Quick quiz, how many people get killed on the road by drunk drivers vs how many get killed by amateur copyright infringers. You can round it down to the nearest thousand.
Oh, absolutly nobody has even been killed by reckless torrenting or filesharing under the influence of kazaa.
Since the two offences don't compare, why do you think you can compare the sentences? How about this, somebody gets his hand chopped off for stealing a loaf of bread, he shouldn't complain because another guy got his head cut off for murder?
A drunk driver is a dangerous person who thinks his/her pleasure outweighs the safety of every other road user. This guy is just someone who shared a movie. Big deal, is George Lucas or anybody else in the poorhouse because of this guy? No, they are all filthy rich. So where is the harm?
yes, it is still a crime, but in any civilized society the punishment of a crime should reflect the harm it does to society as a whole, not what some small subgroup thinks. Even the germans realize this. When the germans are more humane then you, you got a problem.
I will tell you of an another great lie, a lie that has existed for decades and continues to be swallowed whole. It is not related but it shows how people lack common sense.
In holland you got a consumer watch agency (consumentenbond) that does (unbiased) comparetive reviews, payed by people who subscribe to them. Pretty good BUT and honest in general as far as I know BUT one of their reviews is one big lie.
It compares the prices in supermarkets and comes with a list of supermarkets by price. You can imagine that the one who is found to be cheapest crows about this a lot.
So what is the lie?
Simple, they buy at each store a selection of standard BRANDNAME goods that an ordinary family might need, and compare the price.
This is NOT all goods a family might need in a full year and offcourse it totally ignores non-brandname goods.
Now here is the killer, the largest supermarket chain in holland (Albert Heijn) often stocks three versions of the same product: cheapo crappy brand (euroshopper) / its own label / big name brand.
The odd thing is that its own label if actually preffered by many people, for instance their peanut butter to me tastes a lot better then the brandname version (its cheapo version is truly disgusting). Yes this cheaper but better peanut butter is NOT on the shopping list.
It gets even sillier with things like sugar, a chemical product where a brandname can offer no additional value except a nicer paper bag. Yet the shopping list insists on getting the brandname product.
For yet more sillyness, a dutch consumer program Kassa, does product reviews including foods and has shown time and time again that cheapo products vs brandname products are NOT always a winner for the exensive products, a reall killer was chocolate letters a few years ago where the extremely cheap no-brand one carried by ALDI beat the established big-brands that were several times cheaper PURELY on quality. Not price vs quality, PURELY on quality.
ALDI products have won several times in these reviews, yet scores low in the price review because it doesn't carry many brandnames.
So what the fuck is your point? This is news for Nerds, not housewives! you might say.
Simple, it shows how biased any review is even when it tries to be honest. Even something as simple as deciding WHAT to review can introduce bias.
It would offcourse be unfair if the supermarket review just picked the lowest priced version of a product because that would just review price, not quality, so they go for a given quality (the exact same brand/jar-size/flavour of peanut butter) and just compare price but this ignores that this might not be the best price/quality product available.
The real truth? Well, that means that at AH you need to shop for their own brand name products and special offers, and go to Edah (the price winner) for brandname products and go to ALDI (the straight cheap price winner) for those products were quality if irrelevant (toilet paper, sugar, etc etc).
The same is true in IT, even if a review tries to be honest, you gotta ask yourselve WHAT they reviewed. One that is often missing with regards to linux is the cost of support. Not in the way most people mean it however. Say that you got a qaulity techinical team already, do you REALLY need outside support then if your own people already contribute to the kernel?
It would be like a car mechanic shop paying for car repairs on their own cars. Seems a bit silly, just maintain them yourselves.
Just because a review lists support as important doesn't mean it is important to YOU.
That is the real kicker in OS reviews, the variousses OS'es out there are totally different beasts, trying to do different things in different ways. One of the fundemental MS differences is that its servers are also a desktop. Windows 2003 can easily be converted into a XP like product capable of playing games. It leads to many a MS server being administered directly from its desktop (even if i
Advertising to pay for everything. Offcourse in a way it does, youtube has been paid for by advertising already although the ads so far have been on other sites. In the end however it was Google that bought it and presumably paid those who had been paying for the massive amounts of bandwidth.
Overlays on video off 10 seconds, 15 seconds after the video started, at the bottom of the screen.
Mmm, what to say about that, something that sounds thoughtful, intresting and will garner me the praise of the internet.
Oh I know:
YUCK
Do NOT want!
I seen something like this before on a torrented becker episode, after commerical breaks (Fellow europeans, if you ever complained about ads in the EU, just watch an american show with the commericals left in. You will be hugging you commericial channels advertising staff before the show is out) it showed some ad that popped some weird cartoon dude up to sell something. God knows what it was for but taking up 50% of the screen was kinda annoying.
While this may astound yanks, the bottom of the screen has its uses for subtitles. So basically subs are out while the ad plays?
I can well understand googles desire to get some revenue going, I am currently watching old columbo eps on youtube all for free except my ISP fee and whatever google has to pay to upload several gigs of data.
But I hate ads. It is not just that they get in the way, it is not just that 99% of them insult the intelligence of a republican, it is not that 99% of them are irrelevant to me (jay leno site shows me clips for american companies while I am in holland, even the best ad is not going to get me to fly to the US to buy something), that they cost me bandwidth, that the distract from what I want to do.
It is ALL of the above.
So good luck google, but remember one thing, you got big because people NO longer were prepared to put up with the crud laden, ad riddled sites of previous search engines. You wouldn't be the first dotcom to commit suicide by ad agency.
Remember, youtube is handy to watch columbo eps, but a torrent wouldn't cost me that much more bandwidth, I would get them in higher res, better sounds and in one long segment. Perhaps google nows this, perhaps this is the end of youtube.
This is the spiritual successor to System Shock 1 & 2 by Looking Glass, while you are talking about games by iD and Bungie. Especially the iD Quake game says a lot about you.
System Shock and Doom came out roughly at the same time. Now be ready for a shock, Doom was inferior in EVERY aspect to System Shock, save one. Sales. Except that they never really competed except in the eyes of shallow people that label every FPS game a FPS.
The simple fact is that System Shock NEVER was a FPS like Doom/Quake/whatever. It just used the First Person Perspective to show you the game. It was in many ways a solo/horror/survival game, a closer sibling in many ways to the third person survival games like Resident Evil.
You are talking about firefights. That was never what System Shock was about, if battle was hard that was because it was supposed to be. Doom: Wade through a see of enemies as an untouchable hardcore marine. System Shock: You are weak and everything is out to get you and they will.
IF you want a pure FPS, then you are right, Bio Shock is NOT for you. Basically you are telling an audience of Star Wars fans that Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is just old fashioned Star Wars and we should all be for the new Battle Star Galactica. Sorry, no. Go back to your mindless shooters kiddo, leave the real games for the adults.
The game is an RPG and has several romance options (the main character/you romancing a party member). You can play as a male or female and there is an oposite and same sex option for both plus if you are male you can even get both the girls to fall for you. Woohoo indeed.
But on the night before the big battle, when woohoo happens in the movies, you speak with the person you are about to woohoo and while the male/female pairing kiss (male/male I do not known) the female/female pairing cuts of just before the kiss and the threesome just sees the second girl arrive at your meeting and say "me too" before the fade out.
There might be a simple reason for this, sloppy development, the female/female pairing does show the player female grow enourmously and the NPC female looking UP into your eyes. For the rest of the game you are the same height. So could that mean the kiss is just the male/female animation with a model replacement?
This is by the way one of the weaknesses of computer games, that for every option you need to write code and design graphics and record speech. NWN2 never has the option to comment on your character too much. How many witty comments can you possibly record to account for every combo of race/sub-race, class and sex?
There have been others who claim that Jade Empire, and indeed other RPG's by bioware, has been rushed/unfinished/unpolished, so the lack of a female/female kiss might just be laziness. OR did they not want to loose their rating?
Personally I remember the days when the Elder Scrolls had a nude paperdoll (the figure of a character that is used in the inventory to put equipment on), nowadays the company seems almost afraid to even hint at the possibility that people are naked underneath their armour.
The Sims homoesexuality is "harmless". Anyone who attacks it clearly is a homophobe and even is the US that would be political suicide. For now.
It involved a group of homo-sexuals who would drug other homo-sexuals at gay parties and then inject them with blood, apparently blood known to be contaminated with the aids virus.
Neither is it first time but it was one of the most direct (blood injection is far sure then unprotected sex), deliberate and massive. But it is nothing new.
Aids has also been used as a threat before as in, "if you (don't) do X I will bite/scratch you".
Offcourse aids is nothing like the WoW disease, but the idea of people deliberatly spreading a disease is not to be dismissed.
It ain't about problems with the cooling itself, for that the rivers would need to be far hotter. The problem is enviromental, if you add extra heat to an already warm river you risk that it rises to the point were you destroy the eco-system. Simply put, the fishes get cooked and the algea grow out of control.
Intresting series, but something seems to be missing. Which is this. We are shown only one side. While it seems clear that a great many men want to have sex with underage persons, what you do NOT see is underage persons wanting to have sex with these men.
Could perverted justice be the sole supplier of online personas wanting to talk dirty with old men and even meet them in person?
Think of it like this, a police operation pre-tending to sell drugs PROVES the existence of people wanting to buy drugs. It does NOT prove the existence of drug sellers.
So how real is the problem? Perhaps the reason that dateline manages to capture so many men with their attempts is that they are fishing in a big pool of hungry men with no competition? If there were lots of underaged persons willing to do these kinds of meetings for real, then dateline would have a far harder time to find people willing to walk into their trap?
This is just speculation based on the known principles of supply and demand. If supply is limited then a small release of that supply will show a high demand EVEN if total demand ain't that high. Example, 1 million dollar race cars selling like hotcakes. NOT because 1 million dollars car are in that high demand generally, but because the supply is extremely limited.
I am left to wonder what the real extent of the problem is.
It may have a real name but is the effect that leads to the current ban on smoking and my installing an adblocker that blocks all ads.
I got a certain treshhold before a nuisance will drive me to action. A mosquito who is smart enough to NOT buzz around my ears will probably survive as the mild itching is NOT worth me getting up, even night after night. Buzz around my ears and the bug will die even if it takes me hours of night rest.
On a larger scale, smokers have for decades forced their addiction on everyone else. This was somehow tolerated but they went to far, and now the actions against smokers are increasingly harsh. Pushed too far the non-smokers are no longer willing to tolerate anything at all.
