Depends on what your taste is
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Lost Ends
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Lost is a "what do you think it means" show. That is its function, it allows you to discuss what you think happened with others. This is a recognized form of story telling, a slight variation on the "pan out" before the final ending that is often used in horror. I remember one movie about the world being overrun by spiders, it ends with the survivors locked up in a house and you pan out and see the entire world covered in a webbing. What happens next? That is up to the audience.
The problem is that story genres are way to limited to truly catogarize stories. A mystery ala The Orient Express is totally different from a mystery like Columbo (who done it vs how does he find out). Lost is a mystery in that it creates mystery and then leaves it to the audience.
A manga version of it is Yokohama Shopping Trip if you like. A world that is ours but with lots of differences and we the audience are never told why or what it means. Why is there a plane flying forever in the sky? Why were robots created. Why do they carry weapons when people do not. Why is the world ending? In YKK this sense of mystery is not meant to be solved, in a way it is like the question "What can change the nature of a man" in Planescape Torment. Whatever answer you think is right, is the correct one. Because it is the answer you choose after following the story.
In YKK you could imagine a nuclear war having taken place. Or global warming or an asteroid/vulcano. Whatever you come up with, that says something about you and that is the story. Your own imagination adds to the story.
The problem with Lost is that it tries to do both. Create a mystery world where your own mind fills in the blanks and that forms the story for YOU a single viewer AND create defined answers that you got to accept as the truth. It provides mystery but then doesn't seem to know how to deal with it. Leave the audience wondering or give them answers.
On the whole, if you didn't feel the need to watch it so far, I wouldn't bother. If it had stayed true to either solving mysteries or leaving people wondering it would have been great, but right now it is just a mess and you can't escape the feeling that confusion is trying to pass itself of for depth.
On the contrary, most children would murder someone if they had the chance.
Why do you think child soldiers are so popular? Because you want a soldier who can barely lift a rifle? or because you want someone who murders without compassion or feeling?
Children are NOT nice.
The problem is something every writer faces
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Lost Ends
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It is simpler to be complex then simple. Take the shortest sci-fi story: "The last
man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door..."
It is very very simple but could you have written it? Probably not.
There is another, although this is more of an intro, close to the classic Star Wars into: "That morning the sun rose in the west."
In one sentence we establisch that this is a different world then we know, just as when Luke Skywalker gazed at two setting suns. This is HARD, we have seen countless sci-fi movies that try to create elaborate imaginary worlds and going totally overboard. Compare the difference between Star Wars Cantina and any music scene in Star Trek TOS. The latter tries to hard, tries to introduce to many fancible objects that in the end just looks like somebody is playing a bicycle wheel.
And for story telling, much the same applies. If I was a really good writer, I wouldn't need this rambling rant, I would have been able to make my point in a single paragraph.
Lost is the product of a writer commitee that didn't know how to write a REALLY good mystery, so they just kept ladling things on and called confusion mystery. Twin Peaks did much the same thing although that was more confusion being mistaken for depth.
And its commercial success works like the emperors clothes. Surely you are not going to say that you "don't get it" when everyone who says they are really smart claims to get it? You got to watch it even if deep down you think the plot was created by taking every b-script written and jumbling the pages, because else you are just one of the plebs that don't get good tv.
Well, I am calling the emperor naked. I can see his dangle and it ain't anything special.
But there will forever people trying to claim there is more to it, because else they would have to admit they watch 5 seasons of the emperors dangly bits. Sometimes there just isn't any depth in a story. Do those same people wonder about the shortest story and look for hidden clues in the two lines as to what might be going on? Here is a hint: NOTHING. Whatever you imagine is going on and at the same time nothing. That is the brilliance of the "story". The author doesn't need an ending because you make up the ending and that is the ending for you.
Ah well, lets see, we should have another decade or two before the next "mystery" show gets aired. Should be about time for another program about a strong independent woman who sleeps with every man she meets and has no other dream then getting married while bonking the navy.
The way to get both performance and storage right now is to by TWO disks. An amazing concept I know. Who would have thought it was possible to get more then one HD/SSD into a PC.
Every single story about SSD's seems to bring out the idiots who want everything on one disk. Good thing these guys ain't farmers or they would be trying to plow the field with a Ferrari or cruise town with a tractor.
This drive is only of use to people who can't afford a real SSD and are limited to a laptop with only one drive bay and even then you would get far better performance with a normal SSD and an external drive for your porn collection.
Yes yes, there are people who use a laptop AND have need for far bigger datasets but on the whole, those people also need far greater access speeds then a traditional laptop HD can offer. I find it amazing to see someone claim he needs to edit video on a laptop with a 500gb 2.5 inch HD running at 5400 rpm. Who are you trying to kid?
And this drive won't be much help here. 4GB is just a cache file, if you are lucky it caches the right files but if you are doing complex stuff these "smart" caches often get horribly confused and start caching the wrong data. Like Vista trying to cache torrented files. Yes, I know it accesses the file a lot but please don't try and cache a 10gb file on the same HD. What's the fucking point? If you for instance will be running a large database from this drive, I am willing to bet its cache performance will degrade as it simply has to much to cache. Small caches only work when a small amount of files is requested a lot and the rest isn't. Like a porn collecton on your OS drive. Video editing, databases, filesharing always screw up caches.
If you really want performance in a laptop, spring for one with two drive bays, put as much memory in it as it can hold and get an SSD and a HD. A real SSD not one of the cheap ones some laptop companies put inside. An SSD is NOT just a fast HD, they truly are in a class of their own. And even if you got only a small single SSD, then you can still save space by putting your music/porn on a flash card or usb stick instead.
I wonder if people can ever get it into their heads that an SSD is about speed, not about capacity. Then again, since every single netbook these days comes with a 360gb slow ass HD instead of small but fast SSD, I think I might be fighting a loosing battle. Seems the average customer can only judge something if the number is bigger.
That robots can do very gentle moves is already known and not really that revolutionary. We have had machines that produce complex or fragile products for a long time.
What a robot/android needs to be capable of is to do these actions on its own, in the right circumstance and adjusted to the environment.
So, can this robot be programmed to perform an X amount of moves that result in a musical performance (an animatronic) or can it be fed a piece of music and then play it on its own? Can it be told to go to room X and perform for patient Y the music that patient requests?
