Nice idea, sadly also doesn't work. What if I want to play, have only a limited amount of time and your island is flooded? This hurts the casual player who may only have a little bit of time each day at a fixed schedule.
Sadly the very nature of an MMO makes a lot of cool ideas hard to implement.
A quest island that submerges every now and then forcing everyone to rush off would indeed by very nice indeed. Constant rush to reach your goal with you rushing out as the tide comes in, a race against the clock. Nice, but sucks if you can only play when the island is under water.
Bury you head in the sand for years, then when the fan has been buried in shit, whine you need more time.
This are internally developed apps, so why on earth did you develop all these years for the pile of shit that is IE when free and better browsers were availabe. Browsers that cost nothing to update and that follow standards so that you can switch between them at your choice, perhaps even use an NON-windows OS entirely.
No, you enslaved yourselve to MS by your own free will or incomepetence and are now crying because MS finally has decided that they can't delay any longer because IE6 is hurting their business and forces people like you to upgrade.
NONE of this wouldhave happened if you had a brain and just switched your company to a better browser years ago. Call it leadership, call it having a clue, you apparently have neither and now expect us to care.
This is EXACTLY what people have been warning about all this time, use MS software and you are at their mercy.
You made your bed, can you guess the next bit?
This is exactly with the whole ODF/OOXML is about as well, can I take a wild guess as to the deployment of non-ms controlled standards in documents in your company?
Oh and if someone else in IT forced you to do this, simply lay the bill for this adjustment to the enforced IE7 migration on their desk, that is standard office culture. Someone forces crap on you, you make the costs coming out of their budget.
And it is very hard, if not impossible to get right. Especially with such nonsense as toll gates.
Think it through, all you need to do to avoid is not use that bridge, this therefore rewards hardcore players who stay in the same area for hours and penalises those who travel a lot.
That is an optimization that is used today. It is NOT a law. Think the real world, just because that huge billboard is miles away doesn't mean some guy runs up to it and tears down the paper and puts a low res version up on it. The entire world in RL and 3D has the same detail no matter where it is.
As you shoot the ray, it finds the entire world the same size and detail. This is actually one of the problems, for proper raytracing you can't use a lower res model for faraway objects because then the scene might indeed end up as you say, reflecting low-res stuff up close.
However, using lower res models is a crappy shortcut anyway, while it currently does lessen the rendering burden it in turn asks for considerable effort to supply the various version of models and textures.
There is another problem with it. Zooming/magnification. Say you are looking at a far away character, now you switch to your sniper scope and all of sudden you see a stick figure, doesn't work does it. Same with camera's that might show that model up close while you are far away. Notice how many outdoor shooters have you wade through grass obscuring your close range vision, while a sniper sees you standing on clear open ground.
I remember Intel making a lot of noise about this optimization by cutting detail on far away objects years ago, it worked but only for games with a fixed view of the world where you couldn't all of sudden get a closeup. In regular rendering you can pull the same stunt, If a building is ALWAYS going to be background, you only need to build the part you see, many a 3D scene is like an old hollywood set, nice facades and nothing in back.
As we get faster hardware, hopefully we can do away with the old hacks to come up with a scene that can be rendered. Quad core PC's don't even cost that much right now, willbe intresting to see what a few more years will bring. Mind you, if all goes to the CPU, I expect AI will take a hit.
Download the free trial for Lotro, create a character and head to Bree. There is a quest there that starts at night, from a ghost near the southern gate, he asks you to find a ring that was lost at some baracks. Yet you don't recall any baracks even being at bree. It is suggested you ask around.
Want to guess how many people INSTANTLY upon receiving that quest ask where to find this ring? 10%? 20%? I once just parked myself for an hour at night time near that ghost, just to see how many people that came near him would next ask the question. 8 people. 6 asked in public chat, the others might very well have done the quest before or asked in private chat.
People don't want to explore.
SWG had a little exploration and most people never bothered with it until the path to Jedi required it.
On the way back from Dol Dinen to Esteldin you come across a wounded ranger, if you approach he warns of a trap and you are ambushed by 3 earthkins, fairly though critters. It isn't a quest, just a bit of color for the game. Again a bit of social experimentiation quickly showed me that most players had NEVER heard of this, quests are shown with a ring, there was no ring so people didn't explore to see what it was all about because no XP means a wast of time.
It is depressing, but I sadly think that the market has spoken and the market has said, we want more WoW, please don't make us think or give us choices. Lead us by the hand and give us our XP and levels.
And to be fair, I am not sure I entirely disagree. There is a fine line between an open-ended free form quest and sending a player out there without a clue. I remember a east european game, SS (not sure about the name, tactical turnbased squadgame in 3D enviroment that was totally destructable), it had quests/missions where on higher difficulties you weren't told what to do. You just appeared on a map and good luck finding out what your objectives were. A challenge or wasting my time?
Like many a MMO player I have thought long and hard about how you could make a better game, but I keep hitting the same old problem, can the user handle it and sadly the answer is no. If you wants millions of subscribers you got to accept that you are developing for an average IQ well below 100. Retards. Lazy retards. Lazy dyslexic retards.
Go on, come with an idea for a quest or game mechanism and then ask yourselve, how will a user who refuses to read or look at his interface deal with it. One of the biggest challenges in the endgame of MMO's comes not from the game itself, but in finding a group of people that after months of play actually managed to get a clue. It sounds amazing but as a raid leader you would be suprised how many times you get a newbie who must be playing on someones elses account because with their skill they should have died at the loading screen.
The game in many ways is even worse then WoW, yes at the beginning progress is rapid and you can quest all the way. No problem.
And then you hit 45 and it all changes, your new class quest is a nightmare, a whole list of items to collect that drop just from 1 critter for 1 person in the group and for instance Slime of Helegrod is needed by all the classes. Yes, it is RAID time with loot rotation.
Then there is your armour, level 47 critical items from single use recipes that can't use a critical item so you have about a 1/3-4 change of actually getting a critical. Do the math on the number of materials needed and you quickly come to realise that Lotro POST level 45 is again a grind.
The reason? Well this is turbine, they don't do original, but mostly, what choice do they really have?
Content costs money, there is a rather ambitious slideshow available somewhere that shows the expansions they once had planned, you are talking a couple of years worth to map all the way to mount doom, but what the hell kind of level will you be by that time?
The grind is way to keep the game 'alive'. Without the grind, well what is there to do once you reached max level? Lotro hurts from this even more then WoW precisly because the early levels are so easy. I got 3 alts at or close to 50 and two rapidly going through their 30's. And then what? Getting them there was fun, but I think that unless the expansion really turns the game around, when I get my last to 45 I will quit for the next MMO.
Make no mistake, Lotro falls into the same WoW style grind later on. Crafters will know this. Jewellers can refine gem, for 4 tiers 1 raw gem makes 1 polished gem. The last tier suddenly requires 2 raw gems to make one polished. You glue themtogether or something? There is no logic in it, it is just to extend the grind even longer. Same reason why platinum ingots suddenly require 4 ore when previous tiers had 2 ores for 1 ingot. Or why Misty Mountain Silver is so rare and drops less from a node then earlier resources.
If I am nice I think that turbine wanted to make a nice game but was faced at later levels with the problem that during testing people finished too quickly and with no time to add extra content they just stretched it out.
If I am nasty I think that turbine wanted to get you hooked with the early rapid progress and then hit you with the grind instead of content so they could milk your subscription money until they ruin this game like they did their earlier title. Lets not forget, Turbine is the MMO company that actually managed to kill of their previous title, even SOE hasn't done that yet. SOE just leaves them lingering in agony.