Same for me with ads on the web, I been pushed beyond my limit with slow page loads, horrible animations and plain nuisance to the point I now block ALL ads, end of story no matter how much I might like the site and how small the ad. I will spend hours on blocking new forms of ads when just ignoring them would be much easier because I no longer can tolerate them. Ages ago I just ignored the flashing gifs and the popups and popunders and then some limit was reached and now I fight them to the extreme.
The odd thing is really how the offending party can't seem to understand what all the fuzz is about. I can understand this with a bug, but how come so few smokers seem capable of understanding that smoking in the presence of a non-smoker is as rude as farting or airing your smelly feet? (and nobody ever died on B.O.)
How come no website owner seems capable of accepting that plastering ads all over the place, flashing ones by preference is going to upset the reader?
TV and radio stations seem similary incapable of understanding the reason behind DVR and MP3 players.
Here is the answer, too many ads on the net/tv/radio have made me and a lot of others allergic to them, what started as a mild dislike now gives us an openly hostile reaction to even the slightest exposure. This isn't your own fault, your page/tv/radio may have the barest minimal of ads you need to finance yourselve BUT others ruined it for you. Blame a total lack of self restriction by the media moguls who just didn't know when to stop.
Just as the asshole smokers ruined it completly for those smokers who knew not to light up in the presence of non-smokers, the out of control banner ad sites ruined it for the likes of slashdot.
Back in ages long gone, when firefox did not exist you had (still have perhaps) a company called doubleclick whose adservers would sometimes choke freezing the loading of the rest of the page. Why and how this happens? Do I look like someone who gives a shit?
I wanted it gone, and finally I bit the bullet and read up on squid and available plugins and setup my linux router to just filter all http traffic. Haven't looked back since.
Browsing without a blocker is like... well it just sucks. At times I am offcourse forced to browse the web without such blocking software and my god, the internet has become as bad as tv. Do they really think that if you saturate people with advertising to the point the original content becomes unusable people are really going to be more inclined to buy?
Apparently so. However not to me. This story offcourse neatly links to the story below about a site block firefox because of adblocker.
Well, who gives a shit. You went to far, now you gotta pay the price. If you don't get revenue from me, blame doubleclick and all those others who just pushed me over the edge.
At the moment I recommend bfilter to people who are fed up as well, it is browser neutral, works out of the box and does a lot more then just ad-blocking. Granted some flash bits require you to click them before they actually load but that is okay, because 99% of flash stuff I don't want to load.
So yes, ad-servers are slowing the net, by adding stuff to webpages I do not want. Can this be solved? It has been solved, not to the liking of those who depend on those ads being seen, but hey, fuck them. Do they care when I have to reload a page over and over again because some server borked?
I have, nothing special, just the dutch draft system, but I can tell you that a typical military pack is NOT light. Carrying a full pack on your back WILL leave you exhausted at the end of a long march. Sure a trained soldier/warrior will be able to do it, BUT not without a stat hit. Remember we are after realism, and if you think someone who has just marched through a forest for the day wearing a full combat outfit is as fresh as a person who hasn't, you must be superman.
If you believe that soldiers wore their full equipment all the time because of ease of transportation I suggest you read up on tactics. You can do this, IF you want your soldiers exhausted when they reach wherever they are going. Fine if that is a friendly camp, but if it is the frontlines. This is known from roman times with accounts from soldiers on the difference between their marching equipment and their combat equipment.
It has always been basic strategy to make sure that your own soldiers do NOT have to march for long, while forcing the enemy too, to ensure that your own troops are the freshest and will therefore have the best chances of winning. This is such basic stuff I can't believe I even have to convince someone of it.
For your other points about armour I give you a bit, but I would really like to give you a modern helment, fully padded and be allowed to hit you with baseball bat a couple of times. If you are not affected by that, well again, nice to meet you superman. If fully trained boxers are wobbly after being hit in the head by PADDED gloves, then so will you be.
Padding spreads out the blow, it does NOT completly absorb it. Again, try some real world experience, like boxing, even with a helmet on you will feel it if you are hit repeatedly.
You have some intresting theory, and prove me wrong on some cases but I get the feeling you haven't actually ever experienced real world situations like wearing heavy equipment or fighting.
How exactly do you guarentee the fair use of the first-sale doctrine? How can you sell a piece of watermarkerd or DRM'ed content? Answer you can't, hence fair use is not possible.
Frankly kid, educate yourselve a bit and try to be less of a tool. The right to sell on something you buy is pretty basic and if that is removed what is next? No longer being able to sell your old car to fight car theft? You can no longer rent out your own house to fight illegal aliens?
Are you ready? So you are a melee class and have chosen heavy armour. Do you know why it is called HEAVY armour? That is right, because it is HEAVY.
So, your party spot an enemy coming towards you, what do you do? Rush in? Not so fast HEAVY armour user, don't you think you should put it on first? What, you were already wearing? For the entire 6 hour journey through the old forest? Oh well, lets see, how about a 50% reduction of all your stats for being exhausted?
So, wait several rounds while you put on your armour with the help of a NPC (You think you can put HEAVY armour on yourselve?) or go into battle as a wreck?
Okay you are entering combat finally, start the counter at 1. What counter you ask? Your exhaustion counter. You do not think you are going to last forever with a ton of steel hanging from your body do you? Ten rounds, that is your max before you are starting to loose it.
Ah, your hit, no worry, the armour absorbs the damage, BUT you do need to start counter2, the daze effect. You do not think you can keep being hit and not suffer at all do you? The ringing sound in your ears alone is at least 10% of your stats.
Also heavy armour tends to be very rigid, metals of the age just ain't the flexible, start counter3 to see when it will simply shatter.
GET THE PICTURE?
I am not even getting into the most basic interplay between your stats, how an agile person would be able to be more agile regardless of armour class, how strength would still be needed to be agile in heavy armour. (So your agility would limited by your strength NOT by your armour)
How a high intelligence/wisdom would mean you would be able to select better moves.
You could think up plenty of extra rules and ways in which stats interact and you could end up with a pretty realistic combat system. It would just take forever to do anything at all.
Take for instance damage, a broken rib is dangerous BUT not instantly lethal, a broken leg is the end for a melee fighter but a mage can cast sitting down and a ranger might just be able to fire a bow from one leg. Yet 99% of games give you nothing more then a simple health bar.
The D&D system is designed to be simple to learn, not require to many things to tracks and still be fun. No it ain't realistic but it "works".
Offcourse, if you then apply D&D rules to a computer game you are just taking the piss, a computer can keep track of countless figures and can compete even the most complex rules in an instant, D&D on a computer would be like using Deep Blue to play TicTacToe.
I think we deserve a goverment grant to fight this non-consentual abstinence among the community! At the minimum community service sentences to those who continue this harmfull practice against innocent slashdotters!
Although I am willing to settle for that list of porn sites. Could they rank them so I don't waste too much time to get too the good stuff?
Why are these things always mentioned as possible solutions for a silent PC? They are NOT PC's. PC's are powerfull and can handle a ton of storage and are easily expanded. These things are not.
No I do NOT question the usefullness of these things for certain tasks, but if you want a full PC that is 100% silent, might I offer a different solition instead? It too involves size.
Make your case big. The simplest way to prevent noise from inside a PC reaching your ears is to use thick walls, and to force the sound to take the long way out. An even simpler solution is to use the layout of your house to put even more distance between you and the PC. My own PC is standing on the balcony, the wires going through the wall. Outside it sits in a thick wooden casing, with it basically having a small case at the bottom that sucks air in from the front and back and up into the main casing were I have put the PC itself (in my own layout) and then a similar case up above that blows the air out. The two fan cases force the air around several walls to break up the soundwaves.
Result, soundless operation, I already picked quiet fans and the sound walls hide even their small amount of noise coupled with tremenedous cooling with no sacrifice on the components used for the PC itself. Regular Core 2 Duo, regular memory, and far too many HD's to hold all my porn eh business data.
While this mini-boards occasionally tempt me, I always end up with the simple fact that they just don't have the raw power I would need. Take using it as a movie player, how the hell are these things supposed to do highdef? That can bring a fullsize system to its knees? As for who would want to use a desktop with less then 2 gigs of memory, do you like pain? (2 gigs is a bit of overkill perhaps for linux but I hate swapping. Swapping means the terrorists have won!)
So nice board, intresting and all, but IF you are thinking about wanting a silent PC, consider instead in using regular hardware but an un-regular encasing. Size indeed matters and trying to make a 2mm thin metal encasing silent is doing things the hardway. 22mm wood, with isolation that is what makes a manly PC. Leave the tiny pc's for the japanese.
The "right" are focussing on a single point, make a lot of noise about that and refuse to look at the total picture.
First of the term Global Warming itself. The simplest attack and most often used is this. It is cold outside, so how can there be global warming.
The problem is global climate CHANGE, not warming. It can be anything from colder to warmer, wetter or dryer. The problem is that our society has developed in certain habitats, if these change we might have to change our society to fit. I personally hold the theory that civilisation has a lot to do with the ease and reliability of food production. The egyptians used to be totally dependant on the Nile, that controlled all their food production and therefore their entire lives. The Nile was at the same time impossible control, perhaps leading to the attitude in people that the world was not under their own direct control but rather in the hands of a higher being.
Enter into europe and the land is far easier on people, not as rich but more reliable from year to year AND more managable. What does it do to a society that is totally dependant on the local river flooding vs a society that can reliable count on a stable food production. Is it purely coincedence that the US, home of a giant farms also became the home of western civilization?
Anyway, the climate we live in affects us directly, just how many failed crops can we have? Fruits this year are ripe earlier then ever before in holland while the grain price is at a record hight, potatoes prices have been increasing steadily over the last decade. We NEED this food. Sure 99% of people right now believes that food just comes from factories but the simple fact is that western civilization still rides on the backs of farmers who are making sure that the rest of us can do all those other things that make our western lives western.
Some african countries are constantly at the mercy of what the local condiction will do to the food supplies, you could create the best political system in the world, and if the locusts eat all the crops or the rains just don't come it will all be for nothing and you will massive hunger again. Sometimes you get the idea in the west that these countries do nothing but beg for food but between the horror stories and charity shows these countries try very hard to improve their lot, building, education, growing crops. And then the rains don't come.
Just imagine that happening in the west. Well you don't have too. Grain prices are already high this year because of failed crops. Potatoe prices are already skyrocketing. Basic food stuffs. Oh sure, we can afford those increased prices. For now but for how long?
