Or people could just learn to use punctuation better instead of using the comma as a catch-all separator, for example "It has calculated the prime roots of fifteen: three and five". Not that I ever do that. *whistle*
meaningless distinction. Give me an example of something you can have at "no cost."
It's only a meaningless distinction if you count meaningless "costs". You can make it absurd, but in real life things which have no charge can often have a real cost and it is important to note this.
That said, the mere existence of an "ads by google" box in a corner of the web page seems like a pretty meaningless cost to me. Especially in the case of nice unobtrusive Google ads on an intarweb already inundated with ridiculous and obnoxious ads.
On a related note, what does offend me are those encyclopedia sites that simply copy Wikipedia entries, douse the page with advertisements, and don't actually credit Wikipedia (or work in any way like wikipedia) at all.
I'd just like to add - in no way is anyone OBLIGED to buy a product from the adverts.
Yet. It's not much of a step from claiming that "By not watching the advertisements you are stealing" to "By not being influenced into buying the advertised product you are stealing". If you already can think the first is true then the latter just follows naturally.
Of course those are just words uttered by despicable people with no force of law. So I'm not disagreeing with you in any way.:)
There is such thing as free will.
And many people see this as a problem that should be fixed.
*head explodes with frustration at stupid comments*
You should really get that checked out. There's a lot of stupid on the internet.
Can a robot rape you? Theoretically, yes. This is why robots like this need Asimov's three laws.
"This unit believed it was not harming the human, but bringing it pleasure. This unit knows that humans are dishonest, and believed that 'no' meant 'yes'."
That's why we'll need The Fourth Law of Robotics: "No" means "No"!
I fly all the time. From Hawaii, all over the country for work. I have a scraggly beard and I usually fly in sweat pants and a t-shirt. I look ruffled at best, and often also wear tie died shirt. I have never been hassled by TSA.
I've got a pony tail, goatee, and wear cargo pants and hiking boots.
Shortly after 9/11 I was flying a lot, and I got stopped by security for a thorough search every single time. Not most, not a larger fraction than before, every single time. There were of course a lot more random searches going on, but I'm talking dozens of trips through security where they weren't pulling out more than one in forty people, and I got tagged every time.
Then, several months later, spring of 02 roughly, it stopped. The number of people being randomly pulled out of line hadn't diminished appreciably, but I was no longer selected as a matter of course. In fact I think since then I've been subject to one random extra screening procedure.
I think it's pretty obvious that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 they'd pulled out every profile in the book, and I matched some "dirty dangerous hippie" profile (while I think tie-die shirt puts you in the "dirty harmless hippie" category), and then they simply stopped using it because they realized that was stupid.
I was clear. I brought it up when talking about things that wouldn't transition well from the 2D games when I brought up space jump, mentioning that they didn't even attempt it until Prime 2 and didn't make it a core part of the game. That's the only context I ever brought up space jump in.
Um no dude you weren't clear at all:
Yes, I did list proper space jump (not to mention wall jumping) and screw attack as a limits, but those are the type of things that really aren't possible at all from a first person view. Proper space jumping would be hard to do in 3D even from a third person view due to camera issues (keep in mind you'd need to be using 2 analog sticks + the jump button at the same time to do effective 2D-style space jumping). First person wall jumping would only really be possible if Samus did an instant 180 degree spin when you kicked off the wall, which would probably be rather disorienting.
I also wouldn't say that space jump was intended to make jumping more forgiving. The first Prime to have it, Prime 2, didn't let you get it until you were 90% of the way through the game. It was more of a bonus for the people who missed it. Also, it's main purpose was to jump long distances. You couldn't even get out of the room you got the space jump in unless you learned how to get the maximum jumping distance possible. There was very little margin for error in that room.
First you're talking about Screw Attack and Space Jump separately, and how both are hard to implement in 3D in addition to other things, and then with no warning or explanation you start using "space jump" (dropping even the modifier "proper") to describe Screw Attack in Prime. At what point did you explain that you felt that Screw Attack was the true implementation of "space jump" in the Prime series? Right the next post, because you sure didn't explain it here. And I had clearly been talking about Prime's space jump when I was talking about its design for making jumping forgiving, then you mentally replaced "space jump" with "screw attack" and said you disagreed. Honestly how confusing could you be?
And I think that's pretty stupid besides. "Space jump" in Prime is not "proper" space jump because it is limited to one extra jump, but "Screw Attack" in Prime is because it is only limited to 5 "jumps", even though you can't increase your height or change the direction of your jumps? That's even less like the 2D space jump than Prime's space jump! It actually serves the same function as the original space jump -- allowing you to attain both height and distances and perform aerial maneuvers to get around corners and other tricks that are impossible without the upgrade. That's why they called it "Space Jump" in Prime -- it's the 3D space jump, limited because it's now 3d.
No, the camera angle isn't why. If the camera angle was the reason why, then it would've sucked in Prime as well. Prime 1 & 2 tilted the camera very slightly when you jump. A lot of people - myself included - considered that to be a benefit. But Prime 3 doesn't do that, and it isn't any harder to jump in that game. I don't see how you can blame the camera angle if Metroid could pull it off great with the same camera angle.
What? No! First Person camera angle versus Third Person camera angle, not some little tilt to the camera from first person. Like I just said it's "FP" vs "TP" that makes it hard! Prime is the first game to make jumping work in a First Person view, the thing we've been talking about this whole time!
This is obvious if you thought about it for two freaking seconds instead of being a stubborn mule. Think about the hardest jump in the Prime series, and the fact that it's about equal to the easiest jump in Mario 64. Can you even imagine trying to do something like, say, the Mario Sunshine Challenge Levels in a 1st Person view? No! Because making jumping work in 1st Person is hard, and r
Newtonian mechanics were as false on some issues as the greek earth-wind-fire-air universe was false. Just because they were a better approximation does not mean that certain statements made by the proposed "laws" do not come out as false once you inspect them closely
What?! What useful predictions could you ever get out of "earth-wind-fire-air"? That was never a scientific predictive model to begin with. You can make many fantastic and reliable predictions using Newtons laws. NASA still uses Newtonian mechanics to land probes on other planets.
When your model fails at some point, that's the end of it. You don't look back and say "oh it wasn't so bad". It's just wrong. A particular postulate it is making about the universe is not true, and that is all that matters.
No, that's not the "end of it", as the continued use of previous models to do good and useful scientific work clearly shows. Science does not simply abandon the old model, they keep it, knowing that there is a better model which is, itself, also just a predictive model.
Modern science is not interested in high school labs - we are interested in an absolute truth stemming from mathematical necessity, if such truth exists or can exist.
Where did you ever get that idea? There is no "absolute truth" in science, nor is science interested in discovering it. Science is interested in verifiable prediction. And as much as they can gain better predictive models of the universe, that's scientific progress, but it is not progress towards "absolute truth". The idea that there is a transient "truth" that gets forgotten when a slightly better "truth" comes along is laughable. Scientists know that they are all just models that are useful, and ready to be modified as new data comes in. For science, it's not "proving Newton wrong" so much as modifying the theory by appending "within this range of conditions, to this degree of precision".