In one of the early wingcommanders you lost a wingman. BAD, reload, retry, samething happened. I tried over and over, killing the kilrathi faster and faster until finally it dawned on me that this wingman was scripted to die. It really was one of the first times in a game for me that such a thing had happened, most games when something bad happen consider it the end. This game never gave you an option, your wingman dies regardless of how good you are.
This is indeed acceptable in a movie, bigs becoming a comet is an excellent piece of drama in Star Wars: A new hope, if only Lucas had the guts to add the openening scenes that were recorded but never made it into the movie. (Luke meets with his childhood friend Biggs who tells him he is going to join the rebellion and urges luke to talk to his uncle. For George Lucas the two events together are quality writing and really deepen the Luke Skywalker character, which is why he never included it but did make Han shoot first, which lessened that character).
Another moment happened for me in System Shock, excellent game but it made me realise a simple flaw. I am alone. All the messages and hints that you could rescue other people are for naught, the game can't handle friendly AI so you will never ever find any. Cue Unreal which used a similar trick of messages being left behind by someone in front of you and as much as you might want to care, you know that person is dead because the game can't give you an ally.
Some games really push this to the limit, one of the later unreals for no apparent reason killed of your entire support crew. So you have been singlehandely wiping out entire armies, but HEY, you still suck because your crew is killed.
One of the comments about the second Dungeon and Dragon movies was that the group sucked because they didn't follow the first rule, always protect the healer. I would NEVER have made that mistake. It for me is the typical writing that doesn't belong in a game.
Don't get me wrong, you could have the player fail, but then it must be a truly epic fail, a fail that can't be helped. The wing-commander scene COULD have worked if you and your wingman had run into a massive wave of kilrathi with you having the vital mission of bringing home a report and your wingman sacrificing herself to ensure you manage to deliver that report. If you want to the player to accept failure you must make that failure inescapable. Sadly all to often the hero in games and movies just screws up in a truly stupid way and we are told, that is for drama.
Another classic case is that of action interruptus, Max Payne, you are clearing an area where someone is held hostage, you are about to kill the baddy and bam, game takes over and you don't shoot fast enough and the hostage is killed. Don't matter how good or bad you did, that is what the script writer decided and that is what is going to happen.
It is the fundemental difference between games and movies. Games can have personal drama, your character might receive a letter that a loved one has died, and you can have epic drama, the opening scene of the battlestar galactica movie where two brothers are ambushed by a huge wave of cyclon, but the medium drama, of the hero screwing up is almost impossible. Especially since so few writers are capable of making the scew up believable.
Take Romeo & Juliet, just how stupid can you get? Surely in real life these two would deserve a darwin award. It works as a passive story because at no time do we have to believe it is real.
God this is turning into a long rant, but one final point. If I watch columbo I can just sit back and take some of the crap science that comes across because, well I don't have to solve the crime. In Gabriel Knight: Sins of the father I found a german poem and got horribly stuck. Why? Because I speak german, so I never thought of looking for a way to translate the poem in game.
Slightly related to this was an expansion of Operation Flashpoint where the hero was constantly moaning about not wanting to be in a war and kill people. Problem? I was the hero, I bought a war game, HELLO SCRIPTWRITER WHAT DO YOU THINK MY FEELINGS ARE ABOUT WAR AND KILLING PEOPLE? That is right, BRING IT ON!
In theory it makes sense and some of you might point at mainframes as an example. However that would like comparing cars to trucks (real trucks not big cars), they are both vehicles and a company might use both but their usage is totally different.
PC's just ain't upgraded, either they are good enough or they are replaced. I love building my own computer but am not as crazy as to replace the CPU whenever a new clockspeed comes out and this means that even a self-builder will often have to bite the bullet and just replace everything.
Be honest, how often in business do you upgrade your desktops by replacing the CPU?
We can test this easily, in the era of the P3 a lot of office systems were DUAL ready, so that when your needs increased you could ad another P3 and have lots more power. How many of you did that with a P3 that had been in the office for more then a year?
This scheme seems like overthinking the problem. PC's in my experience either last until they die and by that time it cheaper to buy new then upgrade/repair, or they are simply replaced with the latest shining model because tech moves so fast that upgrading just the CPU will turn everything else into a bottle neck. Just check how many different types of memory we have had over the years. Would you really want a quad core on your IDE-33 motherboard? Play DVD's on a single speed cd-rom?
Either you need all the cores now, or by the time you activate them because your apps need them everything else will need to be upgraded too and a brand new CPU will be available that is far better AND cheaper.
But in a way we have had this solution for a long time now, but instead of activating extra cores when paid for, chipmakers instead sell defective chips for a reduced price so your still got a 4 core inside your machine but only 2 actually function (not sure wether this happens with entire cores but it is offcourse the case with cache memory).
I don't see this happening, especially if you consider that an army of nerds would be trying their best to break the enabling code to get their extra cores for free, just see what happened with the "dual" P2 and cheapo P3's, Intel would have a heart attack.
A recent story in a dutch free newspaper touched on a related subject, mobile phones. Aparently some boys had used one to film a girl in the shower, and when caught seemed unaware that this was illegal.
Not that spying on girls in the showers is anything new, but the tools for doing so have become a LOT easier and kids seem to not have gotten any brighter.
If my sister had wanted to photograph herself she would have had to borrow our parents camera, a rather large thing, got some film, have the film developed (at a place where any of the workers could see the pictures) and then do whatever she intended to do with them.
IF she gave them to her boyfriend he would then either have had to had copies made with it at a photolab (with the person working there offcourse seeing the pictures) or havbe found a considerable amountof private time with the photostat machine (or whatever those early printing machines were called the older slashdot member might have used for the school newspaper).
A considerable amount of effort and a lot of hassle for the image to get all over the place.
Now check a porn site like cheggit and search for homemade porn and you will find countless examples of girls that photographed/filmed themselves for a limitted audience and now find themselves all over the web.
If I had brought a camera to school with the intent for filming the girls shower room, I am pretty sure people would have noticed the rather bulky gear. A mobile phone? Well, everyone got one of those.
If you watch a program like To catch a predator one thing you might notice is from how far away they come. My sister only had to worry about the local pervs, not ones across the whole of the netherlands.
Our world has changed, we have gotten ourselves a set of tools and put them into the hands of kids who aren't any brighter then we were and lets be honest, we were DUMB! As a male I had different kinds of dumbness (driving a bike down a steep incline with building rubble on either side, diving in shallow water, etc etc) but most kids have the common sense of... well of kids, I can't really think of anything that has less common sense, even kittens learn faster.
The problem is that the measures proposed will do absolutly nothing to stop kids from making the wrong choices. Part of growing up is making the wrong choices but I am saying this as a kid who didn't impale himself on a piece of iron sticking out of concrete, broke his neck diving in 1 meter deep water or got raped, darwin awards not for nothing exclude people below 16(or 18)
Saying we should educate kids instead to deal with the realities of the internet and related modern technologie is a tired old cliche but sadly it is the only thing that stands a chance. Not that it will work, kids don't want to be educated, and you can tell people a thousand times that every photograph you take is forever and can be seen by the entire world and you will still get kids exposing themselves online because kids ain't smart and there ain't nothing you are going to do about, same as kids still get killed because they dive in shallow water as they have been doing for hundreds if not thousands of years. Posting yourselve nude on the net is just the latest way of being stupid.
Not that it anything new, ages ago during a holiday camp I was charged with doing the photographing, this includes some pics of the girls in our class daring each other on to show more and more. No I am not bragging, they were flirting with the camera not me, but that was decades ago and really was no different then what you see on myspace, but I did not have the means to distribute it worldwide at a whim. I thought aout making copies and in the time it took me to start doing it I realized it would cause far to much trouble and didn't and kept them private.
Advertising has ALWAYS been with us. When commerce became viable the person selling something has always had to attract people to buy their wares. Not just the actual product but to buy it from them.