Farming the crops we are used too requires very fine tolerances, just one hailstorm out of season can ruin fruit, just one small storm and all the grain will be ruined, just a few days of rainfall at the wrong time and potatoes rot in the ground.
The fear is NOT for places like holland to turn into deserts, just for enough failed crops to A cost us a fortune in lost exports B to increase the cost of living that we need to spend all our money on food, just like in africa.
Point Two: How can human beings possibly affect the entire planet.
True, we are tiny, but we are numerous. Nature shows us just how much of an effect a species can have on the land. Just take a look at the african savannah, devoid of trees. This is caused by elephants who actively destroys trees in order to promote the growth of grass. Next is the fact the fact that our society grew in a certain balance, there are two kinds of balances, think of a pendulum, it is balance if it is hanging down, this is hard to disrupt and will eventually settle back. But the pendulum is also in balance if it standing straight up, this is very easy to disrupt and will NOT restore itself. Consider holland, small as man might be, it has totally shaped that corner of the world, NOTHING in holland is natural, no natural forest, no natural rivers. Everything is there because man
But yes, I agree, people are reluctant to change. I recently had to deal with a non-geeks computer... *pauzes while the slashdot audience groans ssympathetically* who kept installing crap software including spyware, trojans etc etc. The guy is also poor so his old computer grinds to a halt pretty damn fast whenever he installed the latest crap again. Offcourse he uses IE and was extremely reluctant to change. He was used to IE and that was what he used and therefore was going to use.
The cure? Well A: I told him that firefox would stop all the crap that got onto his computer B: the only remedy I offered was for him to re-install windows XP (no service pack) again and let it patch to service pack 2.
Cruel, I know especially on AMD from the P3 era with 128mb of memory, but hey, he finally got the message after the Xth install and having to buy a new HD (actually the old one was fine but he got one so messed up that he thought it was broken and who am I to correct a IE user?)
Finally now he is using FF and his comp hasn't had to re-install in a while. It is amazing to see how much you can harm even Windows XP (which I have to admit as a linux user is not as crap as windows used to be) when the user will click on anything that comes his way. It is sometimes humbling to have to rememeber that people do not only SEE those banners "you are infected" (by the way, I seem to have missed that story about how the web switched payed by advertising to the current model) but actually click on them and install any software that they find.
Constantly helping these people out does NOT force them to learn from their mistakes. Most people like to be helpfull, but perhaps you should take the role of your own parents at times and just let those people make their own mistakes, force them to deal with it on their own and hope they learn. You can run along your kid while they are learning to ride their bike, but if you are still doing that when they are 21, you might not actually be helping them.
Do NOT become an overprotective carebear. If your father does NOT want to use firefox, then fine let him deal with his computer problems (if he even has any, you don't say so).
People hate pushy people. So do NOT push firefox on people.
First of in general, your tagline seems to be in favour of soft-drugs, I also take it that you are a US citizens. Soft-drugs are to my knowledge illegal there. So your attitude to the police might be a tad colored by the fact that you favour the use of a substance that they are supposed to stop being used. This is not a debate about softdrugs. Just think how you would judge a comment about students (you are one right?) who has a tagline "Education leads to communism".
The the first case:
The way you talk seems odd. You are the brother of some kid with hom he had (a) beef). Eh, some kid? I smell something fishy here. The sentence just doesn't make sense and is not how a normal person would express themselves. Either the guy knew your sister/brother or he didn't but you seem to be describing your own brother/sister as some kid.
So even if the above is true, what kind of brother/sisters do you have that know people with guns?
You also sound pretty young, so what are you doing with 5/6 little kids in a car? That seems like a lot.
You never seen the kid before, yet you have the police the punks name? What is missing here? How did you learn the name of a person you never seen before?
While it does seem odd that the police does not want to take out a report about the case I think there is an awfull lot you ain't telling us.
Case two:
There are assholes on the road and even ones who do this on purpose. No doubt about that. Yet often people also suffer from an angry reaction to someone elses driving behaviour. You would be suprised to see how often people curse someone else for cutting them off, when they have just cut those people off moments before. Road rage is offcourse wrong BUT your account MIGHT just be leaving out the little details of what you did to get that other person so angry with you. Not that you are lying, you might not have noticed you cut them off for instance and think yourselve innocent.
Perhaps it was someone who had a beef with some kid who might be related to you?
Case three:
You got a ticket, for non-inspection. I think this might be similar to the dutch system off APK, a system that requires cars to be checked every so often for roadsafety.
So, your complaint is that you got a ticket for having done a mandatory safety check. Mmm, you are breaking my heart here. Call Amnesty International! Perhaps you should have left a note, "It is too cold to drive this bike any further, please do NOT ticket it for not having gone through the safety check, because else I think you are a meanie".
As other posters have noted, an awfull lot of these "bad cops" stories seem to be colored by the person telling them and I see no sign that your case is not the same.
I see a young guy, living in a country that has outlawed his drug use, telling just his side of the story whining about getting a ticket for something he admits doing and complaing the police doesn't handle every little incident. Oh the humanity.
If you are a bit older you might remember a time when the police was respected, perhaps I was just younger then, perhaps it was a different society BUT the current attitude to the police hasn't always existed.
The problem you describe does indeed exist, but you forget to name one reason for it. The police is the face of a whole system that has been screwed up.
The cop on the street gets the blame for the whole system that has been broken down by, well ultimately us, the voters.
I am going to take the dutch situation because that is were I live, your own country may be different but I am sure you might regonize this.
The bleeding hearts, who just do not want to punish people, period end of story. They will always find an excuse for every criminal because if society ain't to blame then they might just have to admit that some people are rotten to the core, end of story.
The right wingers, who just not want to pay for the punishement of people. They want more police, more convictions and longer jail sentences, but not a penny spend on it. The bleeding hearts may be nuts, but at least they regonize that if you want something, you need to pay for it.
The liberals who think society doesn't need enforcement, lets take the conductor out of public transport, people can regulate themselves. If you want to see how well people can regulate themselves, disable the traffic lights at a busy intersection, enjoy the anarachy.
The press, going to have go with a british example from a few years back. Woman gets sentenced for a drunk driving charge, press up in arms because she is a mother and sending her to jail would be too harsh. A bit later, similar case, but the woman gets a very light sentence, press up in arms because this sends the wrong message and smells of reverse sexism. The press puts whatever angle on any story that they think might sell them most copies at the moment and then we all act suprised when politicians just seem to have given up on trying to get our opinion on things. Take slashdot itself, rabid privacy nutcases or people who publish the personal details of spammers online?
The legal system was once extremely harsh, were just being the child of someone in debt could land you in jail often to die.
In more modern time this has slowly been changed, on the whole for the good BUT perhaps we have gone too far. A recent dutch letter-to-the-editor noted that a 18 year old who has stabbed a gay man received 6 months (minues time already served during arrest, resultint in his immidiate release) while a group of puppy thieves got two years.
While hanging every thief might be a bit too drastic and hacking the hands of childeren who steal an apple is perhaps not fitting the seriousness of the crime, perhaps the above example shows that we have gone a bit too soft.
Do you know that in some western countries you are free to commit any crime you please as long as you are below a certain age?
Do you know that in holland sentences do not stack? So if you commot a serious crime you can just as well commit a whole lot more because it won't incrwease your time in jail?
Do you know that if a mentally insane person (holland got a special system for dealing with those, they get two sentences, regular jail time and a sentence to be treated for their insanity) excapes during their many outings their guard may NOT use force to restrain that person and the escape itself is NOT a crime? This has been an extremely common thing recently.
While the amount of incompetence in this system is now slowly coming to light the real cause of it, years of cost cutting (the clinics are often COMMERICIAL! they are being PAID by the number of people they cure. Can you say, quanity over quality) years of the public voting for whoever promised tax cuts is not being examined.
If you want to improve society you should enforce the following law. Every newspaper story should list the people who voted for that policy. Prisoners getting parolled because they need the spaces for the next batch, thank the right-wingers for their tax-cutting. People being given trivial sentences for serious crimes, thank the leftwingers for their bleeding hearts.
That sound like a good job? Is the governor mansion in Alaska a nice place to live? Should someone with that kind of job and all the perks be content with life?
Then please tell me why the current senator of Alaska felt it neccesary to commit a crime WHILE MILLIONS OF PEOPLE ALL AROUND THE WORLD MAKING A FRACTION OF HIS SALARY, HAVE NOTHING AND NOTHING TO LOOK FORWARD TOO DO NOT COMMIT CRIMES?
Your comment is not just stupid, it is plain insulting.
As if somehow being poor makes you a criminal, yuch. So everybody who comes from a poor background, from a bad neighbourhood and wants more is going to resort to crime while the rich in good areas are offcourse innocent as a newborn kittens.
What you might have meant (unless you truly are a bigot) is that some low value economic crimes might not happen if people weren't forced at times between the choice of paying for basic needs or obeying the law.
These types of crimes are however rare. Even a poor person who robs someone else for a pair of Nikes does NOT qualify, you do NOT need brandname shoes to life. Not even to be "content".
Most crime originates from a sense of entitlement which becomes criminel when society judges that you ain't entitled to it. You are NOT entitled to my paycheck (well unless you happen to be Mrs. SmallFurryCreature), you are NOT entitled to have sex with me if I say no (anyone?), you are NOT entitled to have another million dollars in your bank account by pandering to the needs of big business, etc etc.
At most society can give its citizens a basic income (job? What about those to young, to old or sick to work?) enough to meet their most basic needs. Society can NOT make all its people content.
Either you are a hatefull bigot who really thinks that all poor people are criminals and rich people are innocent, OR you expressed yourselve extremely poorly (even by slashdot standards) or you are just a plain fucking idiot.
Because doing what you suggest cost money, taxpayers money. It is an election year (ah, democracy were goverment is paralysed for months before and after an election every two years, might this be the REAL reason countries like Japan, Korea and now China raced ahead of the west so fast?) and you are calling for an increase in spending, and therefore taxation.
It might be possible to get setup a campaign with that but you would also be the first person in history to actually end up with a negative amount of votes.
Not saying you are not right, just ain't gonna happen. Not until the Chinese space program becomes news and the US suddenly realizes that it is loosing face and it starts another space race (by setting a goal they can achieve quickly and then loudly shouting that was the goal all along for everyone and claim victory even if some doubters question the actual results (was the US/USSR space race "won" by landing on the moon OR did the russians with the their continued space pressence with MIR really have the most succesfull program?)).