Which is why science is interested in high school labs -- the verifiable predictions that are made by the science taught in high school are still valid, as you can test yourself. If those predictions stopped working, then that science would be absolutely proven wrong.
Einstein proved the classical physics wrong by a thought experiment in a single piece of paper making a single assumption.
And we're already certain that Einstein is "wrong" in that there are phenomenon that cannot be predicted by his model, and models which do cover such areas can't peacefully coexist with Einstein's theory. Quantum Mechanics is that model. So both QM and Relativity are "wrong"? They certainly are not the "absolute truth"!
So the fact that Newtonian physics cannot predict what will happen at extremely large masses and velocities means it was as much "proven wrong" as Relativity is "proven wrong" because it cannot predict what will happen at extremely small masses and distances.
Anyway that's all besides the point, because it was so much about Netwonian Physics being wrong as the observations that led to Newton's Laws are still predicted by Relativity -- Relativity subsumes Newtonian Physics. Whereas the Electric Universe tries to turn that on its head, and say things that are well predicted by Newton, Relativity, and other well studied models aren't happening at all.
I said there was no *proper* space jump in Metroid Prime.
Okay you should be more clear then since I was talking about the actual space jump in the game and how they designed it to make jumping more forgiving, and you were talking about "proper" space jump and screw attack separately in one paragraph, but then switched to using "space jump" to mean "'proper' space jump as represented by screw attack in Prime 2" without any explanation that you were doing so. That's very confusing.
Anyway, it looks like you mixed up talk of 2D style space jump for the weak space jump the 3D games ended up with.
No, you mixed up when I said that space jump was designed to make jumping more forgiving with your swap of space jump and screw attack. I never made or accepted any such replacement. I'm talking about "space jump". The space jump in Prime is the weakened version of space jump in previous games, and it's no accident that they did so. It was one of the things they did to make jumping in Prime easier and better.
I guess if you read reviews at sites that consider FPS games the end all be all you might've seen that, but I'll tell you a very large number of reviews didn't bother to mention it at all.
It has nothing to do with what esteem they hold FPS games. It has to do with playing First-Person games with jumping, and finding that the jumping universally sucked, and being concerned that it would suck in Prime as well.
It's an adventure game with a different camera angle. If you look at it that way, it's not surprising. If you think of it as an FPS game, I guess it is.
The camera angle is WHY First-Person anything before Prime had terrible jumping! You can't just say "Oh it's an adventure game with a different camera angle, so it makes sense that jumping would work well", because that ignores how you make it work well with the different camera angle. It's not automatic! Prime is not the first "first person adventure" game, but it is the first one that had natural jumping. "FPS" vs "FPA" isn't what makes jumping difficult to get right, it's "FP" vs "TP".
If you've never played any other first-person perspective games with jumping puzzles, perhaps it isn't surprising because you just aren't aware of the challenges. If you have, then it is surprising.
That's basically what it comes down to. The only first person perspective game with jumping puzzles you've played is Prime, which is the only one to have gotten it right, therefore you don't appreciate it's accomplishments in this regard and just assume it's as simple as declaring your game to be an adventure not a shooter. It's easy to take something for granted if you don't know anything different.
I really don't get where you're coming from. You've stated that you haven't really played any other first person games and thus aren't aware of the problems they had, you've also said you give props to Retro for making the best 3d game ever -- what's your hangup against just acknowledging that, while you may not have appreciated it at the time, one of their non-trivial accomplishments was creating the first jumping puzzles in a first person game that weren't annoying?
I certainly give them their due - I consider Metroid Prime to be the best 3D game ever made.
Yeah, it's awesome.:) I'm just saying, part of that was making the jumping feel as natural as possible, and a lot of that has to do with level design, so give them their due.
Yes, I did list proper space jump (not to mention wall jumping) and screw attack as a limits, but those are the type of things that really aren't possible at all from a first person view.
Right, right, they scrapped things that make little or no sense in a first person perspective.
I also wouldn't say that space jump was intended to make jumping more forgiving. The first Prime to have it, Prime 2, didn't let you get it until you were 90% of the way through the game. It was more of a bonus for the people who missed it. Also, it's main purpose was to jump long distances.
You are mistaken; there was space jump in Metroid Prime, you got it about halfway through. You got it even earlier than that in Prime 2, not 90% through.
You are correct though that it's use as an upgrade was to enable you to jump distances that were impossible before and open up new areas like almost all Metroid upgrades do. I'm talking about the implementation as far as making jumping forgiving goes -- in previous metroids, it only worked if you used it at the peak of your jumps, whereas in Prime you can use it at any point of your jump, which made any jump that -didn't- required a maximum-length jump much easier. You could, for example, make a very sloppy attempt at a jump that would require a max-length non-space jump, then space-jump at the last minute to make sure you made it all the way if you thought you might fall short.
Were the developers worried about getting jumping right? Sure. As were the developers of Mario Galaxy. But Mario fans weren't worried that they wouldn't get it right.
Mario Galaxy is 3rd person, and they proved 3rd person platforming could be done well back in Mario 64, as well as countless other 3rd-person platforming games since then. Metroid was the first FPS that made jumping work well. It's not nearly as easy to do, as evidenced by all the failures of other games.
Mario fans had no reason to be worried. Metroid fans were worried they wouldn't get it right and rightfully so. You didn't play FPSes and don't understand why they were worried, but they were.
The extent of the commentary I saw on normal jumping had to do with height issues.
Okay, fine, you just weren't aware of it, just like you weren't aware that previous FPSes had crappy jumping and Prime was the first good one. You must have missed the reviews too where the reviewers expressed their relief that the jumping was in fact easy and fun instead of annoying and painful like all previous experience would have led them to expect.
I really don't know what you're objecting to at this point. This is all I'm saying: Metroid Prime's designers, in particular their level designers, made jumping natural and intuitive in an FPS for the first time ever. That's it. Take it or leave it, but it's true, and they deserve mad props for that achievement (among all their other ones).
Because at the moment all those countries are menaced by a neighbour who is kept in check largely by the US. And all those neighbours either have or are very close to having ICBMs. And some of them are maybe crazy enough to threaten the US with those ICBMS or their neighbours. Now if the US can shoot them down there's much less incentive for them to do that. So missile defense is actually a geopolitical stabiliser.
What on earth makes you think North Korea is going to attack anybody with an ICBM, or a nuclear-armed missile of any kind?!
First, an ICBM is a huge, gigantic, unmistakable Send nuclear retaliation here! sign. And I know it's fun to think about Kim being is "maybe crazy enough" to get his own country turned into a glass parking lot, but rationally speaking he's probably not looking to rule a cockroach and tumor-laden rat colony if he can avoid it.
