amount of money in your 100+ company, then you need to look for a new job.
Take a step back for a moment... Against this wall? No thanks, I don't smoke, why do you want me to wear a blindfold?Your email is down for a day. Eek! So what? So what? For most people, this is really no big deal.What people, cavemen? Especially if it only happens once in a blue moon.Everytime the moon is blue I loose email, you are scaring ME!
Have you never experienced a local failure of any kind?Well, once when I spend an 12 hour session checking my mail I sorta had a leak... You never had a day without a computer before?Yikes, stop being so nasty, even in a post apolyptic world there must be computers, how else am I going to run my pip boy. Your local net connection never went down?Nothing ever went down on me. I got quadrupple redundancy and keep a stack of modems in air thight containers just in case. Never had a power failure?Please, my coffee machine got UPS
I'm sure some guy on here has some worst-case, niche scenario where losing email for a day means the end of the world - but for most of us, it just means people who REALLY need us use a phone. If your email is so important, you need some kind of redundancy that a single provider is just not going to ever give you. You'd better have a hell of a data center with redundant connections through multiple providers.You are SPYING ON ME? Which of my dozen webcams have you hacked into?
If you see someone talking about SS2, well that is just because they are to young to know better.
The trick for me to make a scary game is NOT darkness or making the player helpless but rather to give him just enough power to be cautious. Give me a grenade that I can use to clear a room, killing everything in sight, but I got ONE grenade, and there are 5 rooms. When do I use it. Now, in the first room or save it for monsters yet to come. Are there monsters beyond this room. Do I use the health potion now or later?
Call of Chutulu starts you off being chases by monsters with no way to defend. That ain't scary. I know what this levels is, a timed puzzle. Just got to do the puzzles in the right order quickly enough and I know the level designer wouldn't make the puzzles impossible or allow me to get stuck because I used up my tools at the wrong time.
For me to be scared I must be afraid that what I am going to do next is going to get me killed. Not that what the game throws at me is going to get me killed. I must feel in control over my actions, the illusion that I can affect my own destiny in the game but that it could so easily go wrong.
This is hard to pull off. Most Doom clones fail for me because your weapons just ain't powerful enough. A shotgun blast should always kill instantly. Then I can count my bullets and worry about wether I have enough. But if every critter needs three shot gun blats anywhere on its bodies, well, then it just seems silly and I know I am just playing a game, not fighting for my life. The more powerful you are, the weaker you are.
Outlaws, an ancient FPS set in the west had scary moments. 1 bullet left, 3 enemies. If I kill one I can take its ammo, but can I popup and hit him dead center quickly enough before the others start blasting away at me? There was little doubt that if I pulled off the shot the enemy would be down, but what if I missed. That is scary. Being afraid to fail BUT that only works if there is a guarantee of success.
That is why 10 little indian movies no longer scare me. I know they are going to die one by one, so I no longer care, just want to see who is going to bite the dust first. That was why Doom the movie was so bad. You knew they were all doing to die and none of them were likable so who the fuck gave a damn.
Give me the tools to fight the game, but limit them and make my own actions cause my success or failure. At no point make me completely powerless or force me to butcher my way through waves of enemies that don't die quickly. Doom style enemies that need 3 rocket blasts to the head are not SCARY.
Enlightment (e16) has been used for a longtime as the actual window manager for Gnome.
But PC's have gotten more powerful, we are now dual core. That means a window manager no longer locks up because the CPU is busy. Even windows (and windows has ALWAYS been terrible as a window manager) runs smoothly now.
E17 doesn't use the GPU, the most powerful component on your PC that is often idle when showing the desktop, by design. That idea was GOOD when GPU's weren't common, but on the PC they are now.
In fact mobile phones are now getting GPU's. Since E17 is far from ready, even if goes to the mobile phones, will it be needed?
I use the Duke Nukem Forever reference for a reason. Part of the reason for its eternal delays is that they took so long that each time the engine they used got outdated. As the industry moved on, DNF got left behind and had to get started again. E17 is running the same risk.
Linux is good, a low powered OS is good, but is anybody waiting for say an 8 bit OS? That is low power, but we moved on.