To stay out of the MMO minefield I will instead use racing games as an example. Grand Prix Legends on the PC and, well any racing game on the consoles.
GPL is brutal, the cars are a bitch to handle, require real skill, have full length F1 races, are fragile as hell and have random breakdowns. This means that if you make a mistake that could easily be the end of the race, if you drive the full 2 hours succesfully you can still be out by a random failure or simply running out of fuel.
Compare this to console racing games, no random failures, damage model is a health bar (no sudden death by loosing a wheel), races are at most a few minutes, the AI sucks donkey balls and you can usually easily make up a mistake and overtake all of the computer racers even if you are way behind.
Two totally different ways of doing the same game type.
Which is better? Well, for me they both got their place. Console racers on my PSP (I own a DS as well, no big consoles) for a quick fix and GPL and similar on the PC for when I am at home and got the time for them.
Driving a full race, definitly makes you more aware of the risks. Go for first and overtake the leader (well, 2nd, 3rd Oh okay, overtaking the guy with the smoking engine 5 laps behind the leader) OR play it safe and get the 2nd place points and NOT risk wrecking your car on the finishing lap.
Choose right and you win, choose wrong and 2 hours of gameplay are, wasted?
HOLD ON ONE FUCKING SECOND
What kind of player would consider those hours wasted? Are you so shallow that that you think 2 hours spend playing a game is only worth it if you the game tells you, you are a winner?
Surely it is the game itself that should be fun? Two hours racing EVEN if I crash in GPL is FUN! Every single lap. The risk of NOT finishing the race on adds to it. No victory without defeat. What is the thrill in completing Monaco in 3rd place if you didn't feel like it took all your skill and a lot of luck to do it?
I get more satisfaction from GPL then a console racer. Offcourse GPL takes more time BUT it also gives me more.
On the other hand I can't just run GPL while travelling on the train, nor would I want to loose my GPL race because the conductor asked for my ticket, a console race, well, who cares, no risk, no punishement.
So I can see your point BUT I can also see why you are absolutly wrong.
In MMORPG's the "risk" is in taking on higher level mobs, more of them and with the risk of adds. For non MMO players who are still reading, MMO's offcourse got no saves, so death cannot be as brutal and simple as in single player games. Permanent death is considered to extreme as well so avatars when they bite off more then they can chew have to be brought back into the game world. Usually a player respawns at a fixed location with some punishement (loss of XP, temporary stats decrease, equipment loss). Sometimes these punishments can be lowered by travelling back to the area of your death.
How harsh this punishement is depends on a lot of things. Some games have almost no penalty, some make you long for real death.
WoW and Everquest 1/2 for instance both asked you to go back to your place of death to lower the penalty. The difference being that in WoW you travel back as an immortal ghost who cannot be attacked or attack. A save run that is purely a time waster.
In Everquest 1/2 and Vangaurd the corpse run is done while you are alive BUT under influence of a stat punishement. In Vanguard even with your best gear missing. So you have to fight your way back in a reduced state to your death body that is probably surrounded by the same mob that killed you in the first place.
So what does this mean?
Well, lets mention another game, Star Wars Galaxies. At one point people in that game KILLED THEMSELVES to safe having to travel back to base. Suicide as a fast travel option, desirable gaming tactic OR the sign of complete and utter ruin. Discuss.
The first is how to find the suspect the Murder She Wrote way. You walk around investigating the suspects and then tell all of them that you know who did it and are going to reveal it tomorrow. The one who turns up that night to kill you, is the murderer. For the JFK assasination we need to go to the twist on that plot. Namely that the person who turns up is the one who wants to protect the person they think really did it.
How does this relate? What is most intresting about the whole JFK thing is NOT who actually pulled the trigger, but the sheer number of people that turned up at night to kill Angela Lansbury. An awfull lot of people/groups/institutions reacted as if they feared that "they" had done it. Not they themselves but perhaps some over ambitious underling, some group they supported and could be traced back.
Since plotting to kill the president of US of A is not what organisations like the FBI and CIA should be doing, just having them react guiltily is enough condemnation.
Think of it like this. I am thinking of killing CowboyNeal and have talked about this with various people. Then all of a sudden CowboyNeal turns up death. I will then offcourse panic, what if someone I talked too actually did it, it could be traced back to me and so I start covering my tracks even though in reality there may be nothing to cover up.
But for me to plot to kill CowboyNeal is not a crime in itself. If it was, millions of lovers of the english language would be in jail right now. It is not quite the same if a security agency plots to kill the president. It does not matter if Oswald worked for them, or even if he was the actuall shooter, that fact that they reacted as if they thought he might have is enough.
The SECOND thing I learned from TV is that conspiracy people are dreamers. They like to believe that the world is run by someone with some degree of competence. Not someone they agree with offcourse but at least that someone is in control.
Sorry. Nope. Unless someone out there is a truly amazing human with skill far beyond any know living being in all of history it just doesn't seem that likely that anyone could pull a shadow goverment type thing off for so long.
People just ain't clever enough. If you look for instance at the 9/11 conspiracies you get the idea that these people desperately wish for a world in wich someone is in control. To set all this up would require a lot of skill that I have never seen displayed before.
In a way conspiracy theorists HELP the powers that be. By looking for order they allow chaos to thrive.
Again the JFK shooting and the Murder She Wrote method. By focusing on trying to find out who DID it, the conspiracy theorists are leaving in the clear everyone who THOUGHT they did it. Who has there been no investigation of the known facts that goverments officials had formed plans to kill the president? These are not disputed, they are know and well documented. BUT because they did not actually do it they get off because everyone wants to find some non-existant secret organisation.
Same with 9/11 by wishing to find that the US goverment planned it all they are ignoring the facts that someone in the US goverment made some really bad choices. Those bad choices did NOT plan the attack but also did nothing to stop it. For some people, charged with the protection of the US, this is a crime itself. Just as plotting to kill the president is.
In my darkest hours I fear that conspiracy theorists are the wetdream of every conspirator. By focussing on the outlandish they are letting the mundane go unnoticed.
Right now the race seems to be between Lord of the Rings Online, a WoW clone with a well-known license and an amazingly done hobit starter area, and Vanguard: Sage of Heroes, a sorta sequal to Everquest that is claimed to try to innovate the MMORPG.
WoW is an Everquest light with added evercamp and evergrind added but coated in a delicous cholate covering that have most of us not noticing how goddamn boring the game actually is at times.
LOTRO in some ways tries to remedy this, it for instance has reduced to almost zero the number of times you will have to kill for a rare lootdrop. If you are asked to collect bear pelts then the bears will drop them pelts, if not it is a bug. So far I seen only two quests were did this not happen, this was mentioned in the quest description and it was then about half that dropped them.
It also has reduced the evercamp, rare or named mobs just respawn at a reasonable time, nothing close to everquests 2, once in a blue moon. Yet you still have quests were you have to kill boss X and have to stand in line to do it. One of the worse variations of this is a quest were you have to rescue a lynx kitten (don't ask) and it is a afraid to come out so you have to kill six budgies that are pestering it. Problem? They ain't assinged to you, so far this invariably results in someone else attacking one of yours. Since you have to kill six of them, this means you then have to wait around for someone else to trigger a respawn of six of them and kills some of theirs. At times you wish they set the respawn more frequent or made such quests into instances.
In the end LOTRO seems to be a WoW with a nice license done slightly better. Yes the Shire is absolutly amazing but the dwarf hall has nothing on the one in WoW.
Vanguard on the other hand is.... Well what is it? Once upon a time SWG was a game that was radically different from Everquest. You just could not compare the two. Vanguard has a lot of lofty claims but ends up being WoW with lots of complexity and even more bugs added but deep down a WoW clone (not that this need amaze you, WoW is an everquest clone and Vanguard is by the everquest guy).
LOTRO and Vanguard even share an oddity. For crafting you need special tools. Sensible enough I suppose, vanguard for some reason turns it into an entire outfit. Yet they both add an amazingly stupid bit of micro management. In LOTRO you have to equip the right tool for the job yourselve. WHY?
Vanguard goes even further, during the crafting process you use a lot of different tools, you can have them in bags (3 tools in a bag) but only one bag active at once, if you need a different tool you need to make a different bag active. WHY?
It really adds nothing to the gameplay but annoyance.
While in theory the combat in Vanguard should be deeper in reality it just isn't. It looks better (LoTRO animation is not even close to Vanguard) but it is just as shallow. If you played WoW or EQ1/2 you will know the drill.
But where LOTRO beats vanguard is in presentation. If you look on at the shire then LOTRO vs Vanguard is like WoW vs Everquest2 times 100. The shire is like one of those adventure themeparks. Something is always happening, it is a beautifully animated populated world. Its quests are fun and exciting and bug free (so far, I do see others having troubles) and it is just an amazingly well done world.
Compared to that Vanguard just seems, lacking.
It is not simply that they are bad, they are not, but they lack the spark. It just ain't the shire and that is it.
The odd thing here that it is not SWG vs EQ or WoW. This is a WoW with license vs WoW with lots of complexity bolted on comparison.
For all that vanguard claims to do, it is just WoW made complex and confusing.
Not that it is all bad, short of Guild Wars Vanguard wins for having females have their own animation. (GW has boobie animation and so beats almost any game) Its combat animations also seem to connect more.
It ain't because I do not like tv. Well I don't, the recent drive to reality tv is one I could do without, but mostly it is because I just don't have time for the ads. Since tv programs are interrupted by them and I just don't have the patience to wait the 5+ minutes before the program resumes I just don't watch anymore.
Radio? The same story. Apart from the fact that I just don't like a lot of modern music, I also just don't want to have 5+ minutes of ads before the news and 5+ minutes after and that is if you don't count the station jingles as ads. Just how much ads do you need to play some music?
I run an ad-filter on my pc to filter ads, google including.
I have a NO-NO sticker on my door wich in the netherlands is the legal way to force ad companies to not post ads in your physical mail box.
GET THE FUCKING PICTURE! I DO NOT WANT YOUR GODDAMNED ADS!
It ain't even the principles of ads that upsets me but that the majority of them are so damned annoying. I suppose an annoying ad you notice you work better, I am probably the only person in the world who absolutly refuses to buy products related to annoying ads (or so ad-companies seem to think), but they annoy me.
And now they want ads in games. Right.
Google has the motto "do no evil". Am I the only one who realizes that the slogan of an ad company is not worth a goddamn thing?
Slashdot Mirror
Quick quiz, how many people get killed on the road by drunk drivers vs how many get killed by amateur copyright infringers. You can round it down to the nearest thousand.