Second, North Korea's specialty isn't missile technology, it's covert ops. They have some of the best spies and infiltrators in the world. If they want to deliver a nuke with the maximum chance of success possible, they're going to put it in a shipping container and quietly sneak it into a harbor of the target country. And maybe they've infiltrated the shipping yard so that container never ends up on any manifests, then they quietly sneak it away and hide it in the target's own borders until they need it. This not only plays to NK's strengths, it also makes it harder to identify the attacker (and thus justify a nuclear response)... Oh and avoids any missile defenses too.
This is why a missile shield or any anti-nuclear-missile system is just a boondoggle. MAD works just fine against any enemy who would fire a missile at us or our allies, and it does nothing to stop the clandestine method of delivery that our scarier enemies are vastly more likely to use anyway.
Any infrared light source near the TV (or IRsensor on the Wiimote) could be disruptive. Lamps, Candles, and especially the Sun. The WiiMote uses the the sensor bar to triangulate position based on 2 steady points (provided by the sensor bar). If multiple sources are competing with the signal then it will confuse the Wiimote causing jitter. The Sun is the worse as it can blanket the Wiimote sensor with IR light making it impossible to detect the 2 points of the sensor bar among all the noise. So as an experiment you may want to close the curtains, blow out the candles, and turn off any lamps that may be near the TV to see if they are adding interference.
There's a helpful tool somewhere in the Wii configuration menus that makes debugging this kind of problem easy. I honestly can't remember what it's called or where it lives... But what it does is show you what the IR Sensor is seeing and what it thinks its reference points are. It will show a grey box with a white dot on it everywhere the software is seeing an IR signal. There should be exactly 2, for the two points on the sensor bar, and if there are more or less then the pointing is going to be screwed up.
This is how I discovered that having the blinds on the window behind the entertainment center half open during the daytime was being interpreted by the Wiimote as about 7 different IR sources. Heh.
As I said in the beginning, I very rarely play FPS games, so I don't know what the norm is. All I know is Metroid handles it the way I would expect it to be handled.
Sorry I must have missed where you said that, though I did get that impression.
So let me say that I think you should give credit where credit is due. Any kind of "platforming" in just about all FPS games -- in particular console games -- has been extremely annoying and difficult and generally considered to have been a bad idea to include at all. Turoc epitomizes this not so much because it's jumping was especially annoying, but because they insisted on putting so much of it in, and making the jumps 3rd-person-platformer difficult, often with the penalty for failure being death. But it wasn't actually worse jumping than most other FPS. And it had nothing to do with analog controls, as all these games were on consoles with at least one analog stick.
Metroid Prime was the first FPS that made jumping feel natural, and easy enough that it could actually have moderate platforming puzzles that didn't make you want to drive to the developer's house and stab out their eyes with a fork, and were in fact actually fun. If you consider an FPS with bad jumping to be a "badly made game", then every FPS with jumping puzzles was badly made. Or, as many people believed, the idea of platforming puzzles in an FPS itself was bad game design.
Retro Studios showed that this wasn't necessarily the case, and the secret does in fact lie in the nature of the jumps required in the game, i.e. the level design. You should really give the Retro level designers their due, because it is only by their hard effort that you were able to have an FPS-platforming experience that feels so natural that you can't imagine it being any other way.
The jumping wasn't what caused the horror. Metroid games are about exploration with some shooting thrown in (the opposite of most first person games), and a lot of abilities that are hard to imagine fitting in a first person game.
Why yes jumping is what caused the horror among Metroid fans who were also familiar with FPSes that had tried it before. Platforming was an inherent aspect of exploration in previous metroid games, we knew it was going to be a major aspect of the new Metroid game, and all attempts to merge platforming and first person perspective had up to that point failed. Thus the fear, and the huge relief when it turned out to have been done better than ever before.
As is, Prime 1 had to scrap the screw attack, drastically limit the space jump, and remove the speed booster entirely. I don't have a link, but the producer of Prime 1 recently did an interview about the development process. He revealed that they were wanting to leave the morph ball out because it was extremely difficult to get working well. It only made it in because Miyamoto said to them "You get the morph ball perfect, or we'll find someone else to make the game." Jumping was the least of people's worries.
That's funny, because a couple of those are examples of abilities directly related to jumping and the difficulty of making it work in 3d. The space jump in particular was changed not to give you the free-roaming that it gave you in previous Metroids, but to make jumping more forgiving (since you could activate the space jump at any point during your normal jump so it was easier to use, and could correct any short-jumps that you made).
Anyway, I'm sure the developers had lots of fears and qualms developing an FPS Metroid. It's interesting to hear that they were thinking of ditching the morph ball, and denied by Miyamoto. To the extent that they could even entertain the notion of dropping morph ball, do you think they could have ditched jumping as a tool of exploration? No, and for the ones responsible for making that work, it surely wasn't the least of their worries. Something incorporated that deeply into the fundamental design sense for th
Ooookay, then. How do you explain the 10,000 year old frozen baby mammoth carcass found in Siberia a few years ago, then? Also, how did they cross the land bridge into the Americas without being able to tolerate cold during the Ice Ages?
Maybe the plasma arcs that supposedly explain meteor craters better than kinetic impact are somehow responsible...
This is classic crackpottery.
The Crackpot wants to claim that they are really a Revolutionary, that they have investigated the weak edges of science and found a fundamental problem, that the conventional wisdom is wrong, and that they hold the solution. A solution that up-ends the existing theories. They will claim that the reason they and they alone were able to discover this solution is because the Science Establishment is too set in their ways, too dogmatic, and simply refuses to question or investigate those areas where the science is weak and various mysteries inadequately explained. They will claim that the only reason that they are given the label "Crackpot" is because the Science Establishment is afraid of their ideas. The Science Establishment hates Revolutionaries, you see, and will not accept the scientific evidence the Revolutionary brings to bear no matter what.
Of course this is nonsense. Real Revolutions happen and up-end the "Establishment", they're just uncommon. Because in most cases, the existing science is by and large good and well established and supported by mountains of evidence. Einstein was a Revolutionary and General Relativity was a Revolution. His theory completely changed how we view the nature of the universe, and one of our most basic assumptions -- that Time itself is constant across all frames of reference. Quantum Mechanics was a huge Revolution in Science, again reversing some of our most basic assumptions about the universe. Yet these Revolutions are now the Scientific Establishment, by the simple virtue of the experimental evidence these Revolutions brought to bear, and now these theories are also supported by mountains of evidence, equally difficult to up-end.
So what then is the difference between the Crackpot and the Revolutionary? Well a major difference is that the true Revolutionary explains the new, explains the experimental data that the old theory cannot, but just as importantly also explains the experimental data that the old theory explained. Relativity didn't prove that Newtonian physics was wrong, it simply showed it to be an approximation for common conditions. It didn't suddenly come out and say "No, actually you can approximate gravitational attraction using the cube root of the distance between masses!" because anyone can drop an object and track its position and see that, in fact, Newton's Laws are correct within the precision of any available measuring device. Quantum Mechanics didn't prove that simpler models of atoms were completely flawed and false -- because all that chemistry you did in high school works just fine using those simpler models. QM only explains what the simpler model cannot.
