I have the USB adapter for the PS2 controller, which is pretty much all I need for games where I might use a gamepad.
Other than that, I have the SideWinder force feedback wheel, which is great for the various driving games I've played over the years, especially when they support the feedback well (as opposed to supporting it poorly, which many games do, in which case I just turn the feedback off), but it unfortunately has a giant wall-wart power supply and the model I have is serial, so any other game controller I want to hook up has to be USB (there went most of my older joysticks and game pads, but the PS2 controller again takes care of that).
As for the various MS SideWinder controllers, there're only 2 I really like, and that would be the wheel and a gamepad I bought a few years ago (before I got the PS2 USB converter), and for some reason they stopped making the gamepad a year or so ago, and the new version of the wheel doesn't look as good either (it's a bit smaller iirc).
MS just keeps making bad decisions on their game controllers, so of course they don't see good sales. Then again, maybe their expectations for sales were too high, especially given the number of different products they had, and the lack of controllers appealing to the flight sim crowd (though admittedly a small market, it's a market that will pay much more for a good stick).
My cell plan has unlimited local and US long distance calling, as long as I'm calling from this area. Basically that means my hands-free set is the perfect game-voice system. Unfortunately, the mic on the hands-free set doesn't extend out far enough to get past the speakers on the headphones I use.
Funny, considering Counter-Strike has had in-game voice capability since 1.4.
Last time I was playing TFC or dealing with it in leagues (it received the in-game voice capability around the same time as CS), very few people used the in-game capability in leagues.
That being said, most leagues had to choose whether to enable or disable it in their server cfg files, because some people were using it and many server admins were disabling it.
Sad how everything has to be a fad like the computer just because the newer machines can show more of Lara Croft's pixels.
Actually, the NES had to be a fad like everything else because most of us couldn't play games on our NES consoles without 10 minutes of cleaning cartridges and aligning them just right in the old front-load systems we bought 15 years ago. I've never seen an original NES system that didn't start having problems loading games after a few years, and most of us couldn't justify buying a 'new' NES console after buying 2 or 3 other consoles.
The article states that 61% of the players of the actual card game are between 12 and 17, while 67% of the players online are between 18 and 35. That could easily make the difference, though there's no shortage in this world of obnoxious punk-ass 18-35 year old people;)
but I'm a lot less willing to take a gamble on a game that's at the mercy of remote servers with unfinished code compared to just a regular computer game (which with only a few notably bad exceptions, generally has all its features in place at ship time).
Not to mention that if a regular game is in a buggy state (or you just find a crash that keeps you from continuing), you can either set it aside for a few months and come back to it later (and download the patches at any time, or not download them), or take it back to get at least some kind of trade-in value on it.
I bought planetside about a week ago. I keep getting the feeling 'I would really like this game if... I could stay connected I could get to a battle before it ended I could have at least some use besides cannon fodder within the first two hours of play There was at least an appearance that the developers were addressing the concerns of the players' etc.
Then the real bonus popped up when the developers admitted that the players are supposed to be able to get to the top level rather quickly. Normally that might be fine, given that it's pretty much an FPS game, but at that point you just have people dumping characters and restarting to figure out which combination of skills and weapons / vehicles / armour give them the best advantage. After that's done, you get uneven populations fighting over one continent or another.
Oh well, at least I figured all of this out in a week, and still have 3 more weeks to either figure out why I should stick around or cancel before they charge me for another month. Too bad I didn't wait longer so I could pick it up for $20 or so like I did with UO and EQ.
It really is a matter of perspective, and that is all that I was getting at by labelling it both. I am definitely in the former camp, and could spend whole pages of text arguing my point, but that is senseless. And I hope I have enough perspective to know that not everybody will agree with me, and will have their own good reasons for believing what they will.
But, like it or not, SC is a seminal game, and WC3 is enormously important as it will sell millions, and by copied and imitated for years to come.
To me, you sound like one of those people that didn't spend hundreds of hours on WarCraft 2 (or even the first WarCraft, for that matter). SC was just another evolutionary step on the ladder that eventually ended up at WC3. Personally, I don't see WC3 as anything spectacular other than the first step on the way to something else, which will probably be StarCraft 2 or WarCraft 4.
Nothing against SC really, as I truly enjoyed the game (except when it crashed during the single player game on a particular mission every time I played it, until the first patch). I just think a lot of people are missing some perspective on that title as well.
Maybe I'll install SC again to go through the expansion. I've been looking for something to play on the PC for a while, and what I'm looking for is probably something I already have anyway.
heh, I had to get down to the UK part to realize why this made any sense at all. Of course, while a good number of us in the US don't have to work at all on that day, Eidos has decided to torture those in the UK by asking them to play the damned game they rushed out the door to push up their numbers for the fiscal year. I think we all saw those reviews coming when we read this article: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid =03/06/18/ 067235&mode=thread&tid=127&tid=186&tid=206&tid=212
It might simply be the fact that a great deal of the sites are run completely over the internet, and many of the people have never seen each other before, and couldn't be bothered to send in a picture.
Japanese cars sell well in the United States, so well that we need to impose tarifs on imported cars to protect our car industry. The Japanese create very good quality and innovative products
umm, from http://edition.cnn.com/2002/BUSINESS/asia/09/12/ja pan.cars/ an article regarding Japan's recent calls for free trade on cars: Japan itself already has no tariffs on passengers cars, trucks and parts, and although the United States, its major export market, also imposes no duties on cars, it has a tariff of 25 percent on trucks.
Of course, in the past there were significant tariffs imposed on foreign cars, mostly to protect the auto industry during the fuel shortages in the '70's.
Meanwhile, Japan has a 400-500% tariff on rice (someone mentioned in a different post that the Japanese don't even buy US rice, this is why, although Japan is one of the world's largest importers of US rice).
Fortunately, tariffs on electronics are low in most countries, with the EU's 14% tariffs considered very high.
I can't just take the gas station just because the original owner died years after selling it to someone else. Creating a work for profit is like starting a business. Get it?