As said, I use E17 because it is good at something else beside being fast, being minimal. I don't need desktop icons and don't want them. Nor sounds not bells and whistles. I just want the basics to look pretty and E17 does that. But I don't need it anymore, I only still run it because I really do NOT like KDE or Gnome. I do NOT want a coherent desktop where everything works together. I run an app, the app does what I want and the window manager draws the window and THAT is it.
But I am a very small market. Others want transparancy, something e17 doesn't do. Others want hardware accelerated graphics, something e17 doesn't do.
When raster first showed a vid of E17 running on a mobile app (Zaurus if I remember right) it was nice looking. But we got more power now. We got iPhone and Android and Nokia's phones. E17 is out of date before it every launched, just like every build of DNF.
Notice that everyone who says TNG was great when PRESSED, talks about the middle seasons. You mention 5 and 7. The first seasons are RARELY mentioned.
The same of course goes for TOS, not everything is a city on the edge of forever. No sir.
Picard certainly had some good proper sci-fi episodes. The torture one, the being part of an alien civilization about to be wiped out was good.
TNG, for a few eps was really good, but it has so many seasons that the ratio of good vs bad episodes is less then in TOS.
Frankly I think TNG started out as to big. TOS has the trinity of kirk, spock, mccoy. The rest have their place but that is the core. There is no such core in TNG. Picard, piker and data? No. Data, wesley and geordie? No. As you said, the characters just didn't mesh for a long time and the best episodes are eps that don't focus on the entire crew together. Other really good eps in fact focus on incidentel characters like the one about three juniors competing for a position and one being send of on a suicide mission.
No series can be consider truly good is four seasons are totally discarded by all by the most hardcore fans as 'must watch'.
What is there to cover. Enlightenment "1" was out a decade ago and since then work has been going on E17 with countless 'restarts' on the core libraries to make it all work.
Others have taken e17 on occasion and tried to make a working desktop out of it all, with some success if you are willing to go without essential tools working consistently, it is a good window manager but only for the hardcore.
It is the Duke Nukem Forever of the Linux world. After a certain amount of time you just have to produce SOMETHING and Raster hasn't.
The problem is now that e17 really has to look for a new home. So what that e17 is lightweight when every PC has a dual core, 4 gigs of ram and a powerful gpu? 10 years ago E17 would have been groundbreaking. 5 years ago it would have ruled the desktop. Today. Who needs it. You can have a PC that can run any hardware accelerated window manager for peanuts, even laptops got GPU's for ages now.
For that matter, this is hardly the first time e17 been shown on a phone.
Raster make some intresting concepts and some of libraries are widely used, but e17 is a pipedream by now outdated by advancing tech. The world has moved on. Don't get me wrong, I got e17 installed and with a lot of tweaking I got it working just as I want it, but I have had to work at it for over half a decade at now to get it working and keep it working with each 'rewrite'. ENOUGH.
Linus is the best known hero of opensource, because he delivers. Stallman has shown real vision and delivered the GNU but gets flack for HERD (or however it is spelled), Raster did E16, then started E17 and not produced anything but core libraries for some future project. Useful they may be to others but some of us are getting tired of waiting.
You do not make sense, a phone that just makes calls doesn't need an OS as complex as this. This OS is needed ONLY for smart phones. You might as well ask for a ferrari to put their engines into mopeds. No moped needs a 800 horse power en... I WANT ONE!
There are two kind of people in this world. Those who think Star Trek TOS is the best and those who think Enterprise could be watched without suffering major brain damage. The first group is right, the second is wrong.
The simple fact is that while the name continued, the product changed.
Telephones. I remember a day when there were public phones with phone books in the booth. Now you need a card to even make a call and directory inquiries is something like 2 euro per call. Same product, even same company but totally different market and experience.
TOS was Sci-Fi with balls, you either had sex with the aliens or beat them up.
TNG was the 80's, lots of sex, lots of carebear but not actually getting your hands dirty because someone might object.
DS9 was the soaps. Lets introduce a continues story but one that never moves. We also need a kid. And a father, single father because that shows he cares.