And it works, you fall for it too. How else do you know it was a SHELL gas station? If you were imune to it and not a sheep you would just tank at any gas station. (but without any advertising whatsoever, how would you know it is a gas station?) You obviously saw Shells adversting, yes even the sign that says Shell is part of advertising.
So feel all high and mighty, the advertisers know your kind and they target you most succesfully.
As for saving cards, good don't use them. Supermarkets are sure to care that they do not have to give you that discount. Teach them a lesson, pay more!
However I wouldn't be too worried, I seen these things before. They come and go and I am still shopping in pretty much the same ways as I did 30 years ago. Nothing changes, LCD displays on shopping carts? Those highly expensive shopping carts that already dissappear left and right? Wait until they are faced with replacing a few dozen lost carts, then it is back to the cardboard display.
About the only chance I seen stick is that vegetables and such are now weiged at the checkout, that shopping carts have a deposit system (50 cents for a cart that costs far far more) and that we switched from checks to pin (electronic payment). Advertisement is still on pieces of paper, exactly the same as when I was a little kid, and when my parents were kids and their parents were kids.
Watch those same shows and see the ones where the pilots still managed to land the aircraft, like the one over Iraq that got shot at, or the several cases of where an airliner lost all engine power etc etc. Plenty of cases where real airmanship and seat of the pants flying were called for that could not be delivered by an auto-pilot or a button pusher.
Only a complete and utter moron looks at a routine job when everything is normal and judges how difficult a job is based on that. The entire point of using real humans with serious training as pilots is NOT for when everything is normal but for when the shit hits the fan and all of sudden an airline pilot you think is just a button pusher is in control of a giant glider.
An autopilot can take off, cruise and land, but it can't deal with an emergency and as was shown during an airshow in europe autopilots will happily try to land an airliner in a forest.
And the question is not WE, but you. How much are you willing to put into saving YOUR life. Don't worry, you are young, there will come a time when you realize just how close death is when you will feel very different. It is called getting old. All of sudden you will think it is a good idea to shovel all the money made into care for the elderly and that those young whippersnappers should just thoughen up and carry the burden you didn't want to carry for your elders (or even yourselve).
Weapons of mass distribution are found in sweden, US pledges to liberate the citizens.
Anyone else think that some one at the media forgot to pay swedish politicians? Don't worry, it will soon be corrected when the politicians all of sudden find they aren't invited to any media social events.
What is the point of comparing the price of oil with the price of gold?
Oil is bought with dollars (Venezuela and Iraq both considered switching to euros, guess which two countries the US didn't like) not gold. This is actually important, it is considered one of the things to help keep the dollar somewhat alive.
Gold is also not nearly as stable as people seem to think. So explain why this connection should be so clear and what it all means.
I have read up on Ron Paul and the couple of policies that he has sound intresting until you start to wonder how to actually implement them.
End the war. Oh goodie, another vietnam style strategic withdrawal (read route, if you are dumping your helicopts overboard to make room for new refugees, you ain't withdrawing, you are running)? The US made the mess, would be nice if you clean it up first before you go back home. It don't matter if you are pro or anti the war, it is a fact and you have to deal with it and you can't just runaway.
Cut spending. Another lovely one. I got a way to cut spending right here. NO SALARY FOR THE PRESIDENT and he pays rent for the whitehouse and buys his own airline tickets. Wanna bet NONE of these simple spending cuts will be taken up? On a larger level, you just can't cut spending. It just never works out, even if you try to do it for real and massively re-organize the state, the cost of the re-organisation will take years to re-coup in savings. Companies know this, that is why big companies when they make cuts in staff to save money ALWAYS reserve extra cash to pay for it. Saving money costs money. It gets even worse in big projects because the money you are cutting is somebodies income. Close a department and you are firing people, never a good idea for somebody who is elected by a popularity contest.
A policy of cutting spending is like a good intention with no actuall plan attached. Show me where you are going to cut spending, how you are going to deal with the sideeffects and how much it is going to cost to achieve in the first place.
Removing the income tax, another idiotic scheme. Sure it can be done, but it would require a massive change and is going to upset a lot of people. Voting people. It would basically force a radical change on how the US funds itself and what it can and cannot do. How are politicians going to buy votes with pork projects if there is no cash?
No Ron Paul is just another smooth talking figure head who promises everything that people like you want to hear without actually ever going into how he thinks he is going to achieve any of this.
In the Netherlands we got something called the "rekenkamer" (mathchamber) which during campaigns checks the various political parties agenda's for financial soundness (normaly they check the goverments policies). They don't judge right or wrong, just wether the financial side of it all makes sense. Promise free public transport, abolish taxes all fine with them, but the figures have to match up.
Perhaps the US should do something similar, check all the politicians promises and do the math.
What you say has been tried. Star Wars galaxies, you created a character and then could build it up as you wanted. Be a dancing bounty-hunter. An engineering doctor.
Well the system was a bit simpler then that, but at least early on it held the promise of you being able to create your own character, free from any cookie-cutter class as we know it from the EQ clones.
The game also never worked.
On of the possible proffessions for instance was image designer (or some name like it), a skill that allowed you to redesign your own or other players bodies, a makeover. Very nice, and really different from what you get in the poorer EQ clones like WoW and Lotro were everyone looks the same.
Now the problem. XP. You got XP from doing a design on a player. Very little xp. For a job that took minutes.
Doing image designer ment a grind beyond all grinds. At least combat players are doing something, getting loot. Image designer? Just sits there, waiting for the a few dozen xp points every 10 minutes.
Healers had a similar problem when the doc buff hit. They just weren't needed, so you got some one smart who figured one combat move would weaken you out of combat, if a player spammed that move, they could then be healed and the healer gain XP to grind to doctor (usefull).
It all sounds very nice to come up with complex systems, but the market rules and the market choose WoW.
SWG was in many ways a very advanced MMO with some intresting chances and some choices that eliminated or at least severly reduced the problems I have with my current MMO Lotro.
SWG thanks to it design had players that looked unique, were I could wear an outfit I choose for style and then upgraded to suit my skills, it had no nood harvestes or ninja looters. You didn't have to spend ages looking for a group to do your mission.
But the market voted, SOE reacted badly and the game was horribly slaughtered. Vanguard tried a reduced version of it, and it bombed too.
Simple works, and having seen a lot of MMO players, lets face it, most can't deal with anything that forces them to think.
There is a quest in LOTRO, it is to find a ring (no not that one), it has a clue, and there are other npc's that can tell you rather precisly, where the ring is. You do not want to feed the number of players that simply ask where the ring is, unable/unwilling to do the least bit of thinking to figure it out themselves.
You could give a quest "save the princess", but you would instantly be hit by a thousand players demanding you tell them where she is and a step by step guide on how to save her.
Don't you really mean "agree with my world view", because only a total tool would think Reuters in unbiased, last year once again had them caught out several times. Don't also forget that it is thanks to Reuters that the RIAA and the like can just publish their press-releases with whatever they want because Reuters (and other press agencies) have made it their business to simply publish press-releases and NEVER EVER investigate, but still insisting these copied press-releases are "real" news.
As for the BBC, if you think the BBC is unbiased, you are insane. Don't mistake, "ooh they don't say the same as fox news" with unbiased. True unbiased reporting requires taking NO position. Not left, not right. Not hard line, not bleeding heart.
Today the weather was cold. BIASED! By whose standards?
Today the temp reach a low of -4 during the midday. Unbiased?
No, it is the "low" that does it. Some might consider it a high.
Today, at 12:00 the temperature at the bilt (dutch met office) reached -4 celcius. That is unbiased.
Now look at the BBC and Reuters again and read the texts carefully and see just how many times the BBC/Reuters takes a position, trying to convince you.
I see the claim of unbiased reporting attached to the BBC so often I think most people just don't understand the meaning of the word.