Except that if I want to buy gas I can go somewhere else if I don't like the owner of that gas station. Copyright is a government-granted monopoly over a creative work that is meant to encourage artists to reveal their creations to the world, under the assumption that it will go into the public domain. I *could* get the work illegally, or try to find it used, if I don't care for the company or people that own the copyright, but the first would be illegal and the second would be next to impossible for many works.
The simple fact is that current copyright laws mean that I will never see any current works in the public domain, and probably won't see Elvis, the Beatles, or anything else from the 1950's and 60's, either. Elvis has been dead nearly as long as I've been alive, and it appears that Ringo may become the last Beatle at some point, and will probably outlive me.
I think the other poster put it fairly well. I don't think that rape can be portrayed in a positive light, and I don't mean to show hate towards other cultures.
All I mean is simply that Americans tend towards ignoring social problems, or trying to litigate away any attempt to enlighten them about those problems, or even portray them in any way (good, bad, positive, negative, doesn't matter).
Taking pleasure in viewing rape is not a cut & dried issue any more than whether or not rape should be portrayed in the first place. In America, it's taboo to portray it at all. Cannibal Corpse and Nirvana both had to come out in the past to defend themselves for writing songs about it, and the only cases in which I can even think of anyone in America getting away without a huge negative contraversy towards them would be victims of rape, and in many cases they are treated very poorly when they come forward (either through art or just through the legal system).
My point is that in America people have a tendency to actively push rape away from any artist's available stories, and that it's done not for the benefit of victims of rape, but for the benefit of the people that believe they can ignore the problem, or the people that believe exposure to it will lead to people performing it. The unfortunate fact the latter group overlooks is that rapists don't generally watch or listen to anything that depicts rape, and that there are vast amounts of somewhat popular material depicting rape in other cultures where rape does not occur more often, and is not seen in any better light in terms of crimes committed than it is here.
What, I can show a character (playable or not) kill someone while carjacking (punishable by death in California) in a game, but I can't show a character raping someone(punishable by as little as 3 years in prison, again in California; transmitting HIV in the process adds an aggravated assault charge)? What if the player character is a cop and has the ability to stop a rape in progress?
Things change. Millions of court cases and extra laws on the subject have changed the point of copyright. You can go all the way back to the constitution, but if you ignore everything but the basics then there are lots of things that don't make sense. Like the original founding fathers didn't want women to be able to vote. I guess that you feel the same way, since you think that only the original definition matters.
The original founding fathers also permitted for the courts to interpret what they wrote and for Congress to ammend to what they wrote. In the case of copyright terms, the courts have allowed the clarifications made in various laws to stand, or have not ruled on them. In the case of women being able to vote, Congress ammended the Constitution, so if you go back to the Constitution, it's there, as long as you read it long enough to figure out that you can drink alcohol (if you're of legal age; if you read it long enough to find out you can't drink alcohol, and then stop, then you probably won't get to the women's right to vote part).
So I guess you want copyright terms to be only last the term of life of the author?
I believe that copyrights should be completely in the control of the original author, and that no person or company should be able to continue to profit from those rights after they have died. Essentially that's the same thing as saying they should last the life of the author.
In reality, though, I tend to believe there is some point to extended copyrights or fixed term copyrights (ie X number of years rather than simply the life of the author, since the author may die before X number of years, or even before the initial profitable term of the work is up). For instance, if record companies didn't own the rights to a number of works that were recorded before CDs came along, those works may never have been released on CDs, and would be limited to significantly less portable formats (portable in terms of what you can do with them and how easily, I consider a casette tape more portable in terms of being able to take it somewhere). Movies would still be relegated to VHS (and some are due to concerns over whether or not DVDs can be easily copied, ie people don't want other people to be able to copy their work).
Overall, though, I just don't like the fact that Michael Jackson is getting more money than Paul McCartney when I buy a Beatles record;) I don't like the fact that record companies can lock up music for huge numbers of years until the original source is so degraded as to be worthless. I don't believe anyone should be able to take artistic works off the market and control copies of that work for so long that almost no one is aware that work ever existed, or so that those interested in the work can't have access to it.
It's been said that the source tape for Star Wars was in very poor condition before Lucas remastered it for re-release back in '97. Imagine the condition of other works from the '70's at this point in time, or works from even earlier, such as material that Disney's been holding onto. Under the original copyright laws specified in the Constitution, those works belong to the public domain, or at least must be released to the public domain after a limited time. Today, because of the extensions on copyright, source material for copyrighted works is deteriorating so that those works may never enter the public domain. The only thing saving a lot of work now is the efforts to digitize a great deal of work for re-release, but a large amount has been left behind, too, simply because some believe that the market is not there, or not big enough to justify the conversion and publishing.
Even with the 'digital age', with most new audio works released on CDs, people don't seem to understand that the source material is usually recorded at much higher quality, even if it's digitally recorded, than what is released, and the case is similar with movies (though in at least as many cases as not the source material is lower quality with video). Slowly we're receiving more books with digital sources (especially since most writing has been submitted to publishing in digital format for years), but we can't get digital copies of a great deal of it, and digitizing a book is a process that takes a great deal of time unless you have a somewhat high-priced copier (and tends to be destructive to the original source if you take the faster route).
I'm not overly concerned about whether or not people will still be able to listen to Elvis and the Beatles when I'm 50, because we have them on CD, which is better than what we've had in the past as far as being able to preserve the work. I can listen to Bach and Beethoven, but only because people have preserved or found paper on which they (or others) wrote their pieces. The only reason I have Carnivore's CDs is because their record label finally decided to release them on that format 15 years after their original release (though there was an earlier compilation that removed some songs to put 2 albums on one disc), mostly because the sing
Am I violating content by (to coin a phrase) "platform shifting"? If I paid for, say, Pac Man (it must have been in 3-4 classic game collections / updates I bought over the last few years) and I can legally play it on the PC, Dreamcast and gamecube, am I "entitled" to play it on MAME?
Actually, I somewhat wonder about that myself. If the actual game is unchanged from one platform to another, does it matter whether the ROM I downloaded is the same as the ROM I own a cartridge (or other disc) for? I think the safest way to go is to stick with the same ROM (ie use an NES emulator to play NES games), because you never know what the copyright owner will come up with as differences between say the arcade and NES version of Donkey Kong.