Animatronics have long been capable of producing very life like results, but nobody is about to suggest that Jim Henson/ILM are the future of robots/androids.
Yes, for a while these kind of performances served a purpose as it was very hard for early robotics to produce gentle movements. But we have solved the problem of the robot arm not crushing a human being, the AI element is what is lacking. We have the capacity to have a robot pick up an egg, but no robot so far can do it on its own so far.
Nice performance, but I like to know how much of it is a robot, and how much a animatronic. Anyone got the answer?
The US position is understandable as is the position of the rest of the world.
The US is gearing itself more and more to an IP economy, sell knowledge/ideas rather then the products themselves. Apple thinks of the iPod and gets paid for this idea while the actual production and shipping can be done somewhere else. The US is not involved at all in a iPod sold in Holland. So how does Apple ensure it gets paid if not with the enforcement of the concept of IP that tells people you can't just copy their design?
With software and media content, who cares who made it originally? Despite claims by MS that copies of its software have malware pre-installed (they must be thinking of Sony's PC, that now come with a paid for feature to get a clean install) the fact is that I can save myself a lot of money by just heading over to the piratebay for my game PC. (And yes I do still buy games, just not the OS and no I don't care about a raid because I got dozens of licenses lying around from machines that got liberated with the help of the penguin)
And for me, a MS license is not all that expensive for someone living on minimum income, in a nation where a license can come close to a months or even years wages... well the choice is even easier.
The US by continuing to turn into a knowledge only culture (describing the US as a knowledge culture, I am going to have to hand in my EU citizen card for this one) is doing the samething the Brits did pre-WW2. "Why should we produce our own food when we can have foreigners do this for us cheaper and can then use our country side for hunting instead". Capital idea, except that nasty Mr Hitler threw a spanner in the works by sinking the ships bringing in the food. What a rotter.
The knowledge/IP economy only works when everyone is willing to play along. It is easy to argue that everyone benefits but clearly not everyone seems to agree. With a physical goods economy (the one the US got really really big on) it is easier to force people to play along. You can just stop shipments if someone breaks the rules. And it is rather hard to steal 1000tons of goods. Just ask the somali pirates what happens to you when you try to steal US cargo. "TRIPLE SYNCHRONIZED HEADSHOT!" (in Unreal commentator voice). And that is if you are a lucky pirate. The russian put some in a rubber boat that just somehow managed to sink... well worse things happen at sea, especially if you upset russians.
But IP? You don't even have to go to the source, the "victim" just happily sends it to you. If the US wants to sell a DVD in China, it got to send the DVD and then just anyone can copy it/steal it. It is an insane system to rely on for your economy. You don't see Shell going around filling everyone's gas tank then hoping they will pay up?
What is China's motivation for respecting US IP? So that money from its economy floats to the west? How does that aid them? (Well it would allow the US to at least start paying some of its massive debts back) The US is banking its economy on a sector were you really depend on the kindness of strangers. Which seems odd since that is not really what capitalists are best at.
When Germany declared war on Britian, they had to spend a fortune on submarines to attempt to "sink" the UK's economy. If China were to declare war, all it would need to do is stop payments for IP. Oh and stop sending goods. No need to sink cargo vessels, just not let them sail anymore. The battle for the pacific would be won with a piece of paper. What would the US do, bomb Chinese ports to force the sunken ships to sail? Block Chinese banks so the money for IP couldn't be transferred even more?
An IP based economy relies far to much on the recognition that IP has to be paid for and to anyone who doesn't have IP that recognition has no positive sides. China/Russia/Canada/EU/Africa do not gain anything from recognizing US IP. Sure, they probably play along because their politicians either want to keep the peace or are corrupted by lobbyists, but how long will that
These changes won't seem dangerous, to anyone who believes them.
It won't seem strange to a UFO believer if the school curriculum started to include advice on how to deal with abductions.
A child love advocate wouldn't find it strange for lessons to be given in how to blow the teacher.
It all depends on how you view the world.
What seems clear is that the new system seems to want to rewrite history, this is not without precedent. A certain german did pretty much the same thing. What was his name again?
Now the truth of the matter is that any approach to any subject will most likely be biased:
10. A new addition to world history: "Explain how Arab rejection of the State of Israel has led to ongoing conflict." Now that's not at all a loaded statement, is it?
This must be the ultimate example, how exactly would you instead introduce this subject without it showing your own bias to this subject?
The sentence itself is true, it was the will of the internation community that Israel would be founded, the territory belonged to the UK and the UK agreed to this. The arab world sought to defy the will of the UN and this has led to the conflict. But there is far more going on in the background. First of all, the UN members had their own reason to found Israel. The US as a bastion against communism, the USSR as a bastion against capitalism (yes really).
Take the insistence by some that the area be called Palestine. A loaded thing in itself, since we are dealing with ancient history for a region that has had many names. Why pick that one? Why pick the name chosen by the romans to remove the original name of Judea after the Jewish revolt? Odd that the occupied terroritories are using the name of an occupier?
And it don't really matter what you think yourself on the subject, just trying to show how insanely complex a unbiased answer is.
If there is current bias in the school books, then the answer is to neatralize that bias, not to slam it in the other direction.
And I really don't think that a nation who thinks that healthcare means death camps needs anymore right-wing bias do you?
Everyone in England thinks he is a buffoon, who still somehow manages to earn a very high salary indeed as an editor, get his government pay and somehow won the election for Major from Ken Livingston (who himself was an outsider, a left wing socialist who ran against his own party candidate when right wing "labour" Tony Blair was still somewhat popular).
Search for "boris hignfy" on youtube, seriously funny stuff. The guy gets away with gaffs that people have torn Bush and Blair apart for. NO journalist even dares to jump on any slight mis pronunciation or botched fact Boris makes. It is BRILLIANT. He has given himself a license to say what he wants to say and not have to worry about weighing every word on a silver platter. Nobody will ruin his career because he "claimed to have invented the internet" or he mixed up the date the US declared independence.
Watch his appearances on the show and then realize he makes more money then you ever will.
You would be amazed how much Americans assume the entire world has a credit card or indeed is dying to get one. There are countless services and shop operating from US that only take credit cards, despite there being countless payment providers who have made it their business to offer the locally prefered solution around the world.