Unbiased reporting means reporting the facts, not opinions. Note that at no point does the original author of the story we are discussing EVER seem to want to report JUST the facts, he is upset because NBC did not want to report his OPINION!
As brutal as it may be, the number of iraq casualties is a fact. The number of which qualify as civilian is already an opinion. That people should care about it at all, that is even more of an opinion. Unbiased reporting is extremely rare, stuff like "the coldest day of 2007" is about it. Note that the BBC like almost everyone else now has weather segments that become a part of the SHOW, complete with "LIVE REPORTING".
The game was offcourse heavily based on KOTOR and in that universe, at least as far a jedi are concerned, you have no greys, only black and white. Evil and good.
While Bioware talks a lot, they are just a mortal game company and as such they are no different from The Sims where your sim needs total luxury to be happy or every shooter wargame where enemies never ever surrender or retreat.
What they wanted and what game mechanics allow just don't match up. They talked a lot in the game about how the "good" path could actually be harmfull and the "evil" path could be about giving people strength BUT it never panned out.
Perhaps because that entire idea is a load of bull. According to the theory of the closed fist, Hitler did the jews a favor with the holocaust since they got Israel out of it and made them into one of the thougest nations on earth.
If you delve a little deeper into the ideas that this game half-mentioned and then forgot to actually implement you might get the idea that this closed fist talk about making people stronger seems an awfull lot like excuses. A load of bullshit to cover up their selfish actions. Oh yeah I stole from you and killed your family but really I wanted to make you stronger.
Think of it like this, and suddenly Bioware has done a lot better, they have this game were the "evil" NPC's spout their nonsense (rememeber your master who tells you about this turns out to be evil) but when you actually look at their actions instead of listening to the words you see true evil.
It is a bit subtle perhaps, but perhaps bioware never ment for your to believe the bullshit about the closed fist not being the "evil" path. Same as in Kotor the darkside at times pretends to have higher motives.
The problem with that is that it is not up to you to determine when I should have a teaching moment with my kid.
The problem with that is that it is NOT up to YOU to determine what I should do just because your kid is present.
The same claim you make goes in reverse, who are you to tell me how to run my life? You claim that this person who sits next to your kid on an airplane and watches a porn movie is telling you how to raise your kid, but by then limiting this person you are telling them how to live their life. What makes you so special?
A lot of parents seem to want to force the entire world to adjust for their kid. Sorry, ain't gonna happen.
You can't expect the entire world to change to your preffered child raising method.
Find out what happened to Zheng Xiaoyu, former head of product safety in China.
That was july THIS year, so with one simple googling I basically shot down your entire rant. This story even made it to slashdot, so I not only show you to be incapable of googling, I show you incapable of recollecting events reported on a site you read. Why then shoud I take anything else you write serious?
Get your facts straight, then I might take your opinions serious.
If you actually knew anything about the story you would know that Chuck Norris never had a problem with the mythical facts satire itself, he even has quoted his favorites on occasion. He is fine with the satire bit. What he is NOT fine with is that this book by Penguin has collected these facts/jokes about him (jokes the author collected, NOT wrote himself) and now published them for profit using his name (a trademark) and likeness.
I am also not quite sure that original creators of the various facts appreciate having their work printed without getting a share.
This seems to be a publisher wanting to make a quick buck of someone elses work using someone elses reputation. Somehow I can't see a jury having much sympathy for them.
Humans are simple creatures, we need the world defined in goodies and baddies, that often means having to make the choice of the lesser of two evils, and not always getting it right.
Godwin time perhaps, in WW2 who are the goodies and who are the baddies? You have the axis and the allies. Well Japan and Germany clearly belong in the baddies groups, these are evil nations whose people have not a single redeeming quality. The role of Italy and and Austria is slightly more complex. Italy often seems to be able to shrug of the worsed of the holocaust.
But the goodies? The US of A? Hitler went to the east for lebensraum, the americans trekked to the west and killed the people already living there. What is the difference between a sign that says "Geine Juden" and "No Blacks"?
England? Talk about a country bend on taking over the world, it made an empire out of astraucities. The soviet union/russia? Well at least Stalin could never be called a racist, he had entire populations wiped out of all sorts. Equality of a kind I suppose.
Yet we must pick and in popular culture that often means we gloss over the "truth" to present one side in a better light. You might have noticed that in the recent WW2 tv series Band of Brothers absolutly no mentions is made of the US army policies regarding blacks or those with ancestors from Japan?
Part of the final solution was to deport jews to remote areas where they could be controlled/wiped out. Explain to me the motivations between Indian reservations and the rather diminsied population figures of native americans?
In WW2 there were only baddies, just that some at that particulair time were not as active as others and depending on your own background some weren't intrested in being very bad to you at that moment. Why string up a jew when blacks are so much more fun?
Yet we need to have a hero, and so we make one, by putting on blinders.
Steve Jobs is a figure in IT, there are many others, but he can be very closely linked to Bill Gates, an obvious baddy (although once seen as a hero freeing us from the evil IBM, a company that is now often seen as a goodie).
What really is the difference between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates apart from income? It is a well known part of computer history that it was Steve Jobs own (what is the word, incompetence, arrogance) that handed Bill Gates the PC market. Apple, IBM, Commodore, Atari etc etc all screwed up at a crucial point leaving Wintel to rule the market. A lot has been written about it already, including on slashdot.
But just imagine that Steve Jobs hadn't made what ever mistake it was he made and that Apple had come to rule the PC market, what then? Would it have been any better? Imagine that the holocaust had never happened, would the US be the evil country for its treatment of blacks, would it have continued like South Africa? How much did the realization of the holocaust change american opinion on its own treatment of a part of the population?
Apple has never been any more open with its software then Microsoft has. While MS software has always been bug prone, I have to say that the most crashy PC I have ever seen was running OS9. Supporting DRM, are we talking about Steve "Disney" Jobs here? Sony is often a villain when it comes to consumer rights, but when did Apple ever fight a legal battle FOR fair use?
But we need a hero, and so we make one, reality be damned. The sad part is that we got real heroes in IT, Stallman in front, but that person is WAY to much of a hero. People often insultingly try to compare him to Jezus but I personally see that as a rather important clue as to real heroes who truly stand for something. The person of jezus, if he was real, was a real pain in the ass for the powers that be, even his own followers. Really read the bible and you find a guy who was kicking against a lot of pedastals and upsetting people. Very confenient he was killed and that the pleps couldn't read and that the powers that be could tell their people what Jezus had RE
I don't, in 2007 I still use XP with the "classic" theme and still roll back all those annoying "enhancements" like that idiotic puppy for the search function.
What was that about anyway? I can understand using an icon like that but it stands totally alone in the entire interface and its design is totally out of place in both the official XP look and the classic windows look
Anyway, 2007 and I still use the same gui as in 98 and W2K. So tell me again please how I will call Vista the best when 7 comes out when I still think a lot of what XP delivered was a total crapfest?
Don't push your own fanboyness on the rest of the world.
Get your knickers out of a twist you pansie. It just means that you can still make a lot of money from something small, if you just sell enough of it.
1 billion sales with a tiny profit still amounts to a hell of a lot of money, China is well known for having the world largest population. Why do you think the US is bending over backwards for this communist country while Cuba (population 2 people and a dog) is on every banlist they can think up?
As for sandals, that is about as racist as saying the dutch wear wooden shoes or the americans cowboy hats.
It is simple, if you mamange to make a single dollar cent of every chinese person in the world, you are still filthy rich.
I doubt the chinese are offended by it, it is not like the US related saying "nobody has every grown poor by underestimating the intelligence of the american customer".
Slashdot Mirror
Nice idea, sadly also doesn't work. What if I want to play, have only a limited amount of time and your island is flooded? This hurts the casual player who may only have a little bit of time each day at a fixed schedule.