The Crackpot's theory, on the other hand, cannot explain the existing evidence. The Crackpot, desperate to prove that they are Revolutionaries, then must try to deny the existing evidence, and deny the large successes of the existing theory at explaining the existing evidence.
This is the case with the Electric Universe shlock our "unwelcome celebrity" champions -- it actually tries to replace Newtonian (and relativistic) mechanics with electricity and plasma. Not just show that some of the difficult to explain parts of the universe (dark energy etc) are better explained with electricity, but that extremely easy and well explained parts of the universe (like meteor impacts, planetary motion) are also explained. It's this attempt to shoe-horn their theory into places it doesn't belong, to up-end science that needs no up-ending, that reveals the Crackpot.
Of course that's the point where most people stop reading. The Crackpot th
I've never cared to see where my feet are. I don't see that being an issue unless the level designer made the platforms way too small.
Or the jump large enough that the only way you could make it was if your feet were at the very edge of the platform when you jumped.
Turoc, the epitome of annoying jumping puzzles in FPS, demonstrated this frequently. The correct jumping procedure was: line up to target, look straight down at your shadow (no visible feet of course), run forward, hit jump when the center of the shadow was precisely at the edge of the platform. If you tried to "feel" where the edge of the platform was while looking forward, you'd either run off the platform or miss the jump.
Are you saying you never cared in Metroid where your feet are? Because it certainly matters in some other FPS games, and it 100% matters in true platform games that are either 2-D or 3-D 3rd person. It doesn't matter in Metroid because they made it not matter...
Good level design makes everything better, bad level design makes everything worse. You wouldn't say sniper rifles are a terrible idea in FPS games just because you played a game that only gave them to you in levels with any good sniping positions.
Okay... Then call it "not bad" level design. Because I'd certainly agree that jumping puzzles ala Turoc and most other FPS games that have them (thankfully few due to being generally reviled) are bad level design. Retro designed the levels in Metroid so that the jumping was not annoying given the camera angle. Call it "good", call it "not bad", I call it "fairly unique in all of 1st person shooter-dom and a breath of fresh air". That's why everyone was terrified when Metroid Prime was announced and heard it was a 1st person shooter with jumping, and relieved when the jumping despite all expectations was not annoying.
It has a huge thing to do with it. It makes it far easier to control the distance of your jump or correct it in mid-air.
There's no real need to do either of those things in Metroid, because of the level design. To the extent that you need to control the distance of your jump, you truly only need to stop it. Which doesn't require analog controls. Whereas conversely using analog stick for motion in Turoc didn't help at all...
I can see where it could flow faster to just pick in essence from: I agree, I disagree, I'm skeptical, etc. Once you do that you still get the your full sentence expressed, you simple don't see the full text of all the unchosen options.
The only problem with this system is when the actual response ends up saying more than you intended, which you would have known if it was fully spelled out. E.g. 'agree' turns into "I agree with Character X, and further more think Character Y is a blithering idiot for disagreeing. I hope you die in a fire, Character Y". Or 'I'm skeptical' becomes "I'm not sure I buy that, Character X, but I might be able to be -- you know -- persuaded... if you catch my drift... And my drift is sodomy."
But then again maybe I'm just playing the wrong games.
Advanced sensitivity + Z lock for me. It's an adventure game, not a shooter. Why make disposing of the wildlife time consuming when the terrain is your real enemy?
Cus it's more fun. To me, anyway. Fortunately the game is designed really well and will still be just as fun for those who don't want to have to aim at the wildlife.
And no, WASD can never compete with an analog stick. Besides the general awkwardness of WASD, they're just digital buttons. It's just not possible to do precise movement with them. That's the reason for all the hate of jumping in FPS games.
No, the hate for jumping in FPS games is that you can't see what the hell you are doing -- you can either see where you are jumping to, or where your feet are, but not both, so one way or another you always feel as though you are jumping blind.
Metroid gets around this through good level design. The analog motion control, though nice, really has nothing to do with it.
Oh but yeah, I've noticed no slow reaction times whatsoever with the wiimote and aiming in Metroid. The only thing that makes it inferior to the mouse is that you can't do instant 180s (or any other arbitrary turn). Oh, and by holding it out it's less stable than a mouse you rest your hand on, but hey, that just makes it feel more real to me.
You mean individuals within the government can edit "the encyclopedia anyone can edit", too?
Oh yeah, and of course it's all the same and you shouldn't be shocked at all at government manipulation.
Everyone knows any shlub can go into Wikipedia and alter the article to whatever slant they want.
One might presume that the government would not deign to do such things, or rather one might presume that it's more offensive when the government actually tries to manipulate public information directly. And no, it being someone in the House "acting on their own" doesn't make it okay, it makes it slightly less offensive. If this is truly the case, then this someone should be punished.
It's kinda like the difference between some dude in a bar lying and making exaggerated claims to make you believe Iraq is dangerous and should be invaded... vs the government lying and making exaggerated claims to the same purpose.
And yes they lied by using intelligence they knew to be faulty to support their vastly overstated claims (like not just knowing Iraq had WMD, but knowing where they were).
Oh and yes I'm still as skeptical of everything coming out of our intelligence apparatus since there hasn't been nearly enough time to undo the damage that having so many of the experienced non-partisans run out of their jobs has done. The best I can say is that the WMD fiasco has created an opportunity for them to refrain from being partisan should they so choose. That doesn't mean I trust their actual product as being any better, whether the product suits an Administration agenda or not.
Just to reiterate: Yes it's worse when a government source modifies Wikipedia than Random Internet Troll. Can't fathom why you'd think otherwise.
Re:Lethal dose of height
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I'm an orthopaedic surgeon, and when fall/jump from those heights, putting them back together can be a bit "tricky", and the pieces don't always go back together well. When the suicide jumper only jumps from 40 feet and lives with horrible fractures, we sometimes joke that they didn't read the literature and plan things out correctly. Now the person is depressed AND may have bad arthritic pain from their smashed joints now, or just be plain old paralyzed. Life sucks.....and then you live.
Ugh... Sounds nasty. That's exactly why 1) if I do commit suicide, I'm going to take the time I would have wasted writing a stupid note to instead plan very carefully to ensure there is no chance of survival.
2) if I ever find myself falling out of an airplane with no parachute, instead of getting into the frog position to slow my fall, it's head-first arms-flat-to-the-sides power-dive for me, baby! I want my corpse to bounce after smashing into the ground.