Unfortunately, the law isn't completely clear. What is clear, though, is that if you have the same exact item, you're fine, just like you're perfectly fine if you copy your vinyl onto CD. What has yet to be clarified in music, though (in a way that's similar to your ROM question) is whether or not you can copy someone else's CD if the content is the same as that of your vinyl records. If the content hasn't been 'remastered', you're probably on much safer grounds with this than if it was 'remastered', even though it's the same songs with the same copyright holders.
You see, it's legal to kill tresspassers, so I just put up "no tresspassing" signs on my lawn (I have a house on a street corner) and when people cut across my lawn (even an inch or two!) I shoot them with my rifle from my attic window! Sure the cops always show up, but I just tell them "They were tresspassing, so technically it was legal for me to kill them." and they just go "ohhh! Yeah, we'll get these bodies out of here for you now." and leave.
Just a hint, drag the bodies into your house and make sure they can't figure out the people were in your lawn when you shot them. It's also a good idea to shoot them in the face so the cops don't think they were attempting to leave your house when you shot them. You'll still get taken in and have to go to trial, but as long as you can prove they were in your house and you didn't invite them there, you're within your rights to have shot them.
IT'S PERFECT, JUST LIKE YOUR IDEA THAT BUYING A THING ONCE ENTITLES YOU TO DOWNLOAD COPIES OF IT AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN FOR EVER!!!!!!!
Actually, it's perfectly legal for you to do if you still have your original copy. Look up fair use laws sometime, you can make copies for personal use all day, and there's no difference in the eyes of the law whether you made the copy yourself or had someone else make the copy for you. Now, if you can't prove that you own the game, you're screwed, just like you would be if the RIAA found that Britney Spears CD you downloaded last week on your hard drive but you didn't have the actual CD.
The Beatles came out with lots of albums in the 60's that were very popular--they became rich on their work. 30 years later I still have to pay someone in order to legally listen to Beatles music. This is ridiculous. The original creators of the music have already reaped fantastic financial rewards
and that someone, in most cases, is either Michael Jackson or the last remaining living Beatle (other than Ringo). Unfortunately, it doesn't really matter who wrote the songs, either, as Michael Jackson owns the rights to songs written by Paul, and Paul owns the rights to songs he did not write. As long as the Beatles' original albums are still available in new formats (or at least in unprotected formats), and Paul is still alive, I'm ok with paying for those albums. When Paul's dead, I don't really want Ringo, Michael Jackson, and some record exec splitting the profits, so I won't buy Beatles albums any more. Luckily, I think I'll manage to have every Beatles CD I want before Paul kicks the bucket.
A few opinions on the subject doesn't change the law. Copyright violations are illegal. Morality is a different issue.
Many people mistake copyright as being about money--it's not. It's about control. If a company doesn't want people playing their games anymore...well they can't stop those who have already purchased legitimate copies of those games, but they can stop future people from buying the games by stopping production. That doesn't give the public the right to pirate the games.
Fortunately for most of us, there's no copyright issue involved in downloading a ROM for a game we already own. At best, there may be a violation of a license agreement in playing the game on a platform for which it was not released (ie an emulator), and in many cases those types of agreements did not exist on the original cartridges. MAME may in some cases be a different situation, as those involve emulation of arcade machines, but even then there are cases where those games were offered on other platforms as well.
You do not violate copyright by downloading or otherwise moving content to another medium for personal use. You violate it by downloading or otherwise copying content of which you do not have a legal copy, or by making copies available to those that do not have legal copies (which is where the whole debate comes from in the first place).
I despise the fact that so many people (especially copyright holders) believe that people use P2P software (or other distribution methods) only to download material of which they do not or never will own legal copies. Personally, I would never own a copy of Metallica's new album if my only exposure to it were through the single song they currently have on the radio and MTV, but if I could listen to the other songs through one method or another, I might buy it (especially since it's dirt cheap compared to other CDs right now). Normally I'd listen to a friend's CD, but thanks to their last two studio efforts, I don't know anyone that would buy one of their CDs any more.
I love it how quick you guys are to call Noah's ark fantasy. Do you love to put us in the same category as those who think the world is flat? Galileo was a Christian. Today's evolutionary mindset is hardened into concrete ignorance. It is an attitude much like the portrayed Catholic stubborness against Galileo's ideas.
Let's see, Genesis 6, from the New International Version (biblegateway.com) Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God. 10 Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth. 11 Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence. 12 God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. 13 So God said to Noah, "I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. 14 So make yourself an ark of cypress [3] wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. 15 This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. [4] 16 Make a roof for it and finish [5] the ark to within 18 inches [6] of the top. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks. 17 I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. 18 But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark-you and your sons and your wife and your sons' wives with you. 19 You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. 20 Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive. 21 You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them." 22 Noah did everything just as God commanded him.
Personally, I can accept that there was a great flood (and possibly more than one), but I can't accept the idea that a man, his wife, three sons, and their wives, as well as 2 of each animal on this earth were the only survivors thanks to the 450x75x45 boat Noah was told to build by God. Maybe Noah did build the ark and try to gather all of the species of earth (at least the area seen as earth to Noah) to survive the flood. Maybe he even survived, despite the fact that a flood of that magnitude would be very likely to create seas which would capsize this vessel. Was he the only one to survive, even in the small part of the world he might have considered to be all of it? Not likely unless he was completely ignorant of the world beyond walking distance.
Oh, and Galileo wasn't excommunicated for believing the world was round, he was excommunicated for believing it wasn't the center of the universe (the sun was the center of the universe! oh wait, that's probably not true, either), due to his own observations through a telescope. He was simply looking at the two views of the position of the earth in the universe (Aristotlean (the earth is the center) vs. Copernicus' view that the earth revolved around the sun), and choosing the one that best fit his observations. Very few people in Galileo's time believed the world was flat (in fact, the same could be said before his time, when Columbus sailed, or ~60 years later when Magellan sailed around the globe, ~100 years before Galileo).