I seriously doubt this had anything to do with the 2 iPads per person limit. There have been a large number of European stores that sold the iPad for a huge profit or as a gimmick. Since it was also done by a reputable large store in Holland, I doubt this was done by someone going in with a dozen credit cards.
No, I just think this is just the arrogance of Apple execs who can't imagine someone not having or wanting a credit card.
I think the CD sounds is to full as in filled. The earlier music has clear notes, there different sounds are seperate. With the CD sound you get the feeling the creator wanted to make sure every single milli-second was filled with something and you get a soft version of the wall-of-sound effect.
The odd thing is that movie music makers also know when to go full orchestra and when to have just a handful of instruments playing. Less can be more.
I still hold a minute silence for the day game music died. When CD tracks from the consoles that never had proper sound hardware crept unto the PC and we got pre-recorded tracks and all the efforts to create music that could switch mood seamlessly were overthrown. Yet another reason console owners should be shunned by polite society.
Since when is 8gb of DDR2 maxed out these days? Sorry mate, but maxed out at the moment is something like 32gb of ddr3. And that would cost you more then a thousand still.
And if you can't compete on price, then compete on quality or go bust.
THAT is the free market. Companies SURE love the free market, except when it bites them in the ass. Understandable perhaps, but it is also understandable that since I am poor and you are rich and I cut your throat and take your cash. There is always an excuse to break the law but you can't run a country with excuses.
And I wouldn't put to much stock in those claimed small margins. Margins are what is between sale price and costs, but what makes up the costs? Huge bonusses? Well, then if small margins are the problem, cut the bonusses. odd that all these struggling chip makers don't seem to go bankrupt eh? Deal with farmers sometime. "it rained: we are in trouble". "the sun is shining: we are in trouble". "The wind is blowing: we are in trouble". Farmers are always in trouble and always need tax relieve. Odd that, no matter what the weather, farmers are in trouble and need lower taxes. It must be hard to be a farmer. Or MAYBE just MAYBE, they are lying scum bags who are rolling in cash. Here is a hint, next time you claim to be on the edge of bankruptcy, park your mercs OUT of view of the camera!
There seems to be an odd cultural difference for some reason in MMO's, although to be fair I should perhaps also put this party on age.
Aion and similar titles are often defended because they are very pretty... no they are not. They are flashy, but that is not the same as pretty. But when you are 12 or asian, that seems to be the case. Consider a tricked out city car, or if you are really gay an American Chopper versus the clean lines of an e-type. No e-type needs blue leds.
The Asian MMO's seem to play similar to a hack&slash, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bABf-SL3rQQ&feature=related the action takes a while to get going, but notice what happens when he hits an enemy. HUGE floating damage numbers. No western MMO would do that, you have a health bar somewhere on your hud that tells you this. It might seem a small difference but think about what single player games have huge floating damage numbers and which do not. Beat-em-ups and hack&slash games, Mortal Kombat and Bayonetta (sorry if they are mispelled, they are not my kind of game) vs Fallout and well any Bioware game (why are there only two RPG makers?). I dare say that while I did enjoy a bit of Diablo, on the whole the two types of games cater to different types of players.
Aion looks pretty, if you like flashy, at first glance, but its beauty is really only skin deep, it has the same very basic character customization that all asian MMO's have. There is no depth to flash and it lacks functionality. You swing a huge sword around in the same basic animation forever and it never has anything to do with the damage. You can sweep straight through an enemy and miss and do a move on enemy behind you 100 meters and score an instant kill. It is the ultimate example of a spreadsheet game with a disco lightening show bolted on top. Great if you like that, but since servers are being merged, apparently not many do.
Perhaps Asian MMO's are just meant to be played differently, you don't play Diablo when you want to loose yourself in a fantasy world and its rich characters do you? It is often claimed Koreans especially play their games in the social settings of a Internet cafe, were they play for long stretches at a time but do chat, drink, smoke at the same time. A western player is more likely to play alone, at home and be limited to the interaction in the game. I get the impression that a western player expects more downtime between fighting. He has few, smaller battles that give him what he needs. While a Asian player expects to be pounding enemies for an hour straight.
As said, these are impressions, but on the whole, if you want to play Aion coming from a western MMO background, you better be ready for the differences. Expect to grind. Expect the best quests to be on the level of the worsed western quests. Expect player killing. Don't expect raiding. Expect PvP being the only end-game content. Expect items shops. Expect them to matter.
It can be fun, but it is NOT the same as a western game. Really, it is Bayonetta vs Dragon Age. As long as you go into the game knowing this, you might be pleasantly surprised. Sadly many people didn't and expected WoW
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. Winston Churchill
There is a reason democracy works with majority rule, because if you had to listen to every single individual, every stakeholder in the country, you would never get anything done and run a real risk of ending up listening to the loudest party.
In MMO land, the loudest party is often the Player Killer. PK ala Ultima Online, so beloved it was ripped from that game and every western game released after it that didn't have it did better. Yes UO fans, UO might have been first, it might have done things no other game has done BUT it also didn't manage to get a large number of subscribers. According to wikipedia it PEAKED at 250.000. Eve claims to have reached 300.000 and that game is considered to be niche. So a small game by a no-name developer working with its own IP has reached more subscribers then a triple A title working with a well known IP. That should tell you something.
Of course, UO did launch before broadband connections were common and was exploring newer ground, and of course popularity says nothing about quality, but read posts about MMO discussions sometime. Just how can it be that so many claim UO is the best when so few played it? More people have played EVE. A SHIT load more played Everquest. Even Star Wars Galaxies reached more people.
If the PK in UO was the thing to have, then UO would have reached more people. In fact, if PvP was so popular, then pure PvP games would do better. But Darkfall, Age of Conan and indeed EVE aren't doing all that well compared to PvE heavier titles like Lord of the Rings Online and of course World of Warcraft. So do you as a developer listen to the countless forum posts demanding unrestricted player killing and full body loot? They are certainly vocal, so surely that is what the players want? Well yes, on the forums, not when it comes to actually playing and PAYING for the game.