Sadly the very nature of an MMO makes a lot of cool ideas hard to implement.
A quest island that submerges every now and then forcing everyone to rush off would indeed by very nice indeed. Constant rush to reach your goal with you rushing out as the tide comes in, a race against the clock. Nice, but sucks if you can only play when the island is under water.
Casual gamers would be in a uproar.
Bury you head in the sand for years, then when the fan has been buried in shit, whine you need more time.
This are internally developed apps, so why on earth did you develop all these years for the pile of shit that is IE when free and better browsers were availabe. Browsers that cost nothing to update and that follow standards so that you can switch between them at your choice, perhaps even use an NON-windows OS entirely.
No, you enslaved yourselve to MS by your own free will or incomepetence and are now crying because MS finally has decided that they can't delay any longer because IE6 is hurting their business and forces people like you to upgrade.
NONE of this wouldhave happened if you had a brain and just switched your company to a better browser years ago. Call it leadership, call it having a clue, you apparently have neither and now expect us to care.
This is EXACTLY what people have been warning about all this time, use MS software and you are at their mercy.
You made your bed, can you guess the next bit?
This is exactly with the whole ODF/OOXML is about as well, can I take a wild guess as to the deployment of non-ms controlled standards in documents in your company?
Oh and if someone else in IT forced you to do this, simply lay the bill for this adjustment to the enforced IE7 migration on their desk, that is standard office culture. Someone forces crap on you, you make the costs coming out of their budget.
Think it through, all you need to do to avoid is not use that bridge, this therefore rewards hardcore players who stay in the same area for hours and penalises those who travel a lot.
Nice idea, doesn't work. NEXT!
That is an optimization that is used today. It is NOT a law. Think the real world, just because that huge billboard is miles away doesn't mean some guy runs up to it and tears down the paper and puts a low res version up on it. The entire world in RL and 3D has the same detail no matter where it is.
As you shoot the ray, it finds the entire world the same size and detail. This is actually one of the problems, for proper raytracing you can't use a lower res model for faraway objects because then the scene might indeed end up as you say, reflecting low-res stuff up close.
However, using lower res models is a crappy shortcut anyway, while it currently does lessen the rendering burden it in turn asks for considerable effort to supply the various version of models and textures.
There is another problem with it. Zooming/magnification. Say you are looking at a far away character, now you switch to your sniper scope and all of sudden you see a stick figure, doesn't work does it. Same with camera's that might show that model up close while you are far away. Notice how many outdoor shooters have you wade through grass obscuring your close range vision, while a sniper sees you standing on clear open ground.
I remember Intel making a lot of noise about this optimization by cutting detail on far away objects years ago, it worked but only for games with a fixed view of the world where you couldn't all of sudden get a closeup. In regular rendering you can pull the same stunt, If a building is ALWAYS going to be background, you only need to build the part you see, many a 3D scene is like an old hollywood set, nice facades and nothing in back.
As we get faster hardware, hopefully we can do away with the old hacks to come up with a scene that can be rendered. Quad core PC's don't even cost that much right now, willbe intresting to see what a few more years will bring. Mind you, if all goes to the CPU, I expect AI will take a hit.
Download the free trial for Lotro, create a character and head to Bree. There is a quest there that starts at night, from a ghost near the southern gate, he asks you to find a ring that was lost at some baracks. Yet you don't recall any baracks even being at bree. It is suggested you ask around.
Want to guess how many people INSTANTLY upon receiving that quest ask where to find this ring? 10%? 20%? I once just parked myself for an hour at night time near that ghost, just to see how many people that came near him would next ask the question. 8 people. 6 asked in public chat, the others might very well have done the quest before or asked in private chat.
People don't want to explore.
SWG had a little exploration and most people never bothered with it until the path to Jedi required it.
On the way back from Dol Dinen to Esteldin you come across a wounded ranger, if you approach he warns of a trap and you are ambushed by 3 earthkins, fairly though critters. It isn't a quest, just a bit of color for the game. Again a bit of social experimentiation quickly showed me that most players had NEVER heard of this, quests are shown with a ring, there was no ring so people didn't explore to see what it was all about because no XP means a wast of time.
It is depressing, but I sadly think that the market has spoken and the market has said, we want more WoW, please don't make us think or give us choices. Lead us by the hand and give us our XP and levels.
And to be fair, I am not sure I entirely disagree. There is a fine line between an open-ended free form quest and sending a player out there without a clue. I remember a east european game, SS (not sure about the name, tactical turnbased squadgame in 3D enviroment that was totally destructable), it had quests/missions where on higher difficulties you weren't told what to do. You just appeared on a map and good luck finding out what your objectives were. A challenge or wasting my time?
Like many a MMO player I have thought long and hard about how you could make a better game, but I keep hitting the same old problem, can the user handle it and sadly the answer is no. If you wants millions of subscribers you got to accept that you are developing for an average IQ well below 100. Retards. Lazy retards. Lazy dyslexic retards.
Go on, come with an idea for a quest or game mechanism and then ask yourselve, how will a user who refuses to read or look at his interface deal with it. One of the biggest challenges in the endgame of MMO's comes not from the game itself, but in finding a group of people that after months of play actually managed to get a clue. It sounds amazing but as a raid leader you would be suprised how many times you get a newbie who must be playing on someones elses account because with their skill they should have died at the loading screen.
The game in many ways is even worse then WoW, yes at the beginning progress is rapid and you can quest all the way. No problem.
And then you hit 45 and it all changes, your new class quest is a nightmare, a whole list of items to collect that drop just from 1 critter for 1 person in the group and for instance Slime of Helegrod is needed by all the classes. Yes, it is RAID time with loot rotation.
Then there is your armour, level 47 critical items from single use recipes that can't use a critical item so you have about a 1/3-4 change of actually getting a critical. Do the math on the number of materials needed and you quickly come to realise that Lotro POST level 45 is again a grind.
The reason? Well this is turbine, they don't do original, but mostly, what choice do they really have?
Content costs money, there is a rather ambitious slideshow available somewhere that shows the expansions they once had planned, you are talking a couple of years worth to map all the way to mount doom, but what the hell kind of level will you be by that time?
The grind is way to keep the game 'alive'. Without the grind, well what is there to do once you reached max level? Lotro hurts from this even more then WoW precisly because the early levels are so easy. I got 3 alts at or close to 50 and two rapidly going through their 30's. And then what? Getting them there was fun, but I think that unless the expansion really turns the game around, when I get my last to 45 I will quit for the next MMO.
Make no mistake, Lotro falls into the same WoW style grind later on. Crafters will know this. Jewellers can refine gem, for 4 tiers 1 raw gem makes 1 polished gem. The last tier suddenly requires 2 raw gems to make one polished. You glue themtogether or something? There is no logic in it, it is just to extend the grind even longer. Same reason why platinum ingots suddenly require 4 ore when previous tiers had 2 ores for 1 ingot. Or why Misty Mountain Silver is so rare and drops less from a node then earlier resources.
If I am nice I think that turbine wanted to make a nice game but was faced at later levels with the problem that during testing people finished too quickly and with no time to add extra content they just stretched it out.
If I am nasty I think that turbine wanted to get you hooked with the early rapid progress and then hit you with the grind instead of content so they could milk your subscription money until they ruin this game like they did their earlier title. Lets not forget, Turbine is the MMO company that actually managed to kill of their previous title, even SOE hasn't done that yet. SOE just leaves them lingering in agony.
In one of the early wingcommanders you lost a wingman. BAD, reload, retry, samething happened. I tried over and over, killing the kilrathi faster and faster until finally it dawned on me that this wingman was scripted to die. It really was one of the first times in a game for me that such a thing had happened, most games when something bad happen consider it the end. This game never gave you an option, your wingman dies regardless of how good you are.