Speaking of which, when I went diving a number of years ago, the instructor said that the one death they'd had in fifteen years of operation was ruled a suicide because the guy didn't appear to ever try to open his parachute, he just went into a dive and crashed right into the ground. And according to the instructor who claimed to witness this from the ground, the body did in fact bounce about 30 feet into the air.
Slashdot Mirror
Or people could just learn to use punctuation better instead of using the comma as a catch-all separator, for example "It has calculated the prime roots of fifteen: three and five". Not that I ever do that. *whistle*
How can they verify the bounty without observing the cat?
Oh I see it's a trick. Clever bastards.
Ever hear of "two countries divided by a common language"?
"who then proceed to poke fun of each other over any minor difference"?
Yes, I've heard of it.
meaningless distinction. Give me an example of something you can have at "no cost."
It's only a meaningless distinction if you count meaningless "costs". You can make it absurd, but in real life things which have no charge can often have a real cost and it is important to note this.
That said, the mere existence of an "ads by google" box in a corner of the web page seems like a pretty meaningless cost to me. Especially in the case of nice unobtrusive Google ads on an intarweb already inundated with ridiculous and obnoxious ads.
On a related note, what does offend me are those encyclopedia sites that simply copy Wikipedia entries, douse the page with advertisements, and don't actually credit Wikipedia (or work in any way like wikipedia) at all.
I'd just like to add - in no way is anyone OBLIGED to buy a product from the adverts.
:)
Yet. It's not much of a step from claiming that "By not watching the advertisements you are stealing" to "By not being influenced into buying the advertised product you are stealing". If you already can think the first is true then the latter just follows naturally.
Of course those are just words uttered by despicable people with no force of law. So I'm not disagreeing with you in any way.
There is such thing as free will.
And many people see this as a problem that should be fixed.
*head explodes with frustration at stupid comments*
You should really get that checked out. There's a lot of stupid on the internet.
As for love... Given how many people cannot tell the difference between a human and a dog,
Look I was drunk, alright?! And the dog came on to me first!
Can a robot rape you? Theoretically, yes. This is why robots like this need Asimov's three laws.
"This unit believed it was not harming the human, but bringing it pleasure. This unit knows that humans are dishonest, and believed that 'no' meant 'yes'."
That's why we'll need The Fourth Law of Robotics: "No" means "No"!
Now, if robots can be more emotionally responsive than men, will men do something drastic to compete with robots?
Yeah. Destroy them.
I fly all the time. From Hawaii, all over the country for work. I have a scraggly beard and I usually fly in sweat pants and a t-shirt. I look ruffled at best, and often also wear tie died shirt. I have never been hassled by TSA.
I've got a pony tail, goatee, and wear cargo pants and hiking boots.
Shortly after 9/11 I was flying a lot, and I got stopped by security for a thorough search every single time. Not most, not a larger fraction than before, every single time. There were of course a lot more random searches going on, but I'm talking dozens of trips through security where they weren't pulling out more than one in forty people, and I got tagged every time.
Then, several months later, spring of 02 roughly, it stopped. The number of people being randomly pulled out of line hadn't diminished appreciably, but I was no longer selected as a matter of course. In fact I think since then I've been subject to one random extra screening procedure.
I think it's pretty obvious that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 they'd pulled out every profile in the book, and I matched some "dirty dangerous hippie" profile (while I think tie-die shirt puts you in the "dirty harmless hippie" category), and then they simply stopped using it because they realized that was stupid.
Um no dude you weren't clear at all:
First you're talking about Screw Attack and Space Jump separately, and how both are hard to implement in 3D in addition to other things, and then with no warning or explanation you start using "space jump" (dropping even the modifier "proper") to describe Screw Attack in Prime. At what point did you explain that you felt that Screw Attack was the true implementation of "space jump" in the Prime series? Right the next post, because you sure didn't explain it here. And I had clearly been talking about Prime's space jump when I was talking about its design for making jumping forgiving, then you mentally replaced "space jump" with "screw attack" and said you disagreed. Honestly how confusing could you be?
And I think that's pretty stupid besides. "Space jump" in Prime is not "proper" space jump because it is limited to one extra jump, but "Screw Attack" in Prime is because it is only limited to 5 "jumps", even though you can't increase your height or change the direction of your jumps? That's even less like the 2D space jump than Prime's space jump! It actually serves the same function as the original space jump -- allowing you to attain both height and distances and perform aerial maneuvers to get around corners and other tricks that are impossible without the upgrade. That's why they called it "Space Jump" in Prime -- it's the 3D space jump, limited because it's now 3d.
No, the camera angle isn't why. If the camera angle was the reason why, then it would've sucked in Prime as well. Prime 1 & 2 tilted the camera very slightly when you jump. A lot of people - myself included - considered that to be a benefit. But Prime 3 doesn't do that, and it isn't any harder to jump in that game. I don't see how you can blame the camera angle if Metroid could pull it off great with the same camera angle.
What? No! First Person camera angle versus Third Person camera angle, not some little tilt to the camera from first person. Like I just said it's "FP" vs "TP" that makes it hard! Prime is the first game to make jumping work in a First Person view, the thing we've been talking about this whole time!
This is obvious if you thought about it for two freaking seconds instead of being a stubborn mule. Think about the hardest jump in the Prime series, and the fact that it's about equal to the easiest jump in Mario 64. Can you even imagine trying to do something like, say, the Mario Sunshine Challenge Levels in a 1st Person view? No! Because making jumping work in 1st Person is hard, and r
Newtonian mechanics were as false on some issues as the greek earth-wind-fire-air universe was false. Just because they were a better approximation does not mean that certain statements made by the proposed "laws" do not come out as false once you inspect them closely
What?! What useful predictions could you ever get out of "earth-wind-fire-air"? That was never a scientific predictive model to begin with. You can make many fantastic and reliable predictions using Newtons laws. NASA still uses Newtonian mechanics to land probes on other planets.
When your model fails at some point, that's the end of it. You don't look back and say "oh it wasn't so bad". It's just wrong. A particular postulate it is making about the universe is not true, and that is all that matters.
No, that's not the "end of it", as the continued use of previous models to do good and useful scientific work clearly shows. Science does not simply abandon the old model, they keep it, knowing that there is a better model which is, itself, also just a predictive model.
Modern science is not interested in high school labs - we are interested in an absolute truth stemming from mathematical necessity, if such truth exists or can exist.
Where did you ever get that idea? There is no "absolute truth" in science, nor is science interested in discovering it. Science is interested in verifiable prediction. And as much as they can gain better predictive models of the universe, that's scientific progress, but it is not progress towards "absolute truth". The idea that there is a transient "truth" that gets forgotten when a slightly better "truth" comes along is laughable. Scientists know that they are all just models that are useful, and ready to be modified as new data comes in. For science, it's not "proving Newton wrong" so much as modifying the theory by appending "within this range of conditions, to this degree of precision".
Which is why science is interested in high school labs -- the verifiable predictions that are made by the science taught in high school are still valid, as you can test yourself. If those predictions stopped working, then that science would be absolutely proven wrong.