Oh, absolutly nobody has even been killed by reckless torrenting or filesharing under the influence of kazaa.
Since the two offences don't compare, why do you think you can compare the sentences? How about this, somebody gets his hand chopped off for stealing a loaf of bread, he shouldn't complain because another guy got his head cut off for murder?
A drunk driver is a dangerous person who thinks his/her pleasure outweighs the safety of every other road user. This guy is just someone who shared a movie. Big deal, is George Lucas or anybody else in the poorhouse because of this guy? No, they are all filthy rich. So where is the harm?
yes, it is still a crime, but in any civilized society the punishment of a crime should reflect the harm it does to society as a whole, not what some small subgroup thinks. Even the germans realize this. When the germans are more humane then you, you got a problem.
I will tell you of an another great lie, a lie that has existed for decades and continues to be swallowed whole. It is not related but it shows how people lack common sense.
In holland you got a consumer watch agency (consumentenbond) that does (unbiased) comparetive reviews, payed by people who subscribe to them. Pretty good BUT and honest in general as far as I know BUT one of their reviews is one big lie.
It compares the prices in supermarkets and comes with a list of supermarkets by price. You can imagine that the one who is found to be cheapest crows about this a lot.
So what is the lie?
Simple, they buy at each store a selection of standard BRANDNAME goods that an ordinary family might need, and compare the price.
This is NOT all goods a family might need in a full year and offcourse it totally ignores non-brandname goods.
Now here is the killer, the largest supermarket chain in holland (Albert Heijn) often stocks three versions of the same product: cheapo crappy brand (euroshopper) / its own label / big name brand.
The odd thing is that its own label if actually preffered by many people, for instance their peanut butter to me tastes a lot better then the brandname version (its cheapo version is truly disgusting). Yes this cheaper but better peanut butter is NOT on the shopping list.
It gets even sillier with things like sugar, a chemical product where a brandname can offer no additional value except a nicer paper bag. Yet the shopping list insists on getting the brandname product.
For yet more sillyness, a dutch consumer program Kassa, does product reviews including foods and has shown time and time again that cheapo products vs brandname products are NOT always a winner for the exensive products, a reall killer was chocolate letters a few years ago where the extremely cheap no-brand one carried by ALDI beat the established big-brands that were several times cheaper PURELY on quality. Not price vs quality, PURELY on quality.
ALDI products have won several times in these reviews, yet scores low in the price review because it doesn't carry many brandnames.
So what the fuck is your point? This is news for Nerds, not housewives! you might say.
Simple, it shows how biased any review is even when it tries to be honest. Even something as simple as deciding WHAT to review can introduce bias.
It would offcourse be unfair if the supermarket review just picked the lowest priced version of a product because that would just review price, not quality, so they go for a given quality (the exact same brand/jar-size/flavour of peanut butter) and just compare price but this ignores that this might not be the best price/quality product available.
The real truth? Well, that means that at AH you need to shop for their own brand name products and special offers, and go to Edah (the price winner) for brandname products and go to ALDI (the straight cheap price winner) for those products were quality if irrelevant (toilet paper, sugar, etc etc).
The same is true in IT, even if a review tries to be honest, you gotta ask yourselve WHAT they reviewed. One that is often missing with regards to linux is the cost of support. Not in the way most people mean it however. Say that you got a qaulity techinical team already, do you REALLY need outside support then if your own people already contribute to the kernel?
It would be like a car mechanic shop paying for car repairs on their own cars. Seems a bit silly, just maintain them yourselves.
Just because a review lists support as important doesn't mean it is important to YOU.
That is the real kicker in OS reviews, the variousses OS'es out there are totally different beasts, trying to do different things in different ways. One of the fundemental MS differences is that its servers are also a desktop. Windows 2003 can easily be converted into a XP like product capable of playing games. It leads to many a MS server being administered directly from its desktop (even if i
Advertising to pay for everything. Offcourse in a way it does, youtube has been paid for by advertising already although the ads so far have been on other sites. In the end however it was Google that bought it and presumably paid those who had been paying for the massive amounts of bandwidth.
Overlays on video off 10 seconds, 15 seconds after the video started, at the bottom of the screen.
Mmm, what to say about that, something that sounds thoughtful, intresting and will garner me the praise of the internet.
Oh I know:
YUCK
Do NOT want!
I seen something like this before on a torrented becker episode, after commerical breaks (Fellow europeans, if you ever complained about ads in the EU, just watch an american show with the commericals left in. You will be hugging you commericial channels advertising staff before the show is out) it showed some ad that popped some weird cartoon dude up to sell something. God knows what it was for but taking up 50% of the screen was kinda annoying.
While this may astound yanks, the bottom of the screen has its uses for subtitles. So basically subs are out while the ad plays?
I can well understand googles desire to get some revenue going, I am currently watching old columbo eps on youtube all for free except my ISP fee and whatever google has to pay to upload several gigs of data.
But I hate ads. It is not just that they get in the way, it is not just that 99% of them insult the intelligence of a republican, it is not that 99% of them are irrelevant to me (jay leno site shows me clips for american companies while I am in holland, even the best ad is not going to get me to fly to the US to buy something), that they cost me bandwidth, that the distract from what I want to do.
It is ALL of the above.
So good luck google, but remember one thing, you got big because people NO longer were prepared to put up with the crud laden, ad riddled sites of previous search engines. You wouldn't be the first dotcom to commit suicide by ad agency.
Remember, youtube is handy to watch columbo eps, but a torrent wouldn't cost me that much more bandwidth, I would get them in higher res, better sounds and in one long segment. Perhaps google nows this, perhaps this is the end of youtube.
This is the spiritual successor to System Shock 1 & 2 by Looking Glass, while you are talking about games by iD and Bungie. Especially the iD Quake game says a lot about you.
System Shock and Doom came out roughly at the same time. Now be ready for a shock, Doom was inferior in EVERY aspect to System Shock, save one. Sales. Except that they never really competed except in the eyes of shallow people that label every FPS game a FPS.
The simple fact is that System Shock NEVER was a FPS like Doom/Quake/whatever. It just used the First Person Perspective to show you the game. It was in many ways a solo/horror/survival game, a closer sibling in many ways to the third person survival games like Resident Evil.
You are talking about firefights. That was never what System Shock was about, if battle was hard that was because it was supposed to be. Doom: Wade through a see of enemies as an untouchable hardcore marine. System Shock: You are weak and everything is out to get you and they will.
IF you want a pure FPS, then you are right, Bio Shock is NOT for you. Basically you are telling an audience of Star Wars fans that Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is just old fashioned Star Wars and we should all be for the new Battle Star Galactica. Sorry, no. Go back to your mindless shooters kiddo, leave the real games for the adults.
The game is an RPG and has several romance options (the main character/you romancing a party member). You can play as a male or female and there is an oposite and same sex option for both plus if you are male you can even get both the girls to fall for you. Woohoo indeed.
But on the night before the big battle, when woohoo happens in the movies, you speak with the person you are about to woohoo and while the male/female pairing kiss (male/male I do not known) the female/female pairing cuts of just before the kiss and the threesome just sees the second girl arrive at your meeting and say "me too" before the fade out.
There might be a simple reason for this, sloppy development, the female/female pairing does show the player female grow enourmously and the NPC female looking UP into your eyes. For the rest of the game you are the same height. So could that mean the kiss is just the male/female animation with a model replacement?
This is by the way one of the weaknesses of computer games, that for every option you need to write code and design graphics and record speech. NWN2 never has the option to comment on your character too much. How many witty comments can you possibly record to account for every combo of race/sub-race, class and sex?
There have been others who claim that Jade Empire, and indeed other RPG's by bioware, has been rushed/unfinished/unpolished, so the lack of a female/female kiss might just be laziness. OR did they not want to loose their rating?
Personally I remember the days when the Elder Scrolls had a nude paperdoll (the figure of a character that is used in the inventory to put equipment on), nowadays the company seems almost afraid to even hint at the possibility that people are naked underneath their armour.
The Sims homoesexuality is "harmless". Anyone who attacks it clearly is a homophobe and even is the US that would be political suicide. For now.
It involved a group of homo-sexuals who would drug other homo-sexuals at gay parties and then inject them with blood, apparently blood known to be contaminated with the aids virus.
Neither is it first time but it was one of the most direct (blood injection is far sure then unprotected sex), deliberate and massive. But it is nothing new.
Aids has also been used as a threat before as in, "if you (don't) do X I will bite/scratch you".
Offcourse aids is nothing like the WoW disease, but the idea of people deliberatly spreading a disease is not to be dismissed.
It ain't about problems with the cooling itself, for that the rivers would need to be far hotter. The problem is enviromental, if you add extra heat to an already warm river you risk that it rises to the point were you destroy the eco-system. Simply put, the fishes get cooked and the algea grow out of control.
This is considered to be a bad thing.
Intresting series, but something seems to be missing. Which is this. We are shown only one side. While it seems clear that a great many men want to have sex with underage persons, what you do NOT see is underage persons wanting to have sex with these men.
Could perverted justice be the sole supplier of online personas wanting to talk dirty with old men and even meet them in person?
Think of it like this, a police operation pre-tending to sell drugs PROVES the existence of people wanting to buy drugs. It does NOT prove the existence of drug sellers.
So how real is the problem? Perhaps the reason that dateline manages to capture so many men with their attempts is that they are fishing in a big pool of hungry men with no competition? If there were lots of underaged persons willing to do these kinds of meetings for real, then dateline would have a far harder time to find people willing to walk into their trap?
This is just speculation based on the known principles of supply and demand. If supply is limited then a small release of that supply will show a high demand EVEN if total demand ain't that high. Example, 1 million dollar race cars selling like hotcakes. NOT because 1 million dollars car are in that high demand generally, but because the supply is extremely limited.
I am left to wonder what the real extent of the problem is.
It may have a real name but is the effect that leads to the current ban on smoking and my installing an adblocker that blocks all ads.
I got a certain treshhold before a nuisance will drive me to action. A mosquito who is smart enough to NOT buzz around my ears will probably survive as the mild itching is NOT worth me getting up, even night after night. Buzz around my ears and the bug will die even if it takes me hours of night rest.
On a larger scale, smokers have for decades forced their addiction on everyone else. This was somehow tolerated but they went to far, and now the actions against smokers are increasingly harsh. Pushed too far the non-smokers are no longer willing to tolerate anything at all.