I have made the mistake of following the forums of several games in the past before I grew up and you can see a certain trend, the people who are playing and PAYING are to busy to be on the forum. EVE might be an exception here, because it is by its nature far more of a game where you organize outside the game world, it is a business sim to many and so the forums might actually be useful for other things then ranting. But this is not the case on many game forums. If you go to the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic site you can find half the posts demanding it to be free-to-play or else the poster won't play it without paying for it (the horror!) and the other half trying to come up with someway to make it seem attractive for other players to be their content (bounty hunters wanting PK but having wised up that they need to wrap it up in a pretty package). Real players have got better things to do, the game won't be out for a year, and really, Bioware probably already made their mind up about the game. Even if they wanted to listen to the forum posters (who are unlikely to be their full audience), where would you find the resources to implement everything? What do you pick?
Oh, the thingy that the forum posters wanted and you already wanted to do? Listening to your users, you run the severe risk of listening to yes-men. Just see the actions by people on this site. Don't like what someone says? mod them down. As a developer, if you are told by one person that you are doing the best job ever and another comes out with a detailed plan of how the game could be far far better but everything the developer believes and stands for is wrong, who does he listen to?
EVE might be in a luxury position in that it grew slowly and might have attracted an audience that wants to play the game that it is. But many titles, especially big budget ones attract all kinds, including people that should just play a different game. You probably won't find many EVE players demanding the game to be more solo friendly and that everyone should be able to afford the biggest ship after soloing for a month and then be able to do everything in the game. But that is EXACTLY what people demand in every other MMO.
Read some MMO forums, then tell me that listening to your audience is a good idea.
Not everything is about terrorism, it just sells now to call it that, but this kind of stuff went on during the cold war, it is a known fact that various armies (or rather navies) have used divers and small subs to sneak into harbours to blow stuff up. It is very difficult to protect against them and ship by their nature make high value targets. If you can sink or at least severely damage a carrier with just a small team... well that would be very nice indeed. Better then having to send in a fleet of your own to brawl it out on the open seas. Ask the Japanese how well that goes against a carrier.
And at war, if you blow up a tanker, that could cause even more damage when that goes up. Just ask the Americans at Pearl Harbor.
This seal defence is nothing more then having guard dogs around an army base. Or shouldn't we have them either because no terrorist would be silly enough to attack one of them either? Oh way, they did.
I for one think it is a good idea that they got guard seals around floating nuclear power stations, possibly armed with nuked, sitting on top of aviation fuel.
Amazing that even after Pearl Harbor you still think that in times of relative peace (and the US is involved in two wars) you don't have to guard your stuff. If I wanted to start a war, I would make sure to first disable what I can of the US fleet, build some small subs, strap high explosives to them, and bring them in to the harbors.
Read up on the Tirpitz and how it was disabled for the duration of WW2.
He used terror to further his agenda. That makes him a terrorist. White people can be terrorists you know, and black people can be president, regardless of what McVeigh would have thought of that.
And at some places people PAY to be put through a strip search, sniffed by a dog, publicly humiliated and probed by a big guy with a grudge.
Doesn't mean I want this top happen to me... well at least not when I am trying to catch a flight... maybe if it is delayed, you know, to kill the time... If I put a sausage in my luggage, will that trigger that sniffer dog and his hunky handler?
Google has simply labelled "cougar" to be an adult term, and adult ads are not allowed on its network. Yet other ads with the same or even stronger adult theme are allowed. The same company has a site for older men seeking younger women, and that one is allowed.
So it seems Google is being very sexist about it. Probably not a high level decision, just someone who let his/her own personal views put a word on the banned word list. I don't think Google really wants to ban all the adult themed ads, it is a lot of money they would be throwing away. 100k in advertising for one site only. Even Google is going to feel it if its puritans stance is now going to force it to block all the sites aimed at men as well.
It must be me, but I can never bring up to much sympathy for criminals.
Oh, he had aspergers. Okay, fine with me. Lock him in an institution then since by his own admission, he cannot stop himself from breaking the law, therefor the change of it happening again are high indeed.
Maybe it is just because every single criminal has an excuse and somehow their mental disability NEVER EVER has interfered with them before, nor should it after they are let go. Odd that eh? "Your Honor, I am insane so let me go, but I should not be locked up in an insane asylum because the moment I am out of here I am perfectly sane again." Somehow aspergers only seems to show up in people who are clearly a bit off but do not commit crimes or in people who commit crimes where nobody noticed it before or deemed it serious enough to take action.
Facing the consequences of your actions. Must be an out of date concept. Quick find me a disease I can use to get out of it.
And don't mod me down, asperges made me do it!
And perhaps I am just fucking tired of parking my bike outside a busy supermarket and when I come back I find that someone had tried to steal it before noticing it is locked, with hundreds of people around but if you kick the shit of them you are the one going to jail. Frankly this guy gets on my nerves. He has two choices, go to jail and I hope he has the shit raped out of him or be treated as the mentally retarded person unable to be responsible for his actions he claims to be. You can't have it both ways. Either you are free with responsibilities or you are not. Pick one.
You assume that a very widescreen setup gives you a wider vision. That the monitors on each side become sideviews. That is how flightsim setups work, but do games support this at all?
I don't think the gaps are that big a deal, cars have them and who cares about that?
Mostly I think this is a case of penis envy: "I can't afford a multi monitor setup, therefor it is stupid."
of course a single monitor that size would be better, but they just ain't available. You can buy three high quality 1980 monitors plus this video card for a 2500 monitor and then you still got only 30 inch. HDTV? Well sure, if you want to sit a mile off so you don't notice the low resolution.
I just wonder what the monitors are they use in newsrooms, I seen several setups with no gap at all, probably expensive but it proves the tech is out there. Ofcourse you can always buy that rounded dell monitor:P
Those winglets are just a good idea period. lots of aircraft use them, not just aircraft that are having trouble with the wing length. Just google images with "winglets". Since winglets have been "discovered" it just makes sense to use them, because just making straight wings is wasteful.
And the wings on the designs just look long because they are so thin, they are not longer then current aircraft. They are just thinner, but that is not against regulations, just hard to engineer.
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Lost is a "what do you think it means" show. That is its function, it allows you to discuss what you think happened with others. This is a recognized form of story telling, a slight variation on the "pan out" before the final ending that is often used in horror. I remember one movie about the world being overrun by spiders, it ends with the survivors locked up in a house and you pan out and see the entire world covered in a webbing. What happens next? That is up to the audience.
The problem is that story genres are way to limited to truly catogarize stories. A mystery ala The Orient Express is totally different from a mystery like Columbo (who done it vs how does he find out). Lost is a mystery in that it creates mystery and then leaves it to the audience.