Whether you intended to or not (assuming that the Slashdot crowd was all pro evolution), you offend when you make comments like these. I have spent a great deal of time reading and arguing evolution - I know it well compared to most people (but not compared, necessarily, to most of the slashdot crowd). And I think the labelling of Noah's ark as fantasy is just an easy summary showing signs of a deep rooted ignorant stubborness.
My comments were not meant to offend, but in general I simply do not care if I do offend, because some people are too easily offe
I've been playing quite a bit, mostly solo, trying to get a feel for the game, heading for hot-spots, etc. I've managed to 'level up' (in as much as that can be said for this game) twice, and get a handful of kills, some during fairly important battles. Unfortunately, it seems that most of the time when I get near any substantial battle I get disconnected. I haven't quite figured out why this keeps happening, especially since my ping times don't seem outrageous (100-200 most of the time, though I see some very odd numbers in the initial screen at times).
I spent a few hours sniping yesterday, and really enjoyed the fact that I can come in towards a battle (or enemy base) from a good distance and find a good place in the hills or trees to take a few enemies down from before I get spotted and taken out myself.
Lieberman said a new round of congressional hearings should be held to focus attention to the problem -- particularly the retail industry's resistance to adopting an industry-wide policy for restricting the sale of M-rated games to children, as Lieberman and Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI) have urged -- as well as to raise parental awareness of the growing body of research documenting the threat video violence poses to public health.
In case you can't read quite as well as one would hope, Lieberman not only specifically mentions the ratings aren't enough, but this quote is both after the ratings were in place, and after his campaign for VP (noted by the date in the article's address). The difference between Lieberman 2002 and Lieberman of the 90's, of course, is that the tail end of the article is a call for parents to read the ratings, despite the rest of the article's call for Congressional hearings and retailers to stop selling to minors.
While I can understand and to some extent support a call to retailers to card people buying M-rated games, it doesn't seem like a really valid shift in policy, especially next to a call for hearings to see if the ratings still reflect the content. Of course, the hearings have prompted the recent additions to the ratings, which I think are good ones (and actually bring back the better parts of the pre-ESRB ratings). Personally, though, I have a tendency to dislike it whenever the government tries to get involved in people's everyday lives. Too many people in the government have based their studies on what people tell them rather than personal experience. There's even one article out there describing Lieberman's answer to people questioning his cries against the industry by going out and buying a 'new Pentium IV 1.5GHz PC and a copy of Doom', in order to show that he's played recent games and knows what he's talking about. In my opinion, the series of articles, which included him actually getting a clue and realizing Doom was not the game everyone showed him pictures of, and buying some more recent games, showed two things: 1) he's perfectly willing to rally against things he's never been exposed to himself 2) he does have the intelligence to actually take a look once he's questioned on it
I think #2 is why there's a slight possibility that he has had a legitimate change in direction. However, I don't trust his tendency towards #1 and would never give him a vote (fortunately I don't live in the area that currently votes for him every few years).
In 1997 he attacked the game Postal (ok, so I don't give a damn about Postal anyway), or attacked Cannibal Corpse's lyrics (despite the fact that their music is meant to be gruesome and the lyrics are not supposed to be something people warm up to, it's supposed to make your stomach turn and anyone that decides to go out and perform the acts described in 'fucked with a knife' or 'force fed broken glass' are really twisted, nevermind that most of CC's material comes from newspaper stories in the first place). He asks for Marilyn Manson's record label to dump him (despite the fact that he refers to a record label that won't be found listed on a Manson album, because the albums are handled by a subsidiary of a subsidiary, the same with CC's music, which he states is Sony's responsibility even though Sony has nothing to do with CC other than distributing some of their label's music). As with other politicians that have railed against CC in the past, it's unlikely that he's actually heard their music, but was more likely given a lyric sheet to read at best (or the descriptions he repeated at worst). Even Bob Dole made statements against CC during his election campaign, and CC's management asked if he had ever heard the music, to which he replied that he had not. The difference between the 'Democrats' and 'Republicans' gets smaller and smaller every year.
MS wants to own your entertainment venue - gaming, PVR, web surfing, digital media playback. Think about it - what does an "Xbox" mean? A "PlayStation" clearly states "play"
Oh please, as much as I disagree with the original poster's points about other consoles, I can't believe how many people are willing to think that Sony's intentions are better than Microsoft's in any way, shape, or form. In fact, with their home electronics products and their already-announced plans for the PS2.5, Sony's most likely in a better position to take control of your living room than Microsoft is. Not to mention that Sony's use of CD and DVD drives in their consoles was just as much geared at making it easier for them to sell more products (music and movies) as making it easier for developers to put their products on Sony's system.
If anything, American corporations have a harder time becoming the monstrosities that Japanese (and many other Asian) corporations are, because there are many Japanese corporations competing in multiple (sometimes complimentary) markets. The US legal system likes to strike down those types of monopolies at least as much as the monopoly that Microsoft is perceived to be.
What I have a problem with is this company is trivilazing the whole religion of Allah/God/Yahwea (?) which includes Christians, Jewish, and Islamics. All for the sense of profit. That, in my mind is ethically wrong. Ethically wrong by fooling players (who are probably young) into thinking that Jesus was some sort of Super-hero like "The Hulk" or "Spider Man", or a "Mutant". Parents'll be fooled by buying a 'nice religous' game.
They are aiming for a 'mature' audience and will probably receive an M rating. Although I tend to have a poor opinion of parents that might be out looking for a 'nice religious' game and pick something up simply because it states that it's based on stories in the Bible, rather than actually looking at content, I think the M rating might make many (if not most) stop and think about what they might be buying. I don't think this company is trying to fool players or parents. They seem to honestly believe that they can make a good game from biblical content that may teach some people some of the ethics of the Bible without being in-your-face about it, which is what many people dislike about the less tasteful portions of religion (and religious music, games, TV, etc) to begin with.
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I have the USB adapter for the PS2 controller, which is pretty much all I need for games where I might use a gamepad.