This is indeed acceptable in a movie, bigs becoming a comet is an excellent piece of drama in Star Wars: A new hope, if only Lucas had the guts to add the openening scenes that were recorded but never made it into the movie. (Luke meets with his childhood friend Biggs who tells him he is going to join the rebellion and urges luke to talk to his uncle. For George Lucas the two events together are quality writing and really deepen the Luke Skywalker character, which is why he never included it but did make Han shoot first, which lessened that character).
Another moment happened for me in System Shock, excellent game but it made me realise a simple flaw. I am alone. All the messages and hints that you could rescue other people are for naught, the game can't handle friendly AI so you will never ever find any. Cue Unreal which used a similar trick of messages being left behind by someone in front of you and as much as you might want to care, you know that person is dead because the game can't give you an ally.
Some games really push this to the limit, one of the later unreals for no apparent reason killed of your entire support crew. So you have been singlehandely wiping out entire armies, but HEY, you still suck because your crew is killed.
One of the comments about the second Dungeon and Dragon movies was that the group sucked because they didn't follow the first rule, always protect the healer. I would NEVER have made that mistake. It for me is the typical writing that doesn't belong in a game.
Don't get me wrong, you could have the player fail, but then it must be a truly epic fail, a fail that can't be helped. The wing-commander scene COULD have worked if you and your wingman had run into a massive wave of kilrathi with you having the vital mission of bringing home a report and your wingman sacrificing herself to ensure you manage to deliver that report. If you want to the player to accept failure you must make that failure inescapable. Sadly all to often the hero in games and movies just screws up in a truly stupid way and we are told, that is for drama.
Another classic case is that of action interruptus, Max Payne, you are clearing an area where someone is held hostage, you are about to kill the baddy and bam, game takes over and you don't shoot fast enough and the hostage is killed. Don't matter how good or bad you did, that is what the script writer decided and that is what is going to happen.
It is the fundemental difference between games and movies. Games can have personal drama, your character might receive a letter that a loved one has died, and you can have epic drama, the opening scene of the battlestar galactica movie where two brothers are ambushed by a huge wave of cyclon, but the medium drama, of the hero screwing up is almost impossible. Especially since so few writers are capable of making the scew up believable.
Take Romeo & Juliet, just how stupid can you get? Surely in real life these two would deserve a darwin award. It works as a passive story because at no time do we have to believe it is real.
God this is turning into a long rant, but one final point. If I watch columbo I can just sit back and take some of the crap science that comes across because, well I don't have to solve the crime. In Gabriel Knight: Sins of the father I found a german poem and got horribly stuck. Why? Because I speak german, so I never thought of looking for a way to translate the poem in game.
Slightly related to this was an expansion of Operation Flashpoint where the hero was constantly moaning about not wanting to be in a war and kill people. Problem? I was the hero, I bought a war game, HELLO SCRIPTWRITER WHAT DO YOU THINK MY FEELINGS ARE ABOUT WAR AND KILLING PEOPLE? That is right, BRING IT ON!
In theory it makes sense and some of you might point at mainframes as an example. However that would like comparing cars to trucks (real trucks not big cars), they are both vehicles and a company might use both but their usage is totally different.
PC's just ain't upgraded, either they are good enough or they are replaced. I love building my own computer but am not as crazy as to replace the CPU whenever a new clockspeed comes out and this means that even a self-builder will often have to bite the bullet and just replace everything.
Be honest, how often in business do you upgrade your desktops by replacing the CPU?
We can test this easily, in the era of the P3 a lot of office systems were DUAL ready, so that when your needs increased you could ad another P3 and have lots more power. How many of you did that with a P3 that had been in the office for more then a year?
This scheme seems like overthinking the problem. PC's in my experience either last until they die and by that time it cheaper to buy new then upgrade/repair, or they are simply replaced with the latest shining model because tech moves so fast that upgrading just the CPU will turn everything else into a bottle neck. Just check how many different types of memory we have had over the years. Would you really want a quad core on your IDE-33 motherboard? Play DVD's on a single speed cd-rom?
Either you need all the cores now, or by the time you activate them because your apps need them everything else will need to be upgraded too and a brand new CPU will be available that is far better AND cheaper.
But in a way we have had this solution for a long time now, but instead of activating extra cores when paid for, chipmakers instead sell defective chips for a reduced price so your still got a 4 core inside your machine but only 2 actually function (not sure wether this happens with entire cores but it is offcourse the case with cache memory).
I don't see this happening, especially if you consider that an army of nerds would be trying their best to break the enabling code to get their extra cores for free, just see what happened with the "dual" P2 and cheapo P3's, Intel would have a heart attack.
A recent story in a dutch free newspaper touched on a related subject, mobile phones. Aparently some boys had used one to film a girl in the shower, and when caught seemed unaware that this was illegal.
Not that spying on girls in the showers is anything new, but the tools for doing so have become a LOT easier and kids seem to not have gotten any brighter.
If my sister had wanted to photograph herself she would have had to borrow our parents camera, a rather large thing, got some film, have the film developed (at a place where any of the workers could see the pictures) and then do whatever she intended to do with them.
IF she gave them to her boyfriend he would then either have had to had copies made with it at a photolab (with the person working there offcourse seeing the pictures) or havbe found a considerable amountof private time with the photostat machine (or whatever those early printing machines were called the older slashdot member might have used for the school newspaper).
A considerable amount of effort and a lot of hassle for the image to get all over the place.
Now check a porn site like cheggit and search for homemade porn and you will find countless examples of girls that photographed/filmed themselves for a limitted audience and now find themselves all over the web.
If I had brought a camera to school with the intent for filming the girls shower room, I am pretty sure people would have noticed the rather bulky gear. A mobile phone? Well, everyone got one of those.
If you watch a program like To catch a predator one thing you might notice is from how far away they come. My sister only had to worry about the local pervs, not ones across the whole of the netherlands.
Our world has changed, we have gotten ourselves a set of tools and put them into the hands of kids who aren't any brighter then we were and lets be honest, we were DUMB! As a male I had different kinds of dumbness (driving a bike down a steep incline with building rubble on either side, diving in shallow water, etc etc) but most kids have the common sense of ... well of kids, I can't really think of anything that has less common sense, even kittens learn faster.
The problem is that the measures proposed will do absolutly nothing to stop kids from making the wrong choices. Part of growing up is making the wrong choices but I am saying this as a kid who didn't impale himself on a piece of iron sticking out of concrete, broke his neck diving in 1 meter deep water or got raped, darwin awards not for nothing exclude people below 16(or 18)
Saying we should educate kids instead to deal with the realities of the internet and related modern technologie is a tired old cliche but sadly it is the only thing that stands a chance. Not that it will work, kids don't want to be educated, and you can tell people a thousand times that every photograph you take is forever and can be seen by the entire world and you will still get kids exposing themselves online because kids ain't smart and there ain't nothing you are going to do about, same as kids still get killed because they dive in shallow water as they have been doing for hundreds if not thousands of years. Posting yourselve nude on the net is just the latest way of being stupid.
Not that it anything new, ages ago during a holiday camp I was charged with doing the photographing, this includes some pics of the girls in our class daring each other on to show more and more. No I am not bragging, they were flirting with the camera not me, but that was decades ago and really was no different then what you see on myspace, but I did not have the means to distribute it worldwide at a whim. I thought aout making copies and in the time it took me to start doing it I realized it would cause far to much trouble and didn't and kept them private.
Advertising has ALWAYS been with us. When commerce became viable the person selling something has always had to attract people to buy their wares. Not just the actual product but to buy it from them.