Same for me with ads on the web, I been pushed beyond my limit with slow page loads, horrible animations and plain nuisance to the point I now block ALL ads, end of story no matter how much I might like the site and how small the ad. I will spend hours on blocking new forms of ads when just ignoring them would be much easier because I no longer can tolerate them. Ages ago I just ignored the flashing gifs and the popups and popunders and then some limit was reached and now I fight them to the extreme.
The odd thing is really how the offending party can't seem to understand what all the fuzz is about. I can understand this with a bug, but how come so few smokers seem capable of understanding that smoking in the presence of a non-smoker is as rude as farting or airing your smelly feet? (and nobody ever died on B.O.)
How come no website owner seems capable of accepting that plastering ads all over the place, flashing ones by preference is going to upset the reader?
TV and radio stations seem similary incapable of understanding the reason behind DVR and MP3 players.
Here is the answer, too many ads on the net/tv/radio have made me and a lot of others allergic to them, what started as a mild dislike now gives us an openly hostile reaction to even the slightest exposure. This isn't your own fault, your page/tv/radio may have the barest minimal of ads you need to finance yourselve BUT others ruined it for you. Blame a total lack of self restriction by the media moguls who just didn't know when to stop.
Just as the asshole smokers ruined it completly for those smokers who knew not to light up in the presence of non-smokers, the out of control banner ad sites ruined it for the likes of slashdot.
Back in ages long gone, when firefox did not exist you had (still have perhaps) a company called doubleclick whose adservers would sometimes choke freezing the loading of the rest of the page. Why and how this happens? Do I look like someone who gives a shit?
I wanted it gone, and finally I bit the bullet and read up on squid and available plugins and setup my linux router to just filter all http traffic. Haven't looked back since.
Browsing without a blocker is like... well it just sucks. At times I am offcourse forced to browse the web without such blocking software and my god, the internet has become as bad as tv. Do they really think that if you saturate people with advertising to the point the original content becomes unusable people are really going to be more inclined to buy?
Apparently so. However not to me. This story offcourse neatly links to the story below about a site block firefox because of adblocker.
Well, who gives a shit. You went to far, now you gotta pay the price. If you don't get revenue from me, blame doubleclick and all those others who just pushed me over the edge.
At the moment I recommend bfilter to people who are fed up as well, it is browser neutral, works out of the box and does a lot more then just ad-blocking. Granted some flash bits require you to click them before they actually load but that is okay, because 99% of flash stuff I don't want to load.
So yes, ad-servers are slowing the net, by adding stuff to webpages I do not want. Can this be solved? It has been solved, not to the liking of those who depend on those ads being seen, but hey, fuck them. Do they care when I have to reload a page over and over again because some server borked?
I have, nothing special, just the dutch draft system, but I can tell you that a typical military pack is NOT light. Carrying a full pack on your back WILL leave you exhausted at the end of a long march. Sure a trained soldier/warrior will be able to do it, BUT not without a stat hit. Remember we are after realism, and if you think someone who has just marched through a forest for the day wearing a full combat outfit is as fresh as a person who hasn't, you must be superman.
If you believe that soldiers wore their full equipment all the time because of ease of transportation I suggest you read up on tactics. You can do this, IF you want your soldiers exhausted when they reach wherever they are going. Fine if that is a friendly camp, but if it is the frontlines. This is known from roman times with accounts from soldiers on the difference between their marching equipment and their combat equipment.
It has always been basic strategy to make sure that your own soldiers do NOT have to march for long, while forcing the enemy too, to ensure that your own troops are the freshest and will therefore have the best chances of winning. This is such basic stuff I can't believe I even have to convince someone of it.
For your other points about armour I give you a bit, but I would really like to give you a modern helment, fully padded and be allowed to hit you with baseball bat a couple of times. If you are not affected by that, well again, nice to meet you superman. If fully trained boxers are wobbly after being hit in the head by PADDED gloves, then so will you be.
Padding spreads out the blow, it does NOT completly absorb it. Again, try some real world experience, like boxing, even with a helmet on you will feel it if you are hit repeatedly.
You have some intresting theory, and prove me wrong on some cases but I get the feeling you haven't actually ever experienced real world situations like wearing heavy equipment or fighting.
How exactly do you guarentee the fair use of the first-sale doctrine? How can you sell a piece of watermarkerd or DRM'ed content? Answer you can't, hence fair use is not possible.
Frankly kid, educate yourselve a bit and try to be less of a tool. The right to sell on something you buy is pretty basic and if that is removed what is next? No longer being able to sell your old car to fight car theft? You can no longer rent out your own house to fight illegal aliens?
This is not a positive step.
Are you ready? So you are a melee class and have chosen heavy armour. Do you know why it is called HEAVY armour? That is right, because it is HEAVY.
So, your party spot an enemy coming towards you, what do you do? Rush in? Not so fast HEAVY armour user, don't you think you should put it on first? What, you were already wearing? For the entire 6 hour journey through the old forest? Oh well, lets see, how about a 50% reduction of all your stats for being exhausted?
So, wait several rounds while you put on your armour with the help of a NPC (You think you can put HEAVY armour on yourselve?) or go into battle as a wreck?
Okay you are entering combat finally, start the counter at 1. What counter you ask? Your exhaustion counter. You do not think you are going to last forever with a ton of steel hanging from your body do you? Ten rounds, that is your max before you are starting to loose it.
Ah, your hit, no worry, the armour absorbs the damage, BUT you do need to start counter2, the daze effect. You do not think you can keep being hit and not suffer at all do you? The ringing sound in your ears alone is at least 10% of your stats.
Also heavy armour tends to be very rigid, metals of the age just ain't the flexible, start counter3 to see when it will simply shatter.
GET THE PICTURE?
I am not even getting into the most basic interplay between your stats, how an agile person would be able to be more agile regardless of armour class, how strength would still be needed to be agile in heavy armour. (So your agility would limited by your strength NOT by your armour)
How a high intelligence/wisdom would mean you would be able to select better moves.
You could think up plenty of extra rules and ways in which stats interact and you could end up with a pretty realistic combat system. It would just take forever to do anything at all.
Take for instance damage, a broken rib is dangerous BUT not instantly lethal, a broken leg is the end for a melee fighter but a mage can cast sitting down and a ranger might just be able to fire a bow from one leg. Yet 99% of games give you nothing more then a simple health bar.
The D&D system is designed to be simple to learn, not require to many things to tracks and still be fun. No it ain't realistic but it "works".
Offcourse, if you then apply D&D rules to a computer game you are just taking the piss, a computer can keep track of countless figures and can compete even the most complex rules in an instant, D&D on a computer would be like using Deep Blue to play TicTacToe.
I think we deserve a goverment grant to fight this non-consentual abstinence among the community! At the minimum community service sentences to those who continue this harmfull practice against innocent slashdotters!
Although I am willing to settle for that list of porn sites. Could they rank them so I don't waste too much time to get too the good stuff?
Why are these things always mentioned as possible solutions for a silent PC? They are NOT PC's. PC's are powerfull and can handle a ton of storage and are easily expanded. These things are not.
No I do NOT question the usefullness of these things for certain tasks, but if you want a full PC that is 100% silent, might I offer a different solition instead? It too involves size.
Make your case big. The simplest way to prevent noise from inside a PC reaching your ears is to use thick walls, and to force the sound to take the long way out. An even simpler solution is to use the layout of your house to put even more distance between you and the PC. My own PC is standing on the balcony, the wires going through the wall. Outside it sits in a thick wooden casing, with it basically having a small case at the bottom that sucks air in from the front and back and up into the main casing were I have put the PC itself (in my own layout) and then a similar case up above that blows the air out. The two fan cases force the air around several walls to break up the soundwaves.
Result, soundless operation, I already picked quiet fans and the sound walls hide even their small amount of noise coupled with tremenedous cooling with no sacrifice on the components used for the PC itself. Regular Core 2 Duo, regular memory, and far too many HD's to hold all my porn eh business data.
While this mini-boards occasionally tempt me, I always end up with the simple fact that they just don't have the raw power I would need. Take using it as a movie player, how the hell are these things supposed to do highdef? That can bring a fullsize system to its knees? As for who would want to use a desktop with less then 2 gigs of memory, do you like pain? (2 gigs is a bit of overkill perhaps for linux but I hate swapping. Swapping means the terrorists have won!)
So nice board, intresting and all, but IF you are thinking about wanting a silent PC, consider instead in using regular hardware but an un-regular encasing. Size indeed matters and trying to make a 2mm thin metal encasing silent is doing things the hardway. 22mm wood, with isolation that is what makes a manly PC. Leave the tiny pc's for the japanese.
The "right" are focussing on a single point, make a lot of noise about that and refuse to look at the total picture.
First of the term Global Warming itself. The simplest attack and most often used is this. It is cold outside, so how can there be global warming.
The problem is global climate CHANGE, not warming. It can be anything from colder to warmer, wetter or dryer. The problem is that our society has developed in certain habitats, if these change we might have to change our society to fit. I personally hold the theory that civilisation has a lot to do with the ease and reliability of food production. The egyptians used to be totally dependant on the Nile, that controlled all their food production and therefore their entire lives. The Nile was at the same time impossible control, perhaps leading to the attitude in people that the world was not under their own direct control but rather in the hands of a higher being.
Enter into europe and the land is far easier on people, not as rich but more reliable from year to year AND more managable. What does it do to a society that is totally dependant on the local river flooding vs a society that can reliable count on a stable food production. Is it purely coincedence that the US, home of a giant farms also became the home of western civilization?
Anyway, the climate we live in affects us directly, just how many failed crops can we have? Fruits this year are ripe earlier then ever before in holland while the grain price is at a record hight, potatoes prices have been increasing steadily over the last decade. We NEED this food. Sure 99% of people right now believes that food just comes from factories but the simple fact is that western civilization still rides on the backs of farmers who are making sure that the rest of us can do all those other things that make our western lives western.
Some african countries are constantly at the mercy of what the local condiction will do to the food supplies, you could create the best political system in the world, and if the locusts eat all the crops or the rains just don't come it will all be for nothing and you will massive hunger again. Sometimes you get the idea in the west that these countries do nothing but beg for food but between the horror stories and charity shows these countries try very hard to improve their lot, building, education, growing crops. And then the rains don't come.
Just imagine that happening in the west. Well you don't have too. Grain prices are already high this year because of failed crops. Potatoe prices are already skyrocketing. Basic food stuffs. Oh sure, we can afford those increased prices. For now but for how long?