Other than that, I have the SideWinder force feedback wheel, which is great for the various driving games I've played over the years, especially when they support the feedback well (as opposed to supporting it poorly, which many games do, in which case I just turn the feedback off), but it unfortunately has a giant wall-wart power supply and the model I have is serial, so any other game controller I want to hook up has to be USB (there went most of my older joysticks and game pads, but the PS2 controller again takes care of that).
As for the various MS SideWinder controllers, there're only 2 I really like, and that would be the wheel and a gamepad I bought a few years ago (before I got the PS2 USB converter), and for some reason they stopped making the gamepad a year or so ago, and the new version of the wheel doesn't look as good either (it's a bit smaller iirc).
MS just keeps making bad decisions on their game controllers, so of course they don't see good sales. Then again, maybe their expectations for sales were too high, especially given the number of different products they had, and the lack of controllers appealing to the flight sim crowd (though admittedly a small market, it's a market that will pay much more for a good stick).
My cell plan has unlimited local and US long distance calling, as long as I'm calling from this area. Basically that means my hands-free set is the perfect game-voice system. Unfortunately, the mic on the hands-free set doesn't extend out far enough to get past the speakers on the headphones I use.
Funny, considering Counter-Strike has had in-game voice capability since 1.4.
Last time I was playing TFC or dealing with it in leagues (it received the in-game voice capability around the same time as CS), very few people used the in-game capability in leagues.
That being said, most leagues had to choose whether to enable or disable it in their server cfg files, because some people were using it and many server admins were disabling it.
Sad how everything has to be a fad like the computer just because the newer machines can show more of Lara Croft's pixels.
Actually, the NES had to be a fad like everything else because most of us couldn't play games on our NES consoles without 10 minutes of cleaning cartridges and aligning them just right in the old front-load systems we bought 15 years ago. I've never seen an original NES system that didn't start having problems loading games after a few years, and most of us couldn't justify buying a 'new' NES console after buying 2 or 3 other consoles.
The article states that 61% of the players of the actual card game are between 12 and 17, while 67% of the players online are between 18 and 35. That could easily make the difference, though there's no shortage in this world of obnoxious punk-ass 18-35 year old people ;)
but I'm a lot less willing to take a gamble on a game that's at the mercy of remote servers with unfinished code compared to just a regular computer game (which with only a few notably bad exceptions, generally has all its features in place at ship time).
Not to mention that if a regular game is in a buggy state (or you just find a crash that keeps you from continuing), you can either set it aside for a few months and come back to it later (and download the patches at any time, or not download them), or take it back to get at least some kind of trade-in value on it.
I bought planetside about a week ago. I keep getting the feeling 'I would really like this game if...
I could stay connected
I could get to a battle before it ended
I could have at least some use besides cannon fodder within the first two hours of play
There was at least an appearance that the developers were addressing the concerns of the players'
etc.
Then the real bonus popped up when the developers admitted that the players are supposed to be able to get to the top level rather quickly. Normally that might be fine, given that it's pretty much an FPS game, but at that point you just have people dumping characters and restarting to figure out which combination of skills and weapons / vehicles / armour give them the best advantage. After that's done, you get uneven populations fighting over one continent or another.
Oh well, at least I figured all of this out in a week, and still have 3 more weeks to either figure out why I should stick around or cancel before they charge me for another month. Too bad I didn't wait longer so I could pick it up for $20 or so like I did with UO and EQ.
It really is a matter of perspective, and that is all that I was getting at by labelling it both. I am definitely in the former camp, and could spend whole pages of text arguing my point, but that is senseless. And I hope I have enough perspective to know that not everybody will agree with me, and will have their own good reasons for believing what they will.
But, like it or not, SC is a seminal game, and WC3 is enormously important as it will sell millions, and by copied and imitated for years to come.
To me, you sound like one of those people that didn't spend hundreds of hours on WarCraft 2 (or even the first WarCraft, for that matter). SC was just another evolutionary step on the ladder that eventually ended up at WC3. Personally, I don't see WC3 as anything spectacular other than the first step on the way to something else, which will probably be StarCraft 2 or WarCraft 4.
Nothing against SC really, as I truly enjoyed the game (except when it crashed during the single player game on a particular mission every time I played it, until the first patch). I just think a lot of people are missing some perspective on that title as well.
Maybe I'll install SC again to go through the expansion. I've been looking for something to play on the PC for a while, and what I'm looking for is probably something I already have anyway.
heh, I had to get down to the UK part to realize why this made any sense at all. Of course, while a good number of us in the US don't have to work at all on that day, Eidos has decided to torture those in the UK by asking them to play the damned game they rushed out the door to push up their numbers for the fiscal year. I think we all saw those reviews coming when we read this article:d =03/06/18/ 067235&mode=thread&tid=127&tid=186&tid=206&tid=212
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?si
It might simply be the fact that a great deal of the sites are run completely over the internet, and many of the people have never seen each other before, and couldn't be bothered to send in a picture.
Japanese cars sell well in the United States, so well that we need to impose tarifs on imported cars to protect our car industry. The Japanese create very good quality and innovative products
a pan.cars/
umm, from http://edition.cnn.com/2002/BUSINESS/asia/09/12/j
an article regarding Japan's recent calls for free trade on cars:
Japan itself already has no tariffs on passengers cars, trucks and parts, and although the United States, its major export market, also imposes no duties on cars, it has a tariff of 25 percent on trucks.
Of course, in the past there were significant tariffs imposed on foreign cars, mostly to protect the auto industry during the fuel shortages in the '70's.
Meanwhile, Japan has a 400-500% tariff on rice (someone mentioned in a different post that the Japanese don't even buy US rice, this is why, although Japan is one of the world's largest importers of US rice).
Fortunately, tariffs on electronics are low in most countries, with the EU's 14% tariffs considered very high.
I can't just take the gas station just because the original owner died years after selling it to someone else. Creating a work for profit is like starting a business. Get it?
Except that if I want to buy gas I can go somewhere else if I don't like the owner of that gas station. Copyright is a government-granted monopoly over a creative work that is meant to encourage artists to reveal their creations to the world, under the assumption that it will go into the public domain. I *could* get the work illegally, or try to find it used, if I don't care for the company or people that own the copyright, but the first would be illegal and the second would be next to impossible for many works.