A manga version of it is Yokohama Shopping Trip if you like. A world that is ours but with lots of differences and we the audience are never told why or what it means. Why is there a plane flying forever in the sky? Why were robots created. Why do they carry weapons when people do not. Why is the world ending? In YKK this sense of mystery is not meant to be solved, in a way it is like the question "What can change the nature of a man" in Planescape Torment. Whatever answer you think is right, is the correct one. Because it is the answer you choose after following the story.
In YKK you could imagine a nuclear war having taken place. Or global warming or an asteroid/vulcano. Whatever you come up with, that says something about you and that is the story. Your own imagination adds to the story.
The problem with Lost is that it tries to do both. Create a mystery world where your own mind fills in the blanks and that forms the story for YOU a single viewer AND create defined answers that you got to accept as the truth. It provides mystery but then doesn't seem to know how to deal with it. Leave the audience wondering or give them answers.
On the whole, if you didn't feel the need to watch it so far, I wouldn't bother. If it had stayed true to either solving mysteries or leaving people wondering it would have been great, but right now it is just a mess and you can't escape the feeling that confusion is trying to pass itself of for depth.
On the contrary, most children would murder someone if they had the chance.
Why do you think child soldiers are so popular? Because you want a soldier who can barely lift a rifle? or because you want someone who murders without compassion or feeling?
Children are NOT nice.
It is simpler to be complex then simple. Take the shortest sci-fi story: "The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door..."
It is very very simple but could you have written it? Probably not.
There is another, although this is more of an intro, close to the classic Star Wars into: "That morning the sun rose in the west."
In one sentence we establisch that this is a different world then we know, just as when Luke Skywalker gazed at two setting suns. This is HARD, we have seen countless sci-fi movies that try to create elaborate imaginary worlds and going totally overboard. Compare the difference between Star Wars Cantina and any music scene in Star Trek TOS. The latter tries to hard, tries to introduce to many fancible objects that in the end just looks like somebody is playing a bicycle wheel.
And for story telling, much the same applies. If I was a really good writer, I wouldn't need this rambling rant, I would have been able to make my point in a single paragraph.
Lost is the product of a writer commitee that didn't know how to write a REALLY good mystery, so they just kept ladling things on and called confusion mystery. Twin Peaks did much the same thing although that was more confusion being mistaken for depth.
And its commercial success works like the emperors clothes. Surely you are not going to say that you "don't get it" when everyone who says they are really smart claims to get it? You got to watch it even if deep down you think the plot was created by taking every b-script written and jumbling the pages, because else you are just one of the plebs that don't get good tv.
Well, I am calling the emperor naked. I can see his dangle and it ain't anything special.
But there will forever people trying to claim there is more to it, because else they would have to admit they watch 5 seasons of the emperors dangly bits. Sometimes there just isn't any depth in a story. Do those same people wonder about the shortest story and look for hidden clues in the two lines as to what might be going on? Here is a hint: NOTHING. Whatever you imagine is going on and at the same time nothing. That is the brilliance of the "story". The author doesn't need an ending because you make up the ending and that is the ending for you.
Ah well, lets see, we should have another decade or two before the next "mystery" show gets aired. Should be about time for another program about a strong independent woman who sleeps with every man she meets and has no other dream then getting married while bonking the navy.
The way to get both performance and storage right now is to by TWO disks. An amazing concept I know. Who would have thought it was possible to get more then one HD/SSD into a PC.
Every single story about SSD's seems to bring out the idiots who want everything on one disk. Good thing these guys ain't farmers or they would be trying to plow the field with a Ferrari or cruise town with a tractor.
This drive is only of use to people who can't afford a real SSD and are limited to a laptop with only one drive bay and even then you would get far better performance with a normal SSD and an external drive for your porn collection.
Yes yes, there are people who use a laptop AND have need for far bigger datasets but on the whole, those people also need far greater access speeds then a traditional laptop HD can offer. I find it amazing to see someone claim he needs to edit video on a laptop with a 500gb 2.5 inch HD running at 5400 rpm. Who are you trying to kid?
And this drive won't be much help here. 4GB is just a cache file, if you are lucky it caches the right files but if you are doing complex stuff these "smart" caches often get horribly confused and start caching the wrong data. Like Vista trying to cache torrented files. Yes, I know it accesses the file a lot but please don't try and cache a 10gb file on the same HD. What's the fucking point? If you for instance will be running a large database from this drive, I am willing to bet its cache performance will degrade as it simply has to much to cache. Small caches only work when a small amount of files is requested a lot and the rest isn't. Like a porn collecton on your OS drive. Video editing, databases, filesharing always screw up caches.
If you really want performance in a laptop, spring for one with two drive bays, put as much memory in it as it can hold and get an SSD and a HD. A real SSD not one of the cheap ones some laptop companies put inside. An SSD is NOT just a fast HD, they truly are in a class of their own. And even if you got only a small single SSD, then you can still save space by putting your music/porn on a flash card or usb stick instead.
I wonder if people can ever get it into their heads that an SSD is about speed, not about capacity. Then again, since every single netbook these days comes with a 360gb slow ass HD instead of small but fast SSD, I think I might be fighting a loosing battle. Seems the average customer can only judge something if the number is bigger.
That robots can do very gentle moves is already known and not really that revolutionary. We have had machines that produce complex or fragile products for a long time.
What a robot/android needs to be capable of is to do these actions on its own, in the right circumstance and adjusted to the environment.
So, can this robot be programmed to perform an X amount of moves that result in a musical performance (an animatronic) or can it be fed a piece of music and then play it on its own? Can it be told to go to room X and perform for patient Y the music that patient requests?
Animatronics have long been capable of producing very life like results, but nobody is about to suggest that Jim Henson/ILM are the future of robots/androids.
Yes, for a while these kind of performances served a purpose as it was very hard for early robotics to produce gentle movements. But we have solved the problem of the robot arm not crushing a human being, the AI element is what is lacking. We have the capacity to have a robot pick up an egg, but no robot so far can do it on its own so far.
Nice performance, but I like to know how much of it is a robot, and how much a animatronic. Anyone got the answer?
Yeah, it is a far better game platform, except for the controls but who needs controls to play a game?