Voyager was the 90's. The US is right, oops Federation is right no matter what. We don't help others because it violates the prime directive but take from others because that doesn't.
Enterprise was... well just crap. Gone was ANY notion of a united earth. US vs them and the US was the US of A.
Slowly overtime any ideal the original had of a united earth together with other species trying to create a better world was gone. It was never that strong to begin with but each series turned the franchise more into just another US telivion series with US sentiments about how the world, including the future should be.
I see the varous series as reflections of US politics of the time (or rather the politics of the producers at the time).
Sorry, but saying you enjoyed Enterprise robs you of any credibility. It was the worsed of all Star Trek ever created. Only the most braindead morons spoonfed on reality tv and informarcials could like that show.
Voyager was not much better, that you mention the two worsed series as examples shows that you are about 12yr olds and have yet to develop taste.
Once you grow up you will realize that there are only TWO star trek captains. Kirk and Picard. Everything else is crap.
"recidivism rates"
There are lies, there are damn lies and then there are statistics. recidivism rates is a statistic even the devil himself would be loathe to utter. It is the ULTIMATE lie.
We know that the majority of crime goes UNSOLVED, worse for sex crimes most even go UNREPORTED.
Yet what does "recidivism rates" measure, the number of times one of the rarely REPORTED and CAUGHT and CONVICTED offenders if REPORTED and CAUGHT and CONVICTED again WITHIN a LIMITED period of time in the SAME JURISDICTION and THE SAME DATABASE!
recidivism rates is actually pretty damn high, depending on who you believe. The majority of criminals do NOT re-offend. They are CAUGHT re-offending, CONVICTED for it and then this act is RECORDED and COUNTED.
If you know anything about the legal system and the database systems they use you know why "recidivism rates" are such a joke.
Roughly speaking, it is like concluding that if I catch you once in London and then ten years later I look in the same street and don't see you, you are in a space colony on mars.
There is one very important thing to remember when looking at recidivism rates. Who reports them? People involved in the BILLION DOLLAR industry of "curing" criminals. This industry is GIGANTIC. Yet they have no proof their methods work because you can't proof innocence. All that person who has been released who isn't RECONVICTED shows is that they haven't been re-convicted. NOT that they haven't committed any crimes.
The politcians don't help either, crime prevention is expensive. Just shoving them out of the door is a lot less expensive, well in the short-term anyway.
Robert Martinson committed suicide after claiming "nothing works" on the subject of rehabbilitation. This is not a popular theory but so far no real evidence has been shown to counter his conclusion.
The simple fact is that if you travel a lot you see different systems. I am familiar with the very light Dutch system and we got organised crime. The japanese got a very strict but 'fair' system and they got organised crime. The americans got a very hard system and they got organised crime. The chinese shoot anyone who crosses the line and they got organised crime.
Racial tensions? France, holland, england, america, russia. Different countries with different attitudes and all had race riots.
The simple fact might be that yes, a child rapists and many other types of offenders might indeed not be safe to ever release. Good luck with that. The left can't accept the idea that some people are just not for to be in society and the right won't want to pay the taxes to deal with this.
Much easier to just release them on the street, in poor areas were nobody votes anyway. Note how NO half-way houses are EVER constructed in well to do areas.
I think most sensible people agree that a child rapist has only one right. A last meal. End of story.
Clearly this person is a sex offender. Sadly the label has been applied to WAY to many offenses that are not as serious.
Rape is the insertion of a penis into a vagina against either person's will. So anal sex does NOT count. Neither does female on female rape. Male on male rape. Oral rape.
Peeing in public (it is not pissing against a building that gets you labelled) could be considered camoflage for exposing yourself. Most normal people would go into the bushes and I never been hassled over that even with police on foot passing by. Going against buildings is just jucky and I suggest the police taser people who do that. In an exposed body part to ensure the darts hit skin.
But to be serious, the problem with this type of discussion is that there are two elements to it. What do you label as a sex offender and then what do wish to be done to them. A child rapist obviously deserves anything they get, someone who took a naked picture of themselves for their own use doesn't deserve the same fate.
But you can't discuss the punishment of crime X unless you make clear what crime X exactly is. Sadly, few politicians seem willing to hold both discussions at once.