The simple fact is that current copyright laws mean that I will never see any current works in the public domain, and probably won't see Elvis, the Beatles, or anything else from the 1950's and 60's, either. Elvis has been dead nearly as long as I've been alive, and it appears that Ringo may become the last Beatle at some point, and will probably outlive me.
I think the other poster put it fairly well. I don't think that rape can be portrayed in a positive light, and I don't mean to show hate towards other cultures.
All I mean is simply that Americans tend towards ignoring social problems, or trying to litigate away any attempt to enlighten them about those problems, or even portray them in any way (good, bad, positive, negative, doesn't matter).
Taking pleasure in viewing rape is not a cut & dried issue any more than whether or not rape should be portrayed in the first place. In America, it's taboo to portray it at all. Cannibal Corpse and Nirvana both had to come out in the past to defend themselves for writing songs about it, and the only cases in which I can even think of anyone in America getting away without a huge negative contraversy towards them would be victims of rape, and in many cases they are treated very poorly when they come forward (either through art or just through the legal system).
My point is that in America people have a tendency to actively push rape away from any artist's available stories, and that it's done not for the benefit of victims of rape, but for the benefit of the people that believe they can ignore the problem, or the people that believe exposure to it will lead to people performing it. The unfortunate fact the latter group overlooks is that rapists don't generally watch or listen to anything that depicts rape, and that there are vast amounts of somewhat popular material depicting rape in other cultures where rape does not occur more often, and is not seen in any better light in terms of crimes committed than it is here.
What, I can show a character (playable or not) kill someone while carjacking (punishable by death in California) in a game, but I can't show a character raping someone(punishable by as little as 3 years in prison, again in California; transmitting HIV in the process adds an aggravated assault charge)? What if the player character is a cop and has the ability to stop a rape in progress?
Things change. Millions of court cases and extra laws on the subject have changed the point of copyright. You can go all the way back to the constitution, but if you ignore everything but the basics then there are lots of things that don't make sense. Like the original founding fathers didn't want women to be able to vote. I guess that you feel the same way, since you think that only the original definition matters.
The original founding fathers also permitted for the courts to interpret what they wrote and for Congress to ammend to what they wrote. In the case of copyright terms, the courts have allowed the clarifications made in various laws to stand, or have not ruled on them. In the case of women being able to vote, Congress ammended the Constitution, so if you go back to the Constitution, it's there, as long as you read it long enough to figure out that you can drink alcohol (if you're of legal age; if you read it long enough to find out you can't drink alcohol, and then stop, then you probably won't get to the women's right to vote part).
So I guess you want copyright terms to be only last the term of life of the author?
;) I don't like the fact that record companies can lock up music for huge numbers of years until the original source is so degraded as to be worthless. I don't believe anyone should be able to take artistic works off the market and control copies of that work for so long that almost no one is aware that work ever existed, or so that those interested in the work can't have access to it.
I believe that copyrights should be completely in the control of the original author, and that no person or company should be able to continue to profit from those rights after they have died. Essentially that's the same thing as saying they should last the life of the author.
In reality, though, I tend to believe there is some point to extended copyrights or fixed term copyrights (ie X number of years rather than simply the life of the author, since the author may die before X number of years, or even before the initial profitable term of the work is up). For instance, if record companies didn't own the rights to a number of works that were recorded before CDs came along, those works may never have been released on CDs, and would be limited to significantly less portable formats (portable in terms of what you can do with them and how easily, I consider a casette tape more portable in terms of being able to take it somewhere). Movies would still be relegated to VHS (and some are due to concerns over whether or not DVDs can be easily copied, ie people don't want other people to be able to copy their work).
Overall, though, I just don't like the fact that Michael Jackson is getting more money than Paul McCartney when I buy a Beatles record
It's been said that the source tape for Star Wars was in very poor condition before Lucas remastered it for re-release back in '97. Imagine the condition of other works from the '70's at this point in time, or works from even earlier, such as material that Disney's been holding onto. Under the original copyright laws specified in the Constitution, those works belong to the public domain, or at least must be released to the public domain after a limited time. Today, because of the extensions on copyright, source material for copyrighted works is deteriorating so that those works may never enter the public domain. The only thing saving a lot of work now is the efforts to digitize a great deal of work for re-release, but a large amount has been left behind, too, simply because some believe that the market is not there, or not big enough to justify the conversion and publishing.
Even with the 'digital age', with most new audio works released on CDs, people don't seem to understand that the source material is usually recorded at much higher quality, even if it's digitally recorded, than what is released, and the case is similar with movies (though in at least as many cases as not the source material is lower quality with video). Slowly we're receiving more books with digital sources (especially since most writing has been submitted to publishing in digital format for years), but we can't get digital copies of a great deal of it, and digitizing a book is a process that takes a great deal of time unless you have a somewhat high-priced copier (and tends to be destructive to the original source if you take the faster route).
I'm not overly concerned about whether or not people will still be able to listen to Elvis and the Beatles when I'm 50, because we have them on CD, which is better than what we've had in the past as far as being able to preserve the work. I can listen to Bach and Beethoven, but only because people have preserved or found paper on which they (or others) wrote their pieces. The only reason I have Carnivore's CDs is because their record label finally decided to release them on that format 15 years after their original release (though there was an earlier compilation that removed some songs to put 2 albums on one disc), mostly because the sing
Am I violating content by (to coin a phrase) "platform shifting"? If I paid for, say, Pac Man (it must have been in 3-4 classic game collections / updates I bought over the last few years) and I can legally play it on the PC, Dreamcast and gamecube, am I "entitled" to play it on MAME?
Actually, I somewhat wonder about that myself. If the actual game is unchanged from one platform to another, does it matter whether the ROM I downloaded is the same as the ROM I own a cartridge (or other disc) for? I think the safest way to go is to stick with the same ROM (ie use an NES emulator to play NES games), because you never know what the copyright owner will come up with as differences between say the arcade and NES version of Donkey Kong.