Farming the crops we are used too requires very fine tolerances, just one hailstorm out of season can ruin fruit, just one small storm and all the grain will be ruined, just a few days of rainfall at the wrong time and potatoes rot in the ground.
The fear is NOT for places like holland to turn into deserts, just for enough failed crops to A cost us a fortune in lost exports B to increase the cost of living that we need to spend all our money on food, just like in africa.
Point Two: How can human beings possibly affect the entire planet.
True, we are tiny, but we are numerous. Nature shows us just how much of an effect a species can have on the land. Just take a look at the african savannah, devoid of trees. This is caused by elephants who actively destroys trees in order to promote the growth of grass. Next is the fact the fact that our society grew in a certain balance, there are two kinds of balances, think of a pendulum, it is balance if it is hanging down, this is hard to disrupt and will eventually settle back. But the pendulum is also in balance if it standing straight up, this is very easy to disrupt and will NOT restore itself. Consider holland, small as man might be, it has totally shaped that corner of the world, NOTHING in holland is natural, no natural forest, no natural rivers. Everything is there because man
But yes, I agree, people are reluctant to change. I recently had to deal with a non-geeks computer... *pauzes while the slashdot audience groans ssympathetically* who kept installing crap software including spyware, trojans etc etc. The guy is also poor so his old computer grinds to a halt pretty damn fast whenever he installed the latest crap again. Offcourse he uses IE and was extremely reluctant to change. He was used to IE and that was what he used and therefore was going to use.
The cure? Well A: I told him that firefox would stop all the crap that got onto his computer B: the only remedy I offered was for him to re-install windows XP (no service pack) again and let it patch to service pack 2.
Cruel, I know especially on AMD from the P3 era with 128mb of memory, but hey, he finally got the message after the Xth install and having to buy a new HD (actually the old one was fine but he got one so messed up that he thought it was broken and who am I to correct a IE user?)
Finally now he is using FF and his comp hasn't had to re-install in a while. It is amazing to see how much you can harm even Windows XP (which I have to admit as a linux user is not as crap as windows used to be) when the user will click on anything that comes his way. It is sometimes humbling to have to rememeber that people do not only SEE those banners "you are infected" (by the way, I seem to have missed that story about how the web switched payed by advertising to the current model) but actually click on them and install any software that they find.
Constantly helping these people out does NOT force them to learn from their mistakes. Most people like to be helpfull, but perhaps you should take the role of your own parents at times and just let those people make their own mistakes, force them to deal with it on their own and hope they learn. You can run along your kid while they are learning to ride their bike, but if you are still doing that when they are 21, you might not actually be helping them.
Do NOT become an overprotective carebear. If your father does NOT want to use firefox, then fine let him deal with his computer problems (if he even has any, you don't say so).
People hate pushy people. So do NOT push firefox on people.
The details are perhaps in what you DON'T say.
First of in general, your tagline seems to be in favour of soft-drugs, I also take it that you are a US citizens. Soft-drugs are to my knowledge illegal there. So your attitude to the police might be a tad colored by the fact that you favour the use of a substance that they are supposed to stop being used. This is not a debate about softdrugs. Just think how you would judge a comment about students (you are one right?) who has a tagline "Education leads to communism".
The the first case:
The way you talk seems odd. You are the brother of some kid with hom he had (a) beef). Eh, some kid? I smell something fishy here. The sentence just doesn't make sense and is not how a normal person would express themselves. Either the guy knew your sister/brother or he didn't but you seem to be describing your own brother/sister as some kid.
So even if the above is true, what kind of brother/sisters do you have that know people with guns?
You also sound pretty young, so what are you doing with 5/6 little kids in a car? That seems like a lot.
You never seen the kid before, yet you have the police the punks name? What is missing here? How did you learn the name of a person you never seen before?
While it does seem odd that the police does not want to take out a report about the case I think there is an awfull lot you ain't telling us.
Case two:
There are assholes on the road and even ones who do this on purpose. No doubt about that. Yet often people also suffer from an angry reaction to someone elses driving behaviour. You would be suprised to see how often people curse someone else for cutting them off, when they have just cut those people off moments before. Road rage is offcourse wrong BUT your account MIGHT just be leaving out the little details of what you did to get that other person so angry with you. Not that you are lying, you might not have noticed you cut them off for instance and think yourselve innocent.
Perhaps it was someone who had a beef with some kid who might be related to you?
Case three:
You got a ticket, for non-inspection. I think this might be similar to the dutch system off APK, a system that requires cars to be checked every so often for roadsafety.
So, your complaint is that you got a ticket for having done a mandatory safety check. Mmm, you are breaking my heart here. Call Amnesty International! Perhaps you should have left a note, "It is too cold to drive this bike any further, please do NOT ticket it for not having gone through the safety check, because else I think you are a meanie".
As other posters have noted, an awfull lot of these "bad cops" stories seem to be colored by the person telling them and I see no sign that your case is not the same.
I see a young guy, living in a country that has outlawed his drug use, telling just his side of the story whining about getting a ticket for something he admits doing and complaing the police doesn't handle every little incident. Oh the humanity.
If you are a bit older you might remember a time when the police was respected, perhaps I was just younger then, perhaps it was a different society BUT the current attitude to the police hasn't always existed.
The problem you describe does indeed exist, but you forget to name one reason for it. The police is the face of a whole system that has been screwed up.
The cop on the street gets the blame for the whole system that has been broken down by, well ultimately us, the voters.
I am going to take the dutch situation because that is were I live, your own country may be different but I am sure you might regonize this.
The bleeding hearts, who just do not want to punish people, period end of story. They will always find an excuse for every criminal because if society ain't to blame then they might just have to admit that some people are rotten to the core, end of story.
The right wingers, who just not want to pay for the punishement of people. They want more police, more convictions and longer jail sentences, but not a penny spend on it. The bleeding hearts may be nuts, but at least they regonize that if you want something, you need to pay for it.
The liberals who think society doesn't need enforcement, lets take the conductor out of public transport, people can regulate themselves. If you want to see how well people can regulate themselves, disable the traffic lights at a busy intersection, enjoy the anarachy.
The press, going to have go with a british example from a few years back. Woman gets sentenced for a drunk driving charge, press up in arms because she is a mother and sending her to jail would be too harsh. A bit later, similar case, but the woman gets a very light sentence, press up in arms because this sends the wrong message and smells of reverse sexism. The press puts whatever angle on any story that they think might sell them most copies at the moment and then we all act suprised when politicians just seem to have given up on trying to get our opinion on things. Take slashdot itself, rabid privacy nutcases or people who publish the personal details of spammers online?
The legal system was once extremely harsh, were just being the child of someone in debt could land you in jail often to die.
In more modern time this has slowly been changed, on the whole for the good BUT perhaps we have gone too far. A recent dutch letter-to-the-editor noted that a 18 year old who has stabbed a gay man received 6 months (minues time already served during arrest, resultint in his immidiate release) while a group of puppy thieves got two years.
While hanging every thief might be a bit too drastic and hacking the hands of childeren who steal an apple is perhaps not fitting the seriousness of the crime, perhaps the above example shows that we have gone a bit too soft.
Do you know that in some western countries you are free to commit any crime you please as long as you are below a certain age?
Do you know that in holland sentences do not stack? So if you commot a serious crime you can just as well commit a whole lot more because it won't incrwease your time in jail?
Do you know that if a mentally insane person (holland got a special system for dealing with those, they get two sentences, regular jail time and a sentence to be treated for their insanity) excapes during their many outings their guard may NOT use force to restrain that person and the escape itself is NOT a crime? This has been an extremely common thing recently.
While the amount of incompetence in this system is now slowly coming to light the real cause of it, years of cost cutting (the clinics are often COMMERICIAL! they are being PAID by the number of people they cure. Can you say, quanity over quality) years of the public voting for whoever promised tax cuts is not being examined.
If you want to improve society you should enforce the following law. Every newspaper story should list the people who voted for that policy. Prisoners getting parolled because they need the spaces for the next batch, thank the right-wingers for their tax-cutting. People being given trivial sentences for serious crimes, thank the leftwingers for their bleeding hearts.
That sound like a good job? Is the governor mansion in Alaska a nice place to live? Should someone with that kind of job and all the perks be content with life?
Then please tell me why the current senator of Alaska felt it neccesary to commit a crime WHILE MILLIONS OF PEOPLE ALL AROUND THE WORLD MAKING A FRACTION OF HIS SALARY, HAVE NOTHING AND NOTHING TO LOOK FORWARD TOO DO NOT COMMIT CRIMES?
Your comment is not just stupid, it is plain insulting.
As if somehow being poor makes you a criminal, yuch. So everybody who comes from a poor background, from a bad neighbourhood and wants more is going to resort to crime while the rich in good areas are offcourse innocent as a newborn kittens.
What you might have meant (unless you truly are a bigot) is that some low value economic crimes might not happen if people weren't forced at times between the choice of paying for basic needs or obeying the law.
These types of crimes are however rare. Even a poor person who robs someone else for a pair of Nikes does NOT qualify, you do NOT need brandname shoes to life. Not even to be "content".
Most crime originates from a sense of entitlement which becomes criminel when society judges that you ain't entitled to it. You are NOT entitled to my paycheck (well unless you happen to be Mrs. SmallFurryCreature), you are NOT entitled to have sex with me if I say no (anyone?), you are NOT entitled to have another million dollars in your bank account by pandering to the needs of big business, etc etc.
At most society can give its citizens a basic income (job? What about those to young, to old or sick to work?) enough to meet their most basic needs. Society can NOT make all its people content.
Either you are a hatefull bigot who really thinks that all poor people are criminals and rich people are innocent, OR you expressed yourselve extremely poorly (even by slashdot standards) or you are just a plain fucking idiot.
Because doing what you suggest cost money, taxpayers money. It is an election year (ah, democracy were goverment is paralysed for months before and after an election every two years, might this be the REAL reason countries like Japan, Korea and now China raced ahead of the west so fast?) and you are calling for an increase in spending, and therefore taxation.
It might be possible to get setup a campaign with that but you would also be the first person in history to actually end up with a negative amount of votes.
Not saying you are not right, just ain't gonna happen. Not until the Chinese space program becomes news and the US suddenly realizes that it is loosing face and it starts another space race (by setting a goal they can achieve quickly and then loudly shouting that was the goal all along for everyone and claim victory even if some doubters question the actual results (was the US/USSR space race "won" by landing on the moon OR did the russians with the their continued space pressence with MIR really have the most succesfull program?)).