Talk about not getting the point. This ain't about CPU power, it is about having all those controls available on the hardware.
What next, an article on a sports car being slammed because a jet fighter is far faster so race that instead?
The US position is understandable as is the position of the rest of the world.
The US is gearing itself more and more to an IP economy, sell knowledge/ideas rather then the products themselves. Apple thinks of the iPod and gets paid for this idea while the actual production and shipping can be done somewhere else. The US is not involved at all in a iPod sold in Holland. So how does Apple ensure it gets paid if not with the enforcement of the concept of IP that tells people you can't just copy their design?
With software and media content, who cares who made it originally? Despite claims by MS that copies of its software have malware pre-installed (they must be thinking of Sony's PC, that now come with a paid for feature to get a clean install) the fact is that I can save myself a lot of money by just heading over to the piratebay for my game PC. (And yes I do still buy games, just not the OS and no I don't care about a raid because I got dozens of licenses lying around from machines that got liberated with the help of the penguin)
And for me, a MS license is not all that expensive for someone living on minimum income, in a nation where a license can come close to a months or even years wages... well the choice is even easier.
The US by continuing to turn into a knowledge only culture (describing the US as a knowledge culture, I am going to have to hand in my EU citizen card for this one) is doing the samething the Brits did pre-WW2. "Why should we produce our own food when we can have foreigners do this for us cheaper and can then use our country side for hunting instead". Capital idea, except that nasty Mr Hitler threw a spanner in the works by sinking the ships bringing in the food. What a rotter.
The knowledge/IP economy only works when everyone is willing to play along. It is easy to argue that everyone benefits but clearly not everyone seems to agree. With a physical goods economy (the one the US got really really big on) it is easier to force people to play along. You can just stop shipments if someone breaks the rules. And it is rather hard to steal 1000tons of goods. Just ask the somali pirates what happens to you when you try to steal US cargo. "TRIPLE SYNCHRONIZED HEADSHOT!" (in Unreal commentator voice). And that is if you are a lucky pirate. The russian put some in a rubber boat that just somehow managed to sink... well worse things happen at sea, especially if you upset russians.
But IP? You don't even have to go to the source, the "victim" just happily sends it to you. If the US wants to sell a DVD in China, it got to send the DVD and then just anyone can copy it/steal it. It is an insane system to rely on for your economy. You don't see Shell going around filling everyone's gas tank then hoping they will pay up?
What is China's motivation for respecting US IP? So that money from its economy floats to the west? How does that aid them? (Well it would allow the US to at least start paying some of its massive debts back) The US is banking its economy on a sector were you really depend on the kindness of strangers. Which seems odd since that is not really what capitalists are best at.
When Germany declared war on Britian, they had to spend a fortune on submarines to attempt to "sink" the UK's economy. If China were to declare war, all it would need to do is stop payments for IP. Oh and stop sending goods. No need to sink cargo vessels, just not let them sail anymore. The battle for the pacific would be won with a piece of paper. What would the US do, bomb Chinese ports to force the sunken ships to sail? Block Chinese banks so the money for IP couldn't be transferred even more?
An IP based economy relies far to much on the recognition that IP has to be paid for and to anyone who doesn't have IP that recognition has no positive sides. China/Russia/Canada/EU/Africa do not gain anything from recognizing US IP. Sure, they probably play along because their politicians either want to keep the peace or are corrupted by lobbyists, but how long will that
These changes won't seem dangerous, to anyone who believes them.
It won't seem strange to a UFO believer if the school curriculum started to include advice on how to deal with abductions.
A child love advocate wouldn't find it strange for lessons to be given in how to blow the teacher.
It all depends on how you view the world.
What seems clear is that the new system seems to want to rewrite history, this is not without precedent. A certain german did pretty much the same thing. What was his name again?
Now the truth of the matter is that any approach to any subject will most likely be biased:
10. A new addition to world history: "Explain how Arab rejection of the State of Israel has led to ongoing conflict." Now that's not at all a loaded statement, is it?
This must be the ultimate example, how exactly would you instead introduce this subject without it showing your own bias to this subject?
The sentence itself is true, it was the will of the internation community that Israel would be founded, the territory belonged to the UK and the UK agreed to this. The arab world sought to defy the will of the UN and this has led to the conflict. But there is far more going on in the background. First of all, the UN members had their own reason to found Israel. The US as a bastion against communism, the USSR as a bastion against capitalism (yes really).
Take the insistence by some that the area be called Palestine. A loaded thing in itself, since we are dealing with ancient history for a region that has had many names. Why pick that one? Why pick the name chosen by the romans to remove the original name of Judea after the Jewish revolt? Odd that the occupied terroritories are using the name of an occupier?
And it don't really matter what you think yourself on the subject, just trying to show how insanely complex a unbiased answer is.
If there is current bias in the school books, then the answer is to neatralize that bias, not to slam it in the other direction.
And I really don't think that a nation who thinks that healthcare means death camps needs anymore right-wing bias do you?
In my day we simply dealt with annoying customers by messing with their food. Kids these days, no imagination.
Everyone in England thinks he is a buffoon, who still somehow manages to earn a very high salary indeed as an editor, get his government pay and somehow won the election for Major from Ken Livingston (who himself was an outsider, a left wing socialist who ran against his own party candidate when right wing "labour" Tony Blair was still somewhat popular).
Search for "boris hignfy" on youtube, seriously funny stuff. The guy gets away with gaffs that people have torn Bush and Blair apart for. NO journalist even dares to jump on any slight mis pronunciation or botched fact Boris makes. It is BRILLIANT. He has given himself a license to say what he wants to say and not have to worry about weighing every word on a silver platter. Nobody will ruin his career because he "claimed to have invented the internet" or he mixed up the date the US declared independence.
Watch his appearances on the show and then realize he makes more money then you ever will.
You would be amazed how much Americans assume the entire world has a credit card or indeed is dying to get one. There are countless services and shop operating from US that only take credit cards, despite there being countless payment providers who have made it their business to offer the locally prefered solution around the world.
I seriously doubt this had anything to do with the 2 iPads per person limit. There have been a large number of European stores that sold the iPad for a huge profit or as a gimmick. Since it was also done by a reputable large store in Holland, I doubt this was done by someone going in with a dozen credit cards.
No, I just think this is just the arrogance of Apple execs who can't imagine someone not having or wanting a credit card.