Einstein proved the classical physics wrong by a thought experiment in a single piece of paper making a single assumption.
And we're already certain that Einstein is "wrong" in that there are phenomenon that cannot be predicted by his model, and models which do cover such areas can't peacefully coexist with Einstein's theory. Quantum Mechanics is that model. So both QM and Relativity are "wrong"? They certainly are not the "absolute truth"!
So the fact that Newtonian physics cannot predict what will happen at extremely large masses and velocities means it was as much "proven wrong" as Relativity is "proven wrong" because it cannot predict what will happen at extremely small masses and distances.
Anyway that's all besides the point, because it was so much about Netwonian Physics being wrong as the observations that led to Newton's Laws are still predicted by Relativity -- Relativity subsumes Newtonian Physics. Whereas the Electric Universe tries to turn that on its head, and say things that are well predicted by Newton, Relativity, and other well studied models aren't happening at all.
I said there was no *proper* space jump in Metroid Prime.
Okay you should be more clear then since I was talking about the actual space jump in the game and how they designed it to make jumping more forgiving, and you were talking about "proper" space jump and screw attack separately in one paragraph, but then switched to using "space jump" to mean "'proper' space jump as represented by screw attack in Prime 2" without any explanation that you were doing so. That's very confusing.
Anyway, it looks like you mixed up talk of 2D style space jump for the weak space jump the 3D games ended up with.
No, you mixed up when I said that space jump was designed to make jumping more forgiving with your swap of space jump and screw attack. I never made or accepted any such replacement. I'm talking about "space jump". The space jump in Prime is the weakened version of space jump in previous games, and it's no accident that they did so. It was one of the things they did to make jumping in Prime easier and better.
I guess if you read reviews at sites that consider FPS games the end all be all you might've seen that, but I'll tell you a very large number of reviews didn't bother to mention it at all.
It has nothing to do with what esteem they hold FPS games. It has to do with playing First-Person games with jumping, and finding that the jumping universally sucked, and being concerned that it would suck in Prime as well.
It's an adventure game with a different camera angle. If you look at it that way, it's not surprising. If you think of it as an FPS game, I guess it is.
The camera angle is WHY First-Person anything before Prime had terrible jumping! You can't just say "Oh it's an adventure game with a different camera angle, so it makes sense that jumping would work well", because that ignores how you make it work well with the different camera angle. It's not automatic! Prime is not the first "first person adventure" game, but it is the first one that had natural jumping. "FPS" vs "FPA" isn't what makes jumping difficult to get right, it's "FP" vs "TP".
If you've never played any other first-person perspective games with jumping puzzles, perhaps it isn't surprising because you just aren't aware of the challenges. If you have, then it is surprising.
That's basically what it comes down to. The only first person perspective game with jumping puzzles you've played is Prime, which is the only one to have gotten it right, therefore you don't appreciate it's accomplishments in this regard and just assume it's as simple as declaring your game to be an adventure not a shooter. It's easy to take something for granted if you don't know anything different.
I really don't get where you're coming from. You've stated that you haven't really played any other first person games and thus aren't aware of the problems they had, you've also said you give props to Retro for making the best 3d game ever -- what's your hangup against just acknowledging that, while you may not have appreciated it at the time, one of their non-trivial accomplishments was creating the first jumping puzzles in a first person game that weren't annoying?
Nobody expects the scramjet engine!
I certainly give them their due - I consider Metroid Prime to be the best 3D game ever made.
:) I'm just saying, part of that was making the jumping feel as natural as possible, and a lot of that has to do with level design, so give them their due.
Yeah, it's awesome.
Yes, I did list proper space jump (not to mention wall jumping) and screw attack as a limits, but those are the type of things that really aren't possible at all from a first person view.
Right, right, they scrapped things that make little or no sense in a first person perspective.
I also wouldn't say that space jump was intended to make jumping more forgiving. The first Prime to have it, Prime 2, didn't let you get it until you were 90% of the way through the game. It was more of a bonus for the people who missed it. Also, it's main purpose was to jump long distances.
You are mistaken; there was space jump in Metroid Prime, you got it about halfway through. You got it even earlier than that in Prime 2, not 90% through.
You are correct though that it's use as an upgrade was to enable you to jump distances that were impossible before and open up new areas like almost all Metroid upgrades do. I'm talking about the implementation as far as making jumping forgiving goes -- in previous metroids, it only worked if you used it at the peak of your jumps, whereas in Prime you can use it at any point of your jump, which made any jump that -didn't- required a maximum-length jump much easier. You could, for example, make a very sloppy attempt at a jump that would require a max-length non-space jump, then space-jump at the last minute to make sure you made it all the way if you thought you might fall short.
Were the developers worried about getting jumping right? Sure. As were the developers of Mario Galaxy. But Mario fans weren't worried that they wouldn't get it right.
Mario Galaxy is 3rd person, and they proved 3rd person platforming could be done well back in Mario 64, as well as countless other 3rd-person platforming games since then. Metroid was the first FPS that made jumping work well. It's not nearly as easy to do, as evidenced by all the failures of other games.
Mario fans had no reason to be worried. Metroid fans were worried they wouldn't get it right and rightfully so. You didn't play FPSes and don't understand why they were worried, but they were.
The extent of the commentary I saw on normal jumping had to do with height issues.
Okay, fine, you just weren't aware of it, just like you weren't aware that previous FPSes had crappy jumping and Prime was the first good one. You must have missed the reviews too where the reviewers expressed their relief that the jumping was in fact easy and fun instead of annoying and painful like all previous experience would have led them to expect.
I really don't know what you're objecting to at this point. This is all I'm saying: Metroid Prime's designers, in particular their level designers, made jumping natural and intuitive in an FPS for the first time ever. That's it. Take it or leave it, but it's true, and they deserve mad props for that achievement (among all their other ones).
Because at the moment all those countries are menaced by a neighbour who is kept in check largely by the US. And all those neighbours either have or are very close to having ICBMs. And some of them are maybe crazy enough to threaten the US with those ICBMS or their neighbours. Now if the US can shoot them down there's much less incentive for them to do that. So missile defense is actually a geopolitical stabiliser.
What on earth makes you think North Korea is going to attack anybody with an ICBM, or a nuclear-armed missile of any kind?!
First, an ICBM is a huge, gigantic, unmistakable Send nuclear retaliation here! sign. And I know it's fun to think about Kim being is "maybe crazy enough" to get his own country turned into a glass parking lot, but rationally speaking he's probably not looking to rule a cockroach and tumor-laden rat colony if he can avoid it.
Second, North Korea's specialty isn't missile technology, it's covert ops. They have some of the best spies and infiltrators in the world. If they want to deliver a nuke with the maximum chance of success possible, they're going to put it in a shipping container and quietly sneak it into a harbor of the target country. And maybe they've infiltrated the shipping yard so that container never ends up on any manifests, then they quietly sneak it away and hide it in the target's own borders until they need it. This not only plays to NK's strengths, it also makes it harder to identify the attacker (and thus justify a nuclear response)... Oh and avoids any missile defenses too.