And it works, you fall for it too. How else do you know it was a SHELL gas station? If you were imune to it and not a sheep you would just tank at any gas station. (but without any advertising whatsoever, how would you know it is a gas station?) You obviously saw Shells adversting, yes even the sign that says Shell is part of advertising.
So feel all high and mighty, the advertisers know your kind and they target you most succesfully.
As for saving cards, good don't use them. Supermarkets are sure to care that they do not have to give you that discount. Teach them a lesson, pay more!
However I wouldn't be too worried, I seen these things before. They come and go and I am still shopping in pretty much the same ways as I did 30 years ago. Nothing changes, LCD displays on shopping carts? Those highly expensive shopping carts that already dissappear left and right? Wait until they are faced with replacing a few dozen lost carts, then it is back to the cardboard display.
About the only chance I seen stick is that vegetables and such are now weiged at the checkout, that shopping carts have a deposit system (50 cents for a cart that costs far far more) and that we switched from checks to pin (electronic payment). Advertisement is still on pieces of paper, exactly the same as when I was a little kid, and when my parents were kids and their parents were kids.
Watch those same shows and see the ones where the pilots still managed to land the aircraft, like the one over Iraq that got shot at, or the several cases of where an airliner lost all engine power etc etc. Plenty of cases where real airmanship and seat of the pants flying were called for that could not be delivered by an auto-pilot or a button pusher.
Only a complete and utter moron looks at a routine job when everything is normal and judges how difficult a job is based on that. The entire point of using real humans with serious training as pilots is NOT for when everything is normal but for when the shit hits the fan and all of sudden an airline pilot you think is just a button pusher is in control of a giant glider.
An autopilot can take off, cruise and land, but it can't deal with an emergency and as was shown during an airshow in europe autopilots will happily try to land an airliner in a forest.
And the question is not WE, but you. How much are you willing to put into saving YOUR life. Don't worry, you are young, there will come a time when you realize just how close death is when you will feel very different. It is called getting old. All of sudden you will think it is a good idea to shovel all the money made into care for the elderly and that those young whippersnappers should just thoughen up and carry the burden you didn't want to carry for your elders (or even yourselve).
Anyone else think that some one at the media forgot to pay swedish politicians? Don't worry, it will soon be corrected when the politicians all of sudden find they aren't invited to any media social events.
A rather idiotic story, about how the two candidates who lost on both sides where anti-gaming, as if voters in Iowa care.
Learn to read slashdot every day, every hour.
What is the point of comparing the price of oil with the price of gold?
Oil is bought with dollars (Venezuela and Iraq both considered switching to euros, guess which two countries the US didn't like) not gold. This is actually important, it is considered one of the things to help keep the dollar somewhat alive.
Gold is also not nearly as stable as people seem to think. So explain why this connection should be so clear and what it all means.
I have read up on Ron Paul and the couple of policies that he has sound intresting until you start to wonder how to actually implement them.
End the war. Oh goodie, another vietnam style strategic withdrawal (read route, if you are dumping your helicopts overboard to make room for new refugees, you ain't withdrawing, you are running)? The US made the mess, would be nice if you clean it up first before you go back home. It don't matter if you are pro or anti the war, it is a fact and you have to deal with it and you can't just runaway.
Cut spending. Another lovely one. I got a way to cut spending right here. NO SALARY FOR THE PRESIDENT and he pays rent for the whitehouse and buys his own airline tickets. Wanna bet NONE of these simple spending cuts will be taken up? On a larger level, you just can't cut spending. It just never works out, even if you try to do it for real and massively re-organize the state, the cost of the re-organisation will take years to re-coup in savings. Companies know this, that is why big companies when they make cuts in staff to save money ALWAYS reserve extra cash to pay for it. Saving money costs money. It gets even worse in big projects because the money you are cutting is somebodies income. Close a department and you are firing people, never a good idea for somebody who is elected by a popularity contest.
A policy of cutting spending is like a good intention with no actuall plan attached. Show me where you are going to cut spending, how you are going to deal with the sideeffects and how much it is going to cost to achieve in the first place.
Removing the income tax, another idiotic scheme. Sure it can be done, but it would require a massive change and is going to upset a lot of people. Voting people. It would basically force a radical change on how the US funds itself and what it can and cannot do. How are politicians going to buy votes with pork projects if there is no cash?
No Ron Paul is just another smooth talking figure head who promises everything that people like you want to hear without actually ever going into how he thinks he is going to achieve any of this.
In the Netherlands we got something called the "rekenkamer" (mathchamber) which during campaigns checks the various political parties agenda's for financial soundness (normaly they check the goverments policies). They don't judge right or wrong, just wether the financial side of it all makes sense. Promise free public transport, abolish taxes all fine with them, but the figures have to match up.
Perhaps the US should do something similar, check all the politicians promises and do the math.
What you say has been tried. Star Wars galaxies, you created a character and then could build it up as you wanted. Be a dancing bounty-hunter. An engineering doctor.
Well the system was a bit simpler then that, but at least early on it held the promise of you being able to create your own character, free from any cookie-cutter class as we know it from the EQ clones.
The game also never worked.
On of the possible proffessions for instance was image designer (or some name like it), a skill that allowed you to redesign your own or other players bodies, a makeover. Very nice, and really different from what you get in the poorer EQ clones like WoW and Lotro were everyone looks the same.
Now the problem. XP. You got XP from doing a design on a player. Very little xp. For a job that took minutes.
Doing image designer ment a grind beyond all grinds. At least combat players are doing something, getting loot. Image designer? Just sits there, waiting for the a few dozen xp points every 10 minutes.
Healers had a similar problem when the doc buff hit. They just weren't needed, so you got some one smart who figured one combat move would weaken you out of combat, if a player spammed that move, they could then be healed and the healer gain XP to grind to doctor (usefull).
It all sounds very nice to come up with complex systems, but the market rules and the market choose WoW.
SWG was in many ways a very advanced MMO with some intresting chances and some choices that eliminated or at least severly reduced the problems I have with my current MMO Lotro.
SWG thanks to it design had players that looked unique, were I could wear an outfit I choose for style and then upgraded to suit my skills, it had no nood harvestes or ninja looters. You didn't have to spend ages looking for a group to do your mission.
But the market voted, SOE reacted badly and the game was horribly slaughtered. Vanguard tried a reduced version of it, and it bombed too.
Simple works, and having seen a lot of MMO players, lets face it, most can't deal with anything that forces them to think.
There is a quest in LOTRO, it is to find a ring (no not that one), it has a clue, and there are other npc's that can tell you rather precisly, where the ring is. You do not want to feed the number of players that simply ask where the ring is, unable/unwilling to do the least bit of thinking to figure it out themselves.
You could give a quest "save the princess", but you would instantly be hit by a thousand players demanding you tell them where she is and a step by step guide on how to save her.
It may be that we got a female on this forum who is into the more advanced forms of self pleasure... Oh right. Forgot, this is slashdot. No females.
Don't you really mean "agree with my world view", because only a total tool would think Reuters in unbiased, last year once again had them caught out several times. Don't also forget that it is thanks to Reuters that the RIAA and the like can just publish their press-releases with whatever they want because Reuters (and other press agencies) have made it their business to simply publish press-releases and NEVER EVER investigate, but still insisting these copied press-releases are "real" news.
As for the BBC, if you think the BBC is unbiased, you are insane. Don't mistake, "ooh they don't say the same as fox news" with unbiased. True unbiased reporting requires taking NO position. Not left, not right. Not hard line, not bleeding heart.
Today the weather was cold. BIASED! By whose standards?
Today the temp reach a low of -4 during the midday. Unbiased?
No, it is the "low" that does it. Some might consider it a high.
Today, at 12:00 the temperature at the bilt (dutch met office) reached -4 celcius. That is unbiased.
Now look at the BBC and Reuters again and read the texts carefully and see just how many times the BBC/Reuters takes a position, trying to convince you.