Ideally we should get rid of the term sex offender and just label people with exactly the crime they committed. If you are going down for peeing against a building you get labelled for that. Nothing more, nothing less. No sex offender list, just a criminal offender list with every crime listed and action taken that is needed for each crime.
For instance a person who exposes himself to kids and that is all and a shrink is willing to bet his life on it can be let into society, just be barred from being near kids un-supervised. A child rapist is kept locked up, comfortably but forever. No "one size fits all" lists or solutions. Deal with each case on its own. But of course it would make it harder to make catchy headlines from an act called "label each crime seperately and create unique measures to deal with the criminals of each crime to ensure the right and correct punishement and future prevention of said crime being repeated."
You are only supposed to register AFTER being convicted of being a sex offender. So they already did harm (wether the setup works is another discussion).
So basically you want to sell to the public that this will harm honest child rapists. Hmmm, good luck. Send me a note when you are going to pitch this idea on the streets. I want to be on a different continent when that shit hits the fan.
The hardcore PC market is near dead. Two games sell. WoW and The Sims. WoW because you can't pirate it and appeals to everyone. The Sims because it appeals to everyone else and they don't know how to pirate it.
Selling a single game with no expansions and no online mode is suicide. Sure, you might be able to recover your investment, if you are lucky but the road is long and difficult and so why bother when their are two examples of games that are not just succesful but massive cash cows.
Will Wright isn't looking at a difference of a million or 2 million in profit but at 100k in profit vs half a billion. Oh okay, I made those numbers up but look at the sales results for the The Sims and ANY other game except WoW.
Spore is NOT The Sims, it lacks the creativity for that. The editors are there but they don't edit anything. You can't really create anything in Spore. Not like in The Sims. Neither can you introde art or have entire websites making money selling hair styles.
Spore for now is selling because it is a simple game. Not sure if it is ever going to appeal as The Sims but you can't blame Will Wright for going this route. It is were the money is.
EA is following the market. If you can't make money with straight box sales of complete hardcore games then rake in the dough by casual games with a ton of expansion packs.
It also explains their DRM, trivial to circumvent but just hard enough to make casual copying impossible, together with the online mode, making it easier for the adults this game is aimed at to just fork over the cash. Same as it is easier to just pay Blizzard for WoW even when not playing until the expansion then letting it lapse or playing on a free server.
Maybe going after the money makes for lesser games, but frankly I think Spore sucked from the start for the hardcore gamer. We wanted an evolution sim, a creature designer for survival. What we got was a creature designer for looks. I lost intrest when I realized the build of my creature didn't matter at all. Just slap things on and you got the points. You couldn't even bulk up on parts to get better stats.
Your logic is flawed, my locking/hiding the door to my dungeon where I keep my daughter is to stop me incrimincating myself by her being found. ALL criminals hide data from the sight of others to stop them from showing their criminal activities.
If you accept that the police under the rules of law can demand access to things then this includes digital data. I have always been loath to see the internet and computers in general as some kind of new world where we can have a different set of rules. If I can be ordered to hand over my swiss bank account number (just a number for a service) then so can I be ordered to hand over the key to my encrypted files.
If you want to change it, chance ALL the laws related to the gathering of evidence. No cyber laws, just laws.
Terrorism isn't anything new, neither are things like gangs and organised crime. It just seems to get more attention now, or perhaps we are more influenced by it.
I remember reading about the days of the 'diligence' in holland, stage-coach for the americans, and the amount of violence in those days makes our age seem very peaceful indeed. When was the last time a train was robbed or even an aircraft hijacked? On the other hand, piracy (the real kind) never went away and seems to have a rivival of sorts with even a no-go area where the more powerful nations on the planet fear to go with their most advanced vessels.
So why do we need tools now to govern we didn't need before? Because the people breaking the rules got tools they didn't have before?
That leads to the question, do we need rules.
The answer to that is obvious, just look at a busy intersection when the lights failed. Chaos. Now imagine if ALL the rules for traffic were gone. No maximum width/height/length. No max weight. No max speed, no min speed. No drive on the left/right side. Remove the rules and not only will you have speeders trying to set new records down your street, you will have SOMEONE trying to move a 100ton bridge over the highway with tank threads and nuclear explosive propulsion without shielding.