This is why a missile shield or any anti-nuclear-missile system is just a boondoggle. MAD works just fine against any enemy who would fire a missile at us or our allies, and it does nothing to stop the clandestine method of delivery that our scarier enemies are vastly more likely to use anyway.
Any infrared light source near the TV (or IRsensor on the Wiimote) could be disruptive. Lamps, Candles, and especially the Sun. The WiiMote uses the the sensor bar to triangulate position based on 2 steady points (provided by the sensor bar). If multiple sources are competing with the signal then it will confuse the Wiimote causing jitter. The Sun is the worse as it can blanket the Wiimote sensor with IR light making it impossible to detect the 2 points of the sensor bar among all the noise. So as an experiment you may want to close the curtains, blow out the candles, and turn off any lamps that may be near the TV to see if they are adding interference.
There's a helpful tool somewhere in the Wii configuration menus that makes debugging this kind of problem easy. I honestly can't remember what it's called or where it lives... But what it does is show you what the IR Sensor is seeing and what it thinks its reference points are. It will show a grey box with a white dot on it everywhere the software is seeing an IR signal. There should be exactly 2, for the two points on the sensor bar, and if there are more or less then the pointing is going to be screwed up.
This is how I discovered that having the blinds on the window behind the entertainment center half open during the daytime was being interpreted by the Wiimote as about 7 different IR sources. Heh.
As I said in the beginning, I very rarely play FPS games, so I don't know what the norm is. All I know is Metroid handles it the way I would expect it to be handled.
Sorry I must have missed where you said that, though I did get that impression.
So let me say that I think you should give credit where credit is due. Any kind of "platforming" in just about all FPS games -- in particular console games -- has been extremely annoying and difficult and generally considered to have been a bad idea to include at all. Turoc epitomizes this not so much because it's jumping was especially annoying, but because they insisted on putting so much of it in, and making the jumps 3rd-person-platformer difficult, often with the penalty for failure being death. But it wasn't actually worse jumping than most other FPS. And it had nothing to do with analog controls, as all these games were on consoles with at least one analog stick.
Metroid Prime was the first FPS that made jumping feel natural, and easy enough that it could actually have moderate platforming puzzles that didn't make you want to drive to the developer's house and stab out their eyes with a fork, and were in fact actually fun. If you consider an FPS with bad jumping to be a "badly made game", then every FPS with jumping puzzles was badly made. Or, as many people believed, the idea of platforming puzzles in an FPS itself was bad game design.
Retro Studios showed that this wasn't necessarily the case, and the secret does in fact lie in the nature of the jumps required in the game, i.e. the level design. You should really give the Retro level designers their due, because it is only by their hard effort that you were able to have an FPS-platforming experience that feels so natural that you can't imagine it being any other way.
The jumping wasn't what caused the horror. Metroid games are about exploration with some shooting thrown in (the opposite of most first person games), and a lot of abilities that are hard to imagine fitting in a first person game.
Why yes jumping is what caused the horror among Metroid fans who were also familiar with FPSes that had tried it before. Platforming was an inherent aspect of exploration in previous metroid games, we knew it was going to be a major aspect of the new Metroid game, and all attempts to merge platforming and first person perspective had up to that point failed. Thus the fear, and the huge relief when it turned out to have been done better than ever before.
As is, Prime 1 had to scrap the screw attack, drastically limit the space jump, and remove the speed booster entirely. I don't have a link, but the producer of Prime 1 recently did an interview about the development process. He revealed that they were wanting to leave the morph ball out because it was extremely difficult to get working well. It only made it in because Miyamoto said to them "You get the morph ball perfect, or we'll find someone else to make the game." Jumping was the least of people's worries.
That's funny, because a couple of those are examples of abilities directly related to jumping and the difficulty of making it work in 3d. The space jump in particular was changed not to give you the free-roaming that it gave you in previous Metroids, but to make jumping more forgiving (since you could activate the space jump at any point during your normal jump so it was easier to use, and could correct any short-jumps that you made).
Anyway, I'm sure the developers had lots of fears and qualms developing an FPS Metroid. It's interesting to hear that they were thinking of ditching the morph ball, and denied by Miyamoto. To the extent that they could even entertain the notion of dropping morph ball, do you think they could have ditched jumping as a tool of exploration? No, and for the ones responsible for making that work, it surely wasn't the least of their worries. Something incorporated that deeply into the fundamental design sense for th
Ooookay, then. How do you explain the 10,000 year old frozen baby mammoth carcass found in Siberia a few years ago, then? Also, how did they cross the land bridge into the Americas without being able to tolerate cold during the Ice Ages?
Maybe the plasma arcs that supposedly explain meteor craters better than kinetic impact are somehow responsible...
This is classic crackpottery.
The Crackpot wants to claim that they are really a Revolutionary, that they have investigated the weak edges of science and found a fundamental problem, that the conventional wisdom is wrong, and that they hold the solution. A solution that up-ends the existing theories. They will claim that the reason they and they alone were able to discover this solution is because the Science Establishment is too set in their ways, too dogmatic, and simply refuses to question or investigate those areas where the science is weak and various mysteries inadequately explained. They will claim that the only reason that they are given the label "Crackpot" is because the Science Establishment is afraid of their ideas. The Science Establishment hates Revolutionaries, you see, and will not accept the scientific evidence the Revolutionary brings to bear no matter what.
Of course this is nonsense. Real Revolutions happen and up-end the "Establishment", they're just uncommon. Because in most cases, the existing science is by and large good and well established and supported by mountains of evidence. Einstein was a Revolutionary and General Relativity was a Revolution. His theory completely changed how we view the nature of the universe, and one of our most basic assumptions -- that Time itself is constant across all frames of reference. Quantum Mechanics was a huge Revolution in Science, again reversing some of our most basic assumptions about the universe. Yet these Revolutions are now the Scientific Establishment, by the simple virtue of the experimental evidence these Revolutions brought to bear, and now these theories are also supported by mountains of evidence, equally difficult to up-end.
So what then is the difference between the Crackpot and the Revolutionary? Well a major difference is that the true Revolutionary explains the new, explains the experimental data that the old theory cannot, but just as importantly also explains the experimental data that the old theory explained. Relativity didn't prove that Newtonian physics was wrong, it simply showed it to be an approximation for common conditions. It didn't suddenly come out and say "No, actually you can approximate gravitational attraction using the cube root of the distance between masses!" because anyone can drop an object and track its position and see that, in fact, Newton's Laws are correct within the precision of any available measuring device. Quantum Mechanics didn't prove that simpler models of atoms were completely flawed and false -- because all that chemistry you did in high school works just fine using those simpler models. QM only explains what the simpler model cannot.