Unfortunately, the law isn't completely clear. What is clear, though, is that if you have the same exact item, you're fine, just like you're perfectly fine if you copy your vinyl onto CD. What has yet to be clarified in music, though (in a way that's similar to your ROM question) is whether or not you can copy someone else's CD if the content is the same as that of your vinyl records. If the content hasn't been 'remastered', you're probably on much safer grounds with this than if it was 'remastered', even though it's the same songs with the same copyright holders.
You see, it's legal to kill tresspassers, so I just put up "no tresspassing" signs on my lawn (I have a house on a street corner) and when people cut across my lawn (even an inch or two!) I shoot them with my rifle from my attic window! Sure the cops always show up, but I just tell them "They were tresspassing, so technically it was legal for me to kill them." and they just go "ohhh! Yeah, we'll get these bodies out of here for you now." and leave.
Just a hint, drag the bodies into your house and make sure they can't figure out the people were in your lawn when you shot them. It's also a good idea to shoot them in the face so the cops don't think they were attempting to leave your house when you shot them. You'll still get taken in and have to go to trial, but as long as you can prove they were in your house and you didn't invite them there, you're within your rights to have shot them.
IT'S PERFECT, JUST LIKE YOUR IDEA THAT BUYING A THING ONCE ENTITLES YOU TO DOWNLOAD COPIES OF IT AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN FOR EVER!!!!!!!
Actually, it's perfectly legal for you to do if you still have your original copy. Look up fair use laws sometime, you can make copies for personal use all day, and there's no difference in the eyes of the law whether you made the copy yourself or had someone else make the copy for you. Now, if you can't prove that you own the game, you're screwed, just like you would be if the RIAA found that Britney Spears CD you downloaded last week on your hard drive but you didn't have the actual CD.
The Beatles came out with lots of albums in the 60's that were very popular--they became rich on their work. 30 years later I still have to pay someone in order to legally listen to Beatles music. This is ridiculous. The original creators of the music have already reaped fantastic financial rewards
and that someone, in most cases, is either Michael Jackson or the last remaining living Beatle (other than Ringo). Unfortunately, it doesn't really matter who wrote the songs, either, as Michael Jackson owns the rights to songs written by Paul, and Paul owns the rights to songs he did not write. As long as the Beatles' original albums are still available in new formats (or at least in unprotected formats), and Paul is still alive, I'm ok with paying for those albums. When Paul's dead, I don't really want Ringo, Michael Jackson, and some record exec splitting the profits, so I won't buy Beatles albums any more. Luckily, I think I'll manage to have every Beatles CD I want before Paul kicks the bucket.
A few opinions on the subject doesn't change the law. Copyright violations are illegal. Morality is a different issue.
Many people mistake copyright as being about money--it's not. It's about control. If a company doesn't want people playing their games anymore...well they can't stop those who have already purchased legitimate copies of those games, but they can stop future people from buying the games by stopping production. That doesn't give the public the right to pirate the games.
Fortunately for most of us, there's no copyright issue involved in downloading a ROM for a game we already own. At best, there may be a violation of a license agreement in playing the game on a platform for which it was not released (ie an emulator), and in many cases those types of agreements did not exist on the original cartridges. MAME may in some cases be a different situation, as those involve emulation of arcade machines, but even then there are cases where those games were offered on other platforms as well.
You do not violate copyright by downloading or otherwise moving content to another medium for personal use. You violate it by downloading or otherwise copying content of which you do not have a legal copy, or by making copies available to those that do not have legal copies (which is where the whole debate comes from in the first place).
I despise the fact that so many people (especially copyright holders) believe that people use P2P software (or other distribution methods) only to download material of which they do not or never will own legal copies. Personally, I would never own a copy of Metallica's new album if my only exposure to it were through the single song they currently have on the radio and MTV, but if I could listen to the other songs through one method or another, I might buy it (especially since it's dirt cheap compared to other CDs right now). Normally I'd listen to a friend's CD, but thanks to their last two studio efforts, I don't know anyone that would buy one of their CDs any more.
I love it how quick you guys are to call Noah's ark fantasy. Do you love to put us in the same category as those who think the world is flat? Galileo was a Christian. Today's evolutionary mindset is hardened into concrete ignorance. It is an attitude much like the portrayed Catholic stubborness against Galileo's ideas.
Let's see, Genesis 6, from the New International Version (biblegateway.com)
Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God. 10 Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth.
11 Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence. 12 God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. 13 So God said to Noah, "I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. 14 So make yourself an ark of cypress [3] wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. 15 This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. [4] 16 Make a roof for it and finish [5] the ark to within 18 inches [6] of the top. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks. 17 I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. 18 But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark-you and your sons and your wife and your sons' wives with you. 19 You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. 20 Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive. 21 You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them."
22 Noah did everything just as God commanded him.
Personally, I can accept that there was a great flood (and possibly more than one), but I can't accept the idea that a man, his wife, three sons, and their wives, as well as 2 of each animal on this earth were the only survivors thanks to the 450x75x45 boat Noah was told to build by God. Maybe Noah did build the ark and try to gather all of the species of earth (at least the area seen as earth to Noah) to survive the flood. Maybe he even survived, despite the fact that a flood of that magnitude would be very likely to create seas which would capsize this vessel. Was he the only one to survive, even in the small part of the world he might have considered to be all of it? Not likely unless he was completely ignorant of the world beyond walking distance.
Oh, and Galileo wasn't excommunicated for believing the world was round, he was excommunicated for believing it wasn't the center of the universe (the sun was the center of the universe! oh wait, that's probably not true, either), due to his own observations through a telescope. He was simply looking at the two views of the position of the earth in the universe (Aristotlean (the earth is the center) vs. Copernicus' view that the earth revolved around the sun), and choosing the one that best fit his observations. Very few people in Galileo's time believed the world was flat (in fact, the same could be said before his time, when Columbus sailed, or ~60 years later when Magellan sailed around the globe, ~100 years before Galileo).