I see the claim of unbiased reporting attached to the BBC so often I think most people just don't understand the meaning of the word.
Unbiased reporting means reporting the facts, not opinions. Note that at no point does the original author of the story we are discussing EVER seem to want to report JUST the facts, he is upset because NBC did not want to report his OPINION!
As brutal as it may be, the number of iraq casualties is a fact. The number of which qualify as civilian is already an opinion. That people should care about it at all, that is even more of an opinion. Unbiased reporting is extremely rare, stuff like "the coldest day of 2007" is about it. Note that the BBC like almost everyone else now has weather segments that become a part of the SHOW, complete with "LIVE REPORTING".
The game was offcourse heavily based on KOTOR and in that universe, at least as far a jedi are concerned, you have no greys, only black and white. Evil and good.
While Bioware talks a lot, they are just a mortal game company and as such they are no different from The Sims where your sim needs total luxury to be happy or every shooter wargame where enemies never ever surrender or retreat.
What they wanted and what game mechanics allow just don't match up. They talked a lot in the game about how the "good" path could actually be harmfull and the "evil" path could be about giving people strength BUT it never panned out.
Perhaps because that entire idea is a load of bull. According to the theory of the closed fist, Hitler did the jews a favor with the holocaust since they got Israel out of it and made them into one of the thougest nations on earth.
If you delve a little deeper into the ideas that this game half-mentioned and then forgot to actually implement you might get the idea that this closed fist talk about making people stronger seems an awfull lot like excuses. A load of bullshit to cover up their selfish actions. Oh yeah I stole from you and killed your family but really I wanted to make you stronger.
Think of it like this, and suddenly Bioware has done a lot better, they have this game were the "evil" NPC's spout their nonsense (rememeber your master who tells you about this turns out to be evil) but when you actually look at their actions instead of listening to the words you see true evil.
It is a bit subtle perhaps, but perhaps bioware never ment for your to believe the bullshit about the closed fist not being the "evil" path. Same as in Kotor the darkside at times pretends to have higher motives.
The problem with that is that it is not up to you to determine when I should have a teaching moment with my kid.
The problem with that is that it is NOT up to YOU to determine what I should do just because your kid is present.
The same claim you make goes in reverse, who are you to tell me how to run my life? You claim that this person who sits next to your kid on an airplane and watches a porn movie is telling you how to raise your kid, but by then limiting this person you are telling them how to live their life. What makes you so special?
A lot of parents seem to want to force the entire world to adjust for their kid. Sorry, ain't gonna happen.
You can't expect the entire world to change to your preffered child raising method.
Find out what happened to Zheng Xiaoyu, former head of product safety in China.
That was july THIS year, so with one simple googling I basically shot down your entire rant. This story even made it to slashdot, so I not only show you to be incapable of googling, I show you incapable of recollecting events reported on a site you read. Why then shoud I take anything else you write serious?
Get your facts straight, then I might take your opinions serious.
If you actually knew anything about the story you would know that Chuck Norris never had a problem with the mythical facts satire itself, he even has quoted his favorites on occasion. He is fine with the satire bit. What he is NOT fine with is that this book by Penguin has collected these facts/jokes about him (jokes the author collected, NOT wrote himself) and now published them for profit using his name (a trademark) and likeness.
I am also not quite sure that original creators of the various facts appreciate having their work printed without getting a share.
This seems to be a publisher wanting to make a quick buck of someone elses work using someone elses reputation. Somehow I can't see a jury having much sympathy for them.
Humans are simple creatures, we need the world defined in goodies and baddies, that often means having to make the choice of the lesser of two evils, and not always getting it right.
Godwin time perhaps, in WW2 who are the goodies and who are the baddies? You have the axis and the allies. Well Japan and Germany clearly belong in the baddies groups, these are evil nations whose people have not a single redeeming quality. The role of Italy and and Austria is slightly more complex. Italy often seems to be able to shrug of the worsed of the holocaust.
But the goodies? The US of A? Hitler went to the east for lebensraum, the americans trekked to the west and killed the people already living there. What is the difference between a sign that says "Geine Juden" and "No Blacks"?
England? Talk about a country bend on taking over the world, it made an empire out of astraucities. The soviet union/russia? Well at least Stalin could never be called a racist, he had entire populations wiped out of all sorts. Equality of a kind I suppose.
Yet we must pick and in popular culture that often means we gloss over the "truth" to present one side in a better light. You might have noticed that in the recent WW2 tv series Band of Brothers absolutly no mentions is made of the US army policies regarding blacks or those with ancestors from Japan?
Part of the final solution was to deport jews to remote areas where they could be controlled/wiped out. Explain to me the motivations between Indian reservations and the rather diminsied population figures of native americans?
In WW2 there were only baddies, just that some at that particulair time were not as active as others and depending on your own background some weren't intrested in being very bad to you at that moment. Why string up a jew when blacks are so much more fun?
Yet we need to have a hero, and so we make one, by putting on blinders.
Steve Jobs is a figure in IT, there are many others, but he can be very closely linked to Bill Gates, an obvious baddy (although once seen as a hero freeing us from the evil IBM, a company that is now often seen as a goodie).
What really is the difference between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates apart from income? It is a well known part of computer history that it was Steve Jobs own (what is the word, incompetence, arrogance) that handed Bill Gates the PC market. Apple, IBM, Commodore, Atari etc etc all screwed up at a crucial point leaving Wintel to rule the market. A lot has been written about it already, including on slashdot.
But just imagine that Steve Jobs hadn't made what ever mistake it was he made and that Apple had come to rule the PC market, what then? Would it have been any better? Imagine that the holocaust had never happened, would the US be the evil country for its treatment of blacks, would it have continued like South Africa? How much did the realization of the holocaust change american opinion on its own treatment of a part of the population?
Apple has never been any more open with its software then Microsoft has. While MS software has always been bug prone, I have to say that the most crashy PC I have ever seen was running OS9. Supporting DRM, are we talking about Steve "Disney" Jobs here? Sony is often a villain when it comes to consumer rights, but when did Apple ever fight a legal battle FOR fair use?
But we need a hero, and so we make one, reality be damned. The sad part is that we got real heroes in IT, Stallman in front, but that person is WAY to much of a hero. People often insultingly try to compare him to Jezus but I personally see that as a rather important clue as to real heroes who truly stand for something. The person of jezus, if he was real, was a real pain in the ass for the powers that be, even his own followers. Really read the bible and you find a guy who was kicking against a lot of pedastals and upsetting people. Very confenient he was killed and that the pleps couldn't read and that the powers that be could tell their people what Jezus had RE
I don't, in 2007 I still use XP with the "classic" theme and still roll back all those annoying "enhancements" like that idiotic puppy for the search function.
What was that about anyway? I can understand using an icon like that but it stands totally alone in the entire interface and its design is totally out of place in both the official XP look and the classic windows look
Anyway, 2007 and I still use the same gui as in 98 and W2K. So tell me again please how I will call Vista the best when 7 comes out when I still think a lot of what XP delivered was a total crapfest?
Don't push your own fanboyness on the rest of the world.
Get your knickers out of a twist you pansie. It just means that you can still make a lot of money from something small, if you just sell enough of it.
1 billion sales with a tiny profit still amounts to a hell of a lot of money, China is well known for having the world largest population. Why do you think the US is bending over backwards for this communist country while Cuba (population 2 people and a dog) is on every banlist they can think up?
As for sandals, that is about as racist as saying the dutch wear wooden shoes or the americans cowboy hats.
It is simple, if you mamange to make a single dollar cent of every chinese person in the world, you are still filthy rich.
I doubt the chinese are offended by it, it is not like the US related saying "nobody has every grown poor by underestimating the intelligence of the american customer".