So does the UK goverment need this new tool? Don't know. The UK goverment like all goverments faces the fundemental problem of trying to rule people who don't want the rules to apply to them but need the rules to apply to everyone else. I of course can speed, drive through red lights but if everyone else does it, I suffer for it so they can't. Just me.
Since the rest of the world isn't yet aware that I am the center of the universe the "Me me me" style goverment won't work and so the goverment must do the unpopular, applying the same rules to everyone, including me.
As for goverment surveilance. Would you spy on your neighbour? No? To 1984? Would you report a car driving on the wrong side of the highway? Why is that different? Do you think that camera surveilance in road tunnels to watch for problems so that lanes can be closed of is a good idea? Or should tunnels be anarchy, every man for himself, no surveilance?
Then how is this different from surveilance in other areas?
Should the goverment have the right to wiretap phones with court orders? Then why is email different?
I think the UK goverment is doing the wrong thing here. Not so much for privacy reasons although they are huge but because the tool won't work. They are just applying a band aid to appear to be doing something.
But I also think the typical kneejerk reaction of "surveilance == bad" is to short-sighted. We have had our phone records logged since telephones were invented, how else do you think they bill you. Why should email be different? Snail mail has gone through goverment hands for ages, why should email be different?
The question we as a society should ask ourselves is WHAT kind of society we want. We can't have our cake and eat it to. If you want traffic rules, you need someone to enforce them and give them the means to do so. Rules without means to enforce them and observe them being broken are meaningless. People often forget this last part.
So, do we want communications un-monitored with all that entails (and please anarchists, point me to a forum run by an anarchist that is TRULY open. No firewal rules, no moderation, no post limits, nothing.) or do we want a society with certain rules and the enforcement of those rules?
Either choice has its problems but you can't want it both ways.
If you want freedom of communication, then you must embrace spam and browse slashdot at -1. If you browse slashdot at higher levels then you have given the powers that be control of the communications send to you. Hell, since slashdot doesn't allow really small posts or really large ones, this is true no matter what level you read it at.
I think Douglas Adams still came to the right c
Just take a picture with your paycheck. Digitally enhance the picture to increase the amount and voila, you are attractive.
So, you assign an entire personality just on looks, no not even looks. Facial STRUCTURE? Because that is all that changed. The 2nd photo doesn't have more make-up, different clothes or a new hairdo. it is the SAME woman, just with a different facial structure.
So, pretty but not quite beautiful girls can only be intrested in shopping right?
Remember, it is the landing that kills you, not flying.
AoC has finishing moves, certain critical hits spark an animation showing you killing the enemy with a single attack, chopping of their head, sticking your sword in them and laughing in their face etc etc.
Nice, except it only works on human opponents since of course the animation needs two actors to work.
But for some reason, the game did NOT make all human enemies the same size. Fair enough, you need some variety, but still, the animation needs to align up. So during a finishing move, you and your enemy would grow/shrink to match up to play the finishing move.
Is this a bug? No, it is a "what the fuck were they thinking" situation. It breaks all immersion, it is just plain silly, you might as well run the entire game in wireframe mode. Why not have big hand at the end of A New Hope reach out replace the deathstar witha firecracker to show it exploding?
The bugs, people can life with. it is the design mistakes that are the real killers.
What it instead delivers is simple. It works.
It is the volvo of MMORPG's. It will never get the chicks like a McLaren or inspire the love of a volkswagen, but it simply works.
Lotro ain't the best, it is just that everything else if worse.
WoW, to many 12yr olds.
Eve, to competitve.
AoC, to buggy.
Vanguard, aged incredibly badly.
SWG, patched to death.
Warhammer, we shall have to see.
Lotro by no means is perfect, but if what you really want is an easy fantasy MMORPG that is just fun to play with just enough depth to keep things intresting, it delivers.
The goat famously said that AoC was Steak and Wine vs WoW's Hamburger and coke.