Whether you intended to or not (assuming that the Slashdot crowd was all pro evolution), you offend when you make comments like these. I have spent a great deal of time reading and arguing evolution - I know it well compared to most people (but not compared, necessarily, to most of the slashdot crowd). And I think the labelling of Noah's ark as fantasy is just an easy summary showing signs of a deep rooted ignorant stubborness.
My comments were not meant to offend, but in general I simply do not care if I do offend, because some people are too easily offe
works fine for me without the www on Firebird 0.6
Then that would leave us with a sincere wish to pander to the largest possible audience, now wouldn't it?
Either way, it comes down to the author or her representatives allowing them to change the book for the US audience, which I think is a load of crap.
I've been playing quite a bit, mostly solo, trying to get a feel for the game, heading for hot-spots, etc. I've managed to 'level up' (in as much as that can be said for this game) twice, and get a handful of kills, some during fairly important battles. Unfortunately, it seems that most of the time when I get near any substantial battle I get disconnected. I haven't quite figured out why this keeps happening, especially since my ping times don't seem outrageous (100-200 most of the time, though I see some very odd numbers in the initial screen at times).
I spent a few hours sniping yesterday, and really enjoyed the fact that I can come in towards a battle (or enemy base) from a good distance and find a good place in the hills or trees to take a few enemies down from before I get spotted and taken out myself.
http://www.senate.gov/~lieberman/press/02/12/2002C 19808.html
Lieberman said a new round of congressional hearings should be held to focus attention to the problem -- particularly the retail industry's resistance to adopting an industry-wide policy for restricting the sale of M-rated games to children, as Lieberman and Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI) have urged -- as well as to raise parental awareness of the growing body of research documenting the threat video violence poses to public health.
In case you can't read quite as well as one would hope, Lieberman not only specifically mentions the ratings aren't enough, but this quote is both after the ratings were in place, and after his campaign for VP (noted by the date in the article's address). The difference between Lieberman 2002 and Lieberman of the 90's, of course, is that the tail end of the article is a call for parents to read the ratings, despite the rest of the article's call for Congressional hearings and retailers to stop selling to minors.
While I can understand and to some extent support a call to retailers to card people buying M-rated games, it doesn't seem like a really valid shift in policy, especially next to a call for hearings to see if the ratings still reflect the content. Of course, the hearings have prompted the recent additions to the ratings, which I think are good ones (and actually bring back the better parts of the pre-ESRB ratings). Personally, though, I have a tendency to dislike it whenever the government tries to get involved in people's everyday lives. Too many people in the government have based their studies on what people tell them rather than personal experience. There's even one article out there describing Lieberman's answer to people questioning his cries against the industry by going out and buying a 'new Pentium IV 1.5GHz PC and a copy of Doom', in order to show that he's played recent games and knows what he's talking about. In my opinion, the series of articles, which included him actually getting a clue and realizing Doom was not the game everyone showed him pictures of, and buying some more recent games, showed two things:
1) he's perfectly willing to rally against things he's never been exposed to himself
2) he does have the intelligence to actually take a look once he's questioned on it
I think #2 is why there's a slight possibility that he has had a legitimate change in direction. However, I don't trust his tendency towards #1 and would never give him a vote (fortunately I don't live in the area that currently votes for him every few years).
In 1997 he attacked the game Postal (ok, so I don't give a damn about Postal anyway), or attacked Cannibal Corpse's lyrics (despite the fact that their music is meant to be gruesome and the lyrics are not supposed to be something people warm up to, it's supposed to make your stomach turn and anyone that decides to go out and perform the acts described in 'fucked with a knife' or 'force fed broken glass' are really twisted, nevermind that most of CC's material comes from newspaper stories in the first place). He asks for Marilyn Manson's record label to dump him (despite the fact that he refers to a record label that won't be found listed on a Manson album, because the albums are handled by a subsidiary of a subsidiary, the same with CC's music, which he states is Sony's responsibility even though Sony has nothing to do with CC other than distributing some of their label's music). As with other politicians that have railed against CC in the past, it's unlikely that he's actually heard their music, but was more likely given a lyric sheet to read at best (or the descriptions he repeated at worst). Even Bob Dole made statements against CC during his election campaign, and CC's management asked if he had ever heard the music, to which he replied that he had not. The difference between the 'Democrats' and 'Republicans' gets smaller and smaller every year.
MS wants to own your entertainment venue - gaming, PVR, web surfing, digital media playback. Think about it - what does an "Xbox" mean? A "PlayStation" clearly states "play"
Oh please, as much as I disagree with the original poster's points about other consoles, I can't believe how many people are willing to think that Sony's intentions are better than Microsoft's in any way, shape, or form. In fact, with their home electronics products and their already-announced plans for the PS2.5, Sony's most likely in a better position to take control of your living room than Microsoft is. Not to mention that Sony's use of CD and DVD drives in their consoles was just as much geared at making it easier for them to sell more products (music and movies) as making it easier for developers to put their products on Sony's system.
If anything, American corporations have a harder time becoming the monstrosities that Japanese (and many other Asian) corporations are, because there are many Japanese corporations competing in multiple (sometimes complimentary) markets. The US legal system likes to strike down those types of monopolies at least as much as the monopoly that Microsoft is perceived to be.
What I have a problem with is this company is trivilazing the whole religion of Allah/God/Yahwea (?) which includes Christians, Jewish, and Islamics. All for the sense of profit. That, in my mind is ethically wrong. Ethically wrong by fooling players (who are probably young) into thinking that Jesus was some sort of Super-hero like "The Hulk" or "Spider Man", or a "Mutant". Parents'll be fooled by buying a 'nice religous' game.
They are aiming for a 'mature' audience and will probably receive an M rating. Although I tend to have a poor opinion of parents that might be out looking for a 'nice religious' game and pick something up simply because it states that it's based on stories in the Bible, rather than actually looking at content, I think the M rating might make many (if not most) stop and think about what they might be buying. I don't think this company is trying to fool players or parents. They seem to honestly believe that they can make a good game from biblical content that may teach some people some of the ethics of the Bible without being in-your-face about it, which is what many people dislike about the less tasteful portions of religion (and religious music, games, TV, etc) to begin with.