The Crackpot's theory, on the other hand, cannot explain the existing evidence. The Crackpot, desperate to prove that they are Revolutionaries, then must try to deny the existing evidence, and deny the large successes of the existing theory at explaining the existing evidence.
This is the case with the Electric Universe shlock our "unwelcome celebrity" champions -- it actually tries to replace Newtonian (and relativistic) mechanics with electricity and plasma. Not just show that some of the difficult to explain parts of the universe (dark energy etc) are better explained with electricity, but that extremely easy and well explained parts of the universe (like meteor impacts, planetary motion) are also explained. It's this attempt to shoe-horn their theory into places it doesn't belong, to up-end science that needs no up-ending, that reveals the Crackpot.
Of course that's the point where most people stop reading. The Crackpot th
I've never cared to see where my feet are. I don't see that being an issue unless the level designer made the platforms way too small.
Or the jump large enough that the only way you could make it was if your feet were at the very edge of the platform when you jumped.
Turoc, the epitome of annoying jumping puzzles in FPS, demonstrated this frequently. The correct jumping procedure was: line up to target, look straight down at your shadow (no visible feet of course), run forward, hit jump when the center of the shadow was precisely at the edge of the platform. If you tried to "feel" where the edge of the platform was while looking forward, you'd either run off the platform or miss the jump.
Are you saying you never cared in Metroid where your feet are? Because it certainly matters in some other FPS games, and it 100% matters in true platform games that are either 2-D or 3-D 3rd person. It doesn't matter in Metroid because they made it not matter...
Good level design makes everything better, bad level design makes everything worse. You wouldn't say sniper rifles are a terrible idea in FPS games just because you played a game that only gave them to you in levels with any good sniping positions.
Okay... Then call it "not bad" level design. Because I'd certainly agree that jumping puzzles ala Turoc and most other FPS games that have them (thankfully few due to being generally reviled) are bad level design. Retro designed the levels in Metroid so that the jumping was not annoying given the camera angle. Call it "good", call it "not bad", I call it "fairly unique in all of 1st person shooter-dom and a breath of fresh air". That's why everyone was terrified when Metroid Prime was announced and heard it was a 1st person shooter with jumping, and relieved when the jumping despite all expectations was not annoying.
It has a huge thing to do with it. It makes it far easier to control the distance of your jump or correct it in mid-air.
There's no real need to do either of those things in Metroid, because of the level design. To the extent that you need to control the distance of your jump, you truly only need to stop it. Which doesn't require analog controls. Whereas conversely using analog stick for motion in Turoc didn't help at all...
I can see where it could flow faster to just pick in essence from: I agree, I disagree, I'm skeptical, etc. Once you do that you still get the your full sentence expressed, you simple don't see the full text of all the unchosen options.
The only problem with this system is when the actual response ends up saying more than you intended, which you would have known if it was fully spelled out. E.g. 'agree' turns into "I agree with Character X, and further more think Character Y is a blithering idiot for disagreeing. I hope you die in a fire, Character Y". Or 'I'm skeptical' becomes "I'm not sure I buy that, Character X, but I might be able to be -- you know -- persuaded... if you catch my drift... And my drift is sodomy."
But then again maybe I'm just playing the wrong games.
Advanced sensitivity + Z lock for me. It's an adventure game, not a shooter. Why make disposing of the wildlife time consuming when the terrain is your real enemy?
Cus it's more fun. To me, anyway. Fortunately the game is designed really well and will still be just as fun for those who don't want to have to aim at the wildlife.
And no, WASD can never compete with an analog stick. Besides the general awkwardness of WASD, they're just digital buttons. It's just not possible to do precise movement with them. That's the reason for all the hate of jumping in FPS games.
No, the hate for jumping in FPS games is that you can't see what the hell you are doing -- you can either see where you are jumping to, or where your feet are, but not both, so one way or another you always feel as though you are jumping blind.
Metroid gets around this through good level design. The analog motion control, though nice, really has nothing to do with it.
Oh but yeah, I've noticed no slow reaction times whatsoever with the wiimote and aiming in Metroid. The only thing that makes it inferior to the mouse is that you can't do instant 180s (or any other arbitrary turn). Oh, and by holding it out it's less stable than a mouse you rest your hand on, but hey, that just makes it feel more real to me.
You mean individuals within the government can edit "the encyclopedia anyone can edit", too?
Oh yeah, and of course it's all the same and you shouldn't be shocked at all at government manipulation.
Everyone knows any shlub can go into Wikipedia and alter the article to whatever slant they want.
One might presume that the government would not deign to do such things, or rather one might presume that it's more offensive when the government actually tries to manipulate public information directly. And no, it being someone in the House "acting on their own" doesn't make it okay, it makes it slightly less offensive. If this is truly the case, then this someone should be punished.
It's kinda like the difference between some dude in a bar lying and making exaggerated claims to make you believe Iraq is dangerous and should be invaded... vs the government lying and making exaggerated claims to the same purpose.
And yes they lied by using intelligence they knew to be faulty to support their vastly overstated claims (like not just knowing Iraq had WMD, but knowing where they were).
Oh and yes I'm still as skeptical of everything coming out of our intelligence apparatus since there hasn't been nearly enough time to undo the damage that having so many of the experienced non-partisans run out of their jobs has done. The best I can say is that the WMD fiasco has created an opportunity for them to refrain from being partisan should they so choose. That doesn't mean I trust their actual product as being any better, whether the product suits an Administration agenda or not.
Just to reiterate: Yes it's worse when a government source modifies Wikipedia than Random Internet Troll. Can't fathom why you'd think otherwise.
I'm an orthopaedic surgeon, and when fall/jump from those heights, putting them back together can be a bit "tricky", and the pieces don't always go back together well. When the suicide jumper only jumps from 40 feet and lives with horrible fractures, we sometimes joke that they didn't read the literature and plan things out correctly. Now the person is depressed AND may have bad arthritic pain from their smashed joints now, or just be plain old paralyzed.
Life sucks.....and then you live.
Ugh... Sounds nasty. That's exactly why
1) if I do commit suicide, I'm going to take the time I would have wasted writing a stupid note to instead plan very carefully to ensure there is no chance of survival.
2) if I ever find myself falling out of an airplane with no parachute, instead of getting into the frog position to slow my fall, it's head-first arms-flat-to-the-sides power-dive for me, baby! I want my corpse to bounce after smashing into the ground.
Speaking of which, when I went diving a number of years ago, the instructor said that the one death they'd had in fifteen years of operation was ruled a suicide because the guy didn't appear to ever try to open his parachute, he just went into a dive and crashed right into the ground. And according to the instructor who claimed to witness this from the ground, the body did in fact bounce about 30 feet into the air.
The tricky part of these wingsuits is how to practice enough to get good, without smashing to goo because you're not good enough.
That's why the the first question I always ask whenever I call a sky diving joint to set up a jump is "How close is the nearest save point?"