Lotro is no steak and wine, it is a McD Hamburger and Coca Cola. There is reason those two brands are the biggest in their field. WoW is huge for a reason, lotro just caters for those who want WoW, with less grind and less 12yr olds.
I am a player who still longs for Star Wars Galaxies pre-'doc buff', tried Everquest 2, a bit of WoW, varioues Free-to-Play and is currently a lifer in Lord of the Rings Online. I tried AoC for 3 months, or rather, I bought 3 months, tried it for two.
The game was started BEFORE WoW came out. Remember that WoW by now is a very old game indeed. MMORPG's ain't all that old to begin with and AoC was pretty much started in the early days.
The best explenation I have come up with for AoC is that the dev's locked themselves up five years ago and never came out. The game just didn't learn from the developments that happened. Not from WoW, but also not from the SWG NGE, Dark&Light, SOE's constant misses, Lotro smooth launch etc etc, Vanguards dismall failure.
AoC launched with almost year 2000 like values. The screenshots look pretty but the interface is... well crap. Crap tastic. So crap that crap doesn't even begin to describe it. It doesn't do anything for game, it ain't just ugle, is unwieldy, makes the game hard to control and doesn't give the players the options they have come to expect.
The odd thing is that the map display is very useful, precisly indicating where each quest area is. Clearly someone at AoC went into the development dungeon 5 years ago having looked at the MMO's and their pisspoor maps of that age and came up with a clearly superior solution. But with no outside contact for all those years, they didn't learn that uses would expect a better UI in all areas in 2008.
Other problems like the famous female attack speed, (females attack slower because their animation is longer) show that the game really had no testing. Did NO dev notice that female toons needed longer to kill enemies?
While the game is pretty, most dungeons looked like the first amateur levels designed for the first Doom game. Nothing but HUGE square corridors filled with enemies, all the same. No setup, no scripts, settings, no atmosphere.
And then the real killer. The game was bugged, resource hungry, memory leaking, with a lousy interface but hey, that never stopped an MMO before.
No, what killed the game was Funcom. They denied all problems. Female attack speed quickly identified? If you mean two months after launch, yeah sure, that is quick. NOT.
Problems were ignored, things that didn't need fixing nerfed and solutions introduced that just took all the fun out of the game. The "grey elite" has to be one of most ill advised nerfs in the history of gaming. To stop gold sellers (Funcom came up with a far better way to kill them, no more players and all in game items being WAY to expensive in real money, 1500 euro for a horse) they made enemies below your level HIT HARDER. They also made every enemy in group content an elite. This meant that a game that is OUTSIDE about you slaughtering waves of enemies suddenly becomes a 6 players on 1 enemy type game. No fun. The messy finishing moves disappeared and every dungeon just became a long boring crawl. Because of the way healing works in the game none of the elites was a challenge, just of staying awake.
And now, the server merges. So much for all the fanboys claiming that there are still plenty of players and nobody has left. Server merges are the death of any MMORPG. If you number slightly decrease people just move on their own, you only need to merge servers if their is an exodus and you can no longer afford to keep redundant servers running. It is basically saying, the people left and we ain't going to get them back.
No, AoC is the third failure of Funcom and this makes me sad, because The Longest Journey developer is working on his own MMORPG and it is also being done by Funcom. Luckily not by the goat who has been shown the door but still. Funcom has had its three strikes (they had a cancelled MMO between Anarchy Online and AoC) a fourth is hardly likely to be different is it?
Hint to anyone working on a MMORPG. PLAY OTHER MMORPG's and LEARN FROM THEM! You don't have to make a WoW clone, but understand WHY people play WoW.
The RAF despite its obvious claims certainly acted as a religious group rathen the a political group. I think you need to seperate the actual following of a god from being a religious group. An 'atheist' religion is after all possible despite of course not following a god. The think that makes a group behave religious, in the way the grand-parent probably intended, is if its 'believes' are a matter of fate, not fact. The RAF believed they were right, that their leaders had the wisdom. There was no room for discussion, evidence or dissent. An ideological fanatic will still have to come up with clear scientific evidence. He can never say 'because' or 'this is the truth'. Granted, the terms are very vague. Not all people who believe in god behave religious after all.