To stay out of the MMO minefield I will instead use racing games as an example. Grand Prix Legends on the PC and, well any racing game on the consoles.
GPL is brutal, the cars are a bitch to handle, require real skill, have full length F1 races, are fragile as hell and have random breakdowns. This means that if you make a mistake that could easily be the end of the race, if you drive the full 2 hours succesfully you can still be out by a random failure or simply running out of fuel.
Compare this to console racing games, no random failures, damage model is a health bar (no sudden death by loosing a wheel), races are at most a few minutes, the AI sucks donkey balls and you can usually easily make up a mistake and overtake all of the computer racers even if you are way behind.
Two totally different ways of doing the same game type.
Which is better? Well, for me they both got their place. Console racers on my PSP (I own a DS as well, no big consoles) for a quick fix and GPL and similar on the PC for when I am at home and got the time for them.
Driving a full race, definitly makes you more aware of the risks. Go for first and overtake the leader (well, 2nd, 3rd Oh okay, overtaking the guy with the smoking engine 5 laps behind the leader) OR play it safe and get the 2nd place points and NOT risk wrecking your car on the finishing lap.
Choose right and you win, choose wrong and 2 hours of gameplay are, wasted?
HOLD ON ONE FUCKING SECOND
What kind of player would consider those hours wasted? Are you so shallow that that you think 2 hours spend playing a game is only worth it if you the game tells you, you are a winner?
Surely it is the game itself that should be fun? Two hours racing EVEN if I crash in GPL is FUN! Every single lap. The risk of NOT finishing the race on adds to it. No victory without defeat. What is the thrill in completing Monaco in 3rd place if you didn't feel like it took all your skill and a lot of luck to do it?
I get more satisfaction from GPL then a console racer. Offcourse GPL takes more time BUT it also gives me more.
On the other hand I can't just run GPL while travelling on the train, nor would I want to loose my GPL race because the conductor asked for my ticket, a console race, well, who cares, no risk, no punishement.
So I can see your point BUT I can also see why you are absolutly wrong.
In MMORPG's the "risk" is in taking on higher level mobs, more of them and with the risk of adds. For non MMO players who are still reading, MMO's offcourse got no saves, so death cannot be as brutal and simple as in single player games. Permanent death is considered to extreme as well so avatars when they bite off more then they can chew have to be brought back into the game world. Usually a player respawns at a fixed location with some punishement (loss of XP, temporary stats decrease, equipment loss). Sometimes these punishments can be lowered by travelling back to the area of your death.
How harsh this punishement is depends on a lot of things. Some games have almost no penalty, some make you long for real death.
WoW and Everquest 1/2 for instance both asked you to go back to your place of death to lower the penalty. The difference being that in WoW you travel back as an immortal ghost who cannot be attacked or attack. A save run that is purely a time waster.
In Everquest 1/2 and Vangaurd the corpse run is done while you are alive BUT under influence of a stat punishement. In Vanguard even with your best gear missing. So you have to fight your way back in a reduced state to your death body that is probably surrounded by the same mob that killed you in the first place.
So what does this mean?
Well, lets mention another game, Star Wars Galaxies. At one point people in that game KILLED THEMSELVES to safe having to travel back to base. Suicide as a fast travel option, desirable gaming tactic OR the sign of complete and utter ruin. Discuss.
In LoTRO if you do NOT die when yo
The first is how to find the suspect the Murder She Wrote way. You walk around investigating the suspects and then tell all of them that you know who did it and are going to reveal it tomorrow. The one who turns up that night to kill you, is the murderer. For the JFK assasination we need to go to the twist on that plot. Namely that the person who turns up is the one who wants to protect the person they think really did it.
How does this relate? What is most intresting about the whole JFK thing is NOT who actually pulled the trigger, but the sheer number of people that turned up at night to kill Angela Lansbury. An awfull lot of people/groups/institutions reacted as if they feared that "they" had done it. Not they themselves but perhaps some over ambitious underling, some group they supported and could be traced back.
Since plotting to kill the president of US of A is not what organisations like the FBI and CIA should be doing, just having them react guiltily is enough condemnation.
Think of it like this. I am thinking of killing CowboyNeal and have talked about this with various people. Then all of a sudden CowboyNeal turns up death. I will then offcourse panic, what if someone I talked too actually did it, it could be traced back to me and so I start covering my tracks even though in reality there may be nothing to cover up.
But for me to plot to kill CowboyNeal is not a crime in itself. If it was, millions of lovers of the english language would be in jail right now. It is not quite the same if a security agency plots to kill the president. It does not matter if Oswald worked for them, or even if he was the actuall shooter, that fact that they reacted as if they thought he might have is enough.
The SECOND thing I learned from TV is that conspiracy people are dreamers. They like to believe that the world is run by someone with some degree of competence. Not someone they agree with offcourse but at least that someone is in control.
Sorry. Nope. Unless someone out there is a truly amazing human with skill far beyond any know living being in all of history it just doesn't seem that likely that anyone could pull a shadow goverment type thing off for so long.
People just ain't clever enough. If you look for instance at the 9/11 conspiracies you get the idea that these people desperately wish for a world in wich someone is in control. To set all this up would require a lot of skill that I have never seen displayed before.
In a way conspiracy theorists HELP the powers that be. By looking for order they allow chaos to thrive.
Again the JFK shooting and the Murder She Wrote method. By focusing on trying to find out who DID it, the conspiracy theorists are leaving in the clear everyone who THOUGHT they did it. Who has there been no investigation of the known facts that goverments officials had formed plans to kill the president? These are not disputed, they are know and well documented. BUT because they did not actually do it they get off because everyone wants to find some non-existant secret organisation.
Same with 9/11 by wishing to find that the US goverment planned it all they are ignoring the facts that someone in the US goverment made some really bad choices. Those bad choices did NOT plan the attack but also did nothing to stop it. For some people, charged with the protection of the US, this is a crime itself. Just as plotting to kill the president is.
In my darkest hours I fear that conspiracy theorists are the wetdream of every conspirator. By focussing on the outlandish they are letting the mundane go unnoticed.
Right now the race seems to be between Lord of the Rings Online, a WoW clone with a well-known license and an amazingly done hobit starter area, and Vanguard: Sage of Heroes, a sorta sequal to Everquest that is claimed to try to innovate the MMORPG.
WoW is an Everquest light with added evercamp and evergrind added but coated in a delicous cholate covering that have most of us not noticing how goddamn boring the game actually is at times.
LOTRO in some ways tries to remedy this, it for instance has reduced to almost zero the number of times you will have to kill for a rare lootdrop. If you are asked to collect bear pelts then the bears will drop them pelts, if not it is a bug. So far I seen only two quests were did this not happen, this was mentioned in the quest description and it was then about half that dropped them.
It also has reduced the evercamp, rare or named mobs just respawn at a reasonable time, nothing close to everquests 2, once in a blue moon. Yet you still have quests were you have to kill boss X and have to stand in line to do it. One of the worse variations of this is a quest were you have to rescue a lynx kitten (don't ask) and it is a afraid to come out so you have to kill six budgies that are pestering it. Problem? They ain't assinged to you, so far this invariably results in someone else attacking one of yours. Since you have to kill six of them, this means you then have to wait around for someone else to trigger a respawn of six of them and kills some of theirs. At times you wish they set the respawn more frequent or made such quests into instances.
In the end LOTRO seems to be a WoW with a nice license done slightly better. Yes the Shire is absolutly amazing but the dwarf hall has nothing on the one in WoW.
Vanguard on the other hand is.... Well what is it? Once upon a time SWG was a game that was radically different from Everquest. You just could not compare the two. Vanguard has a lot of lofty claims but ends up being WoW with lots of complexity and even more bugs added but deep down a WoW clone (not that this need amaze you, WoW is an everquest clone and Vanguard is by the everquest guy).
LOTRO and Vanguard even share an oddity. For crafting you need special tools. Sensible enough I suppose, vanguard for some reason turns it into an entire outfit. Yet they both add an amazingly stupid bit of micro management. In LOTRO you have to equip the right tool for the job yourselve. WHY?
Vanguard goes even further, during the crafting process you use a lot of different tools, you can have them in bags (3 tools in a bag) but only one bag active at once, if you need a different tool you need to make a different bag active. WHY?
It really adds nothing to the gameplay but annoyance.
While in theory the combat in Vanguard should be deeper in reality it just isn't. It looks better (LoTRO animation is not even close to Vanguard) but it is just as shallow. If you played WoW or EQ1/2 you will know the drill.
But where LOTRO beats vanguard is in presentation. If you look on at the shire then LOTRO vs Vanguard is like WoW vs Everquest2 times 100. The shire is like one of those adventure themeparks. Something is always happening, it is a beautifully animated populated world. Its quests are fun and exciting and bug free (so far, I do see others having troubles) and it is just an amazingly well done world.
Compared to that Vanguard just seems, lacking.
It is not simply that they are bad, they are not, but they lack the spark. It just ain't the shire and that is it.
The odd thing here that it is not SWG vs EQ or WoW. This is a WoW with license vs WoW with lots of complexity bolted on comparison.
For all that vanguard claims to do, it is just WoW made complex and confusing.
Not that it is all bad, short of Guild Wars Vanguard wins for having females have their own animation. (GW has boobie animation and so beats almost any game) Its combat animations also seem to connect more.
But offcourse, last but not leas
It ain't because I do not like tv. Well I don't, the recent drive to reality tv is one I could do without, but mostly it is because I just don't have time for the ads. Since tv programs are interrupted by them and I just don't have the patience to wait the 5+ minutes before the program resumes I just don't watch anymore.
Radio? The same story. Apart from the fact that I just don't like a lot of modern music, I also just don't want to have 5+ minutes of ads before the news and 5+ minutes after and that is if you don't count the station jingles as ads. Just how much ads do you need to play some music?
I run an ad-filter on my pc to filter ads, google including.
I have a NO-NO sticker on my door wich in the netherlands is the legal way to force ad companies to not post ads in your physical mail box.
GET THE FUCKING PICTURE! I DO NOT WANT YOUR GODDAMNED ADS!
It ain't even the principles of ads that upsets me but that the majority of them are so damned annoying. I suppose an annoying ad you notice you work better, I am probably the only person in the world who absolutly refuses to buy products related to annoying ads (or so ad-companies seem to think), but they annoy me.
And now they want ads in games. Right.
Google has the motto "do no evil". Am I the only one who realizes that the slogan of an ad company is not worth a goddamn thing?