Apple would hardly be alone in this.
I think the CD sounds is to full as in filled. The earlier music has clear notes, there different sounds are seperate. With the CD sound you get the feeling the creator wanted to make sure every single milli-second was filled with something and you get a soft version of the wall-of-sound effect.
The odd thing is that movie music makers also know when to go full orchestra and when to have just a handful of instruments playing. Less can be more.
I still hold a minute silence for the day game music died. When CD tracks from the consoles that never had proper sound hardware crept unto the PC and we got pre-recorded tracks and all the efforts to create music that could switch mood seamlessly were overthrown. Yet another reason console owners should be shunned by polite society.
And I suppose all those Jews were just fools for telling the Germans they were Jews? Silly buggers.
Are you REALLY suggesting that a draconian law is okay because you can always attempt to break the law?
Good news everyone, the anti-drug laws are not an issue, just keep your drugs in your pocket when you pass customs.
Bad news for the zoophilia lovers, horses stretch your pockets out.
He is our example, nobody can smooch tarmac like the pope.
Be fair, where else is a celibate nazi pedophile going to get some action?
Burn karma burn
Since when is 8gb of DDR2 maxed out these days? Sorry mate, but maxed out at the moment is something like 32gb of ddr3. And that would cost you more then a thousand still.
And if you can't compete on price, then compete on quality or go bust.
THAT is the free market. Companies SURE love the free market, except when it bites them in the ass. Understandable perhaps, but it is also understandable that since I am poor and you are rich and I cut your throat and take your cash. There is always an excuse to break the law but you can't run a country with excuses.
And I wouldn't put to much stock in those claimed small margins. Margins are what is between sale price and costs, but what makes up the costs? Huge bonusses? Well, then if small margins are the problem, cut the bonusses. odd that all these struggling chip makers don't seem to go bankrupt eh? Deal with farmers sometime. "it rained: we are in trouble". "the sun is shining: we are in trouble". "The wind is blowing: we are in trouble". Farmers are always in trouble and always need tax relieve. Odd that, no matter what the weather, farmers are in trouble and need lower taxes. It must be hard to be a farmer. Or MAYBE just MAYBE, they are lying scum bags who are rolling in cash. Here is a hint, next time you claim to be on the edge of bankruptcy, park your mercs OUT of view of the camera!
There seems to be an odd cultural difference for some reason in MMO's, although to be fair I should perhaps also put this party on age.
Aion and similar titles are often defended because they are very pretty... no they are not. They are flashy, but that is not the same as pretty. But when you are 12 or asian, that seems to be the case. Consider a tricked out city car, or if you are really gay an American Chopper versus the clean lines of an e-type. No e-type needs blue leds.
The Asian MMO's seem to play similar to a hack&slash, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bABf-SL3rQQ&feature=related the action takes a while to get going, but notice what happens when he hits an enemy. HUGE floating damage numbers. No western MMO would do that, you have a health bar somewhere on your hud that tells you this. It might seem a small difference but think about what single player games have huge floating damage numbers and which do not. Beat-em-ups and hack&slash games, Mortal Kombat and Bayonetta (sorry if they are mispelled, they are not my kind of game) vs Fallout and well any Bioware game (why are there only two RPG makers?). I dare say that while I did enjoy a bit of Diablo, on the whole the two types of games cater to different types of players.
Aion looks pretty, if you like flashy, at first glance, but its beauty is really only skin deep, it has the same very basic character customization that all asian MMO's have. There is no depth to flash and it lacks functionality. You swing a huge sword around in the same basic animation forever and it never has anything to do with the damage. You can sweep straight through an enemy and miss and do a move on enemy behind you 100 meters and score an instant kill. It is the ultimate example of a spreadsheet game with a disco lightening show bolted on top. Great if you like that, but since servers are being merged, apparently not many do.
Perhaps Asian MMO's are just meant to be played differently, you don't play Diablo when you want to loose yourself in a fantasy world and its rich characters do you? It is often claimed Koreans especially play their games in the social settings of a Internet cafe, were they play for long stretches at a time but do chat, drink, smoke at the same time. A western player is more likely to play alone, at home and be limited to the interaction in the game. I get the impression that a western player expects more downtime between fighting. He has few, smaller battles that give him what he needs. While a Asian player expects to be pounding enemies for an hour straight.
As said, these are impressions, but on the whole, if you want to play Aion coming from a western MMO background, you better be ready for the differences. Expect to grind. Expect the best quests to be on the level of the worsed western quests. Expect player killing. Don't expect raiding. Expect PvP being the only end-game content. Expect items shops. Expect them to matter.
It can be fun, but it is NOT the same as a western game. Really, it is Bayonetta vs Dragon Age. As long as you go into the game knowing this, you might be pleasantly surprised. Sadly many people didn't and expected WoW
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. Winston Churchill
There is a reason democracy works with majority rule, because if you had to listen to every single individual, every stakeholder in the country, you would never get anything done and run a real risk of ending up listening to the loudest party.
In MMO land, the loudest party is often the Player Killer. PK ala Ultima Online, so beloved it was ripped from that game and every western game released after it that didn't have it did better. Yes UO fans, UO might have been first, it might have done things no other game has done BUT it also didn't manage to get a large number of subscribers. According to wikipedia it PEAKED at 250.000. Eve claims to have reached 300.000 and that game is considered to be niche. So a small game by a no-name developer working with its own IP has reached more subscribers then a triple A title working with a well known IP. That should tell you something.
Of course, UO did launch before broadband connections were common and was exploring newer ground, and of course popularity says nothing about quality, but read posts about MMO discussions sometime. Just how can it be that so many claim UO is the best when so few played it? More people have played EVE. A SHIT load more played Everquest. Even Star Wars Galaxies reached more people.
If the PK in UO was the thing to have, then UO would have reached more people. In fact, if PvP was so popular, then pure PvP games would do better. But Darkfall, Age of Conan and indeed EVE aren't doing all that well compared to PvE heavier titles like Lord of the Rings Online and of course World of Warcraft. So do you as a developer listen to the countless forum posts demanding unrestricted player killing and full body loot? They are certainly vocal, so surely that is what the players want? Well yes, on the forums, not when it comes to actually playing and PAYING for the game.
I have made the mistake of following the forums of several games in the past before I grew up and you can see a certain trend, the people who are playing and PAYING are to busy to be on the forum. EVE might be an exception here, because it is by its nature far more of a game where you organize outside the game world, it is a business sim to many and so the forums might actually be useful for other things then ranting. But this is not the case on many game forums. If you go to the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic site you can find half the posts demanding it to be free-to-play or else the poster won't play it without paying for it (the horror!) and the other half trying to come up with someway to make it seem attractive for other players to be their content (bounty hunters wanting PK but having wised up that they need to wrap it up in a pretty package). Real players have got better things to do, the game won't be out for a year, and really, Bioware probably already made their mind up about the game. Even if they wanted to listen to the forum posters (who are unlikely to be their full audience), where would you find the resources to implement everything? What do you pick?
Oh, the thingy that the forum posters wanted and you already wanted to do? Listening to your users, you run the severe risk of listening to yes-men. Just see the actions by people on this site. Don't like what someone says? mod them down. As a developer, if you are told by one person that you are doing the best job ever and another comes out with a detailed plan of how the game could be far far better but everything the developer believes and stands for is wrong, who does he listen to?
EVE might be in a luxury position in that it grew slowly and might have attracted an audience that wants to play the game that it is. But many titles, especially big budget ones attract all kinds, including people that should just play a different game. You probably won't find many EVE players demanding the game to be more solo friendly and that everyone should be able to afford the biggest ship after soloing for a month and then be able to do everything in the game. But that is EXACTLY what people demand in every other MMO.
Read some MMO forums, then tell me that listening to your audience is a good idea.
Not everything is about terrorism, it just sells now to call it that, but this kind of stuff went on during the cold war, it is a known fact that various armies (or rather navies) have used divers and small subs to sneak into harbours to blow stuff up. It is very difficult to protect against them and ship by their nature make high value targets. If you can sink or at least severely damage a carrier with just a small team... well that would be very nice indeed. Better then having to send in a fleet of your own to brawl it out on the open seas. Ask the Japanese how well that goes against a carrier.
And at war, if you blow up a tanker, that could cause even more damage when that goes up. Just ask the Americans at Pearl Harbor.
This seal defence is nothing more then having guard dogs around an army base. Or shouldn't we have them either because no terrorist would be silly enough to attack one of them either? Oh way, they did.
I for one think it is a good idea that they got guard seals around floating nuclear power stations, possibly armed with nuked, sitting on top of aviation fuel.
Amazing that even after Pearl Harbor you still think that in times of relative peace (and the US is involved in two wars) you don't have to guard your stuff. If I wanted to start a war, I would make sure to first disable what I can of the US fleet, build some small subs, strap high explosives to them, and bring them in to the harbors.
Read up on the Tirpitz and how it was disabled for the duration of WW2.
He used terror to further his agenda. That makes him a terrorist. White people can be terrorists you know, and black people can be president, regardless of what McVeigh would have thought of that.
And at some places people PAY to be put through a strip search, sniffed by a dog, publicly humiliated and probed by a big guy with a grudge.
Doesn't mean I want this top happen to me... well at least not when I am trying to catch a flight... maybe if it is delayed, you know, to kill the time... If I put a sausage in my luggage, will that trigger that sniffer dog and his hunky handler?
And what to say of Lycid Lynx? Icanhascheezburger.com?
My god, women looking for sex are EVERYWHERE!
Thank god for slashdot, the one safe sanctuary free of sex! No change of running into a horny woman lusting after my body here.
Google has simply labelled "cougar" to be an adult term, and adult ads are not allowed on its network. Yet other ads with the same or even stronger adult theme are allowed. The same company has a site for older men seeking younger women, and that one is allowed.
So it seems Google is being very sexist about it. Probably not a high level decision, just someone who let his/her own personal views put a word on the banned word list. I don't think Google really wants to ban all the adult themed ads, it is a lot of money they would be throwing away. 100k in advertising for one site only. Even Google is going to feel it if its puritans stance is now going to force it to block all the sites aimed at men as well.
It must be me, but I can never bring up to much sympathy for criminals.
Oh, he had aspergers. Okay, fine with me. Lock him in an institution then since by his own admission, he cannot stop himself from breaking the law, therefor the change of it happening again are high indeed.
Maybe it is just because every single criminal has an excuse and somehow their mental disability NEVER EVER has interfered with them before, nor should it after they are let go. Odd that eh? "Your Honor, I am insane so let me go, but I should not be locked up in an insane asylum because the moment I am out of here I am perfectly sane again." Somehow aspergers only seems to show up in people who are clearly a bit off but do not commit crimes or in people who commit crimes where nobody noticed it before or deemed it serious enough to take action.
Facing the consequences of your actions. Must be an out of date concept. Quick find me a disease I can use to get out of it.
And don't mod me down, asperges made me do it!
And perhaps I am just fucking tired of parking my bike outside a busy supermarket and when I come back I find that someone had tried to steal it before noticing it is locked, with hundreds of people around but if you kick the shit of them you are the one going to jail. Frankly this guy gets on my nerves. He has two choices, go to jail and I hope he has the shit raped out of him or be treated as the mentally retarded person unable to be responsible for his actions he claims to be. You can't have it both ways. Either you are free with responsibilities or you are not. Pick one.
You assume that a very widescreen setup gives you a wider vision. That the monitors on each side become sideviews. That is how flightsim setups work, but do games support this at all?
I don't think the gaps are that big a deal, cars have them and who cares about that?
Mostly I think this is a case of penis envy: "I can't afford a multi monitor setup, therefor it is stupid."
of course a single monitor that size would be better, but they just ain't available. You can buy three high quality 1980 monitors plus this video card for a 2500 monitor and then you still got only 30 inch. HDTV? Well sure, if you want to sit a mile off so you don't notice the low resolution.
I just wonder what the monitors are they use in newsrooms, I seen several setups with no gap at all, probably expensive but it proves the tech is out there. Ofcourse you can always buy that rounded dell monitor :P
Those winglets are just a good idea period. lots of aircraft use them, not just aircraft that are having trouble with the wing length. Just google images with "winglets". Since winglets have been "discovered" it just makes sense to use them, because just making straight wings is wasteful.
And the wings on the designs just look long because they are so thin, they are not longer then current aircraft. They are just thinner, but that is not against regulations, just hard to engineer.