I wasn't aware that one of the necessities of having a role model scientist was that of said role model being the same sex.
That's okay, it's pretty common for males in a male-dominated society with plenty of male role models to fail to see the significance of the sex of said role models. Yet I'm sure that if you think about what you know about role models in general, starting with those basic role models that define how we perceive gender roles -- i.e. our parents -- then you should see how having same-sex role models in professional fields can be important.
Then consider what happens when there are very few or no same-sex role models in a given field, and the opposite sex role models are of the often vocalized opinion that members of your sex are not suitable for that field. I mean, this goes on even today, but think of what it was like more than fifty years ago. In this context a strong same-sex role model is even more important as they can serve as a powerful counterexample to the naysayers.
I don't think all women between the ages of 8 and 80 are feeling robbed by this possibility.
Um, yeah, because if this is true most of them don't know about it -- I'd never heard it before either. That wouldn't alter the fact that they were robbed, even if the impact this had on their lives would in most cases be small. Certainly there are cases where it could have been very big.
The average energy of a vacuum can be zero. The deviation of the average amount of energy cannot be zero. The average is not the deviation from the average. State that clearly, and there is no issue. Blur the line, make BS.
If the average is zero, but the deviation is not, then that implies that some points in the vacuum have positive energy and others have, necessarily, negative energy. Sorry, WTF is negative energy?
Ergo, the entire point of the article is moot, he painted what he saw and understood, that - believe it or not - is what artists do.
Actually, that isn't necessarily what artists do. Since the earliest cave paintings to Venus de Milo to modern cartoons, artists paint representations of what they see (with their real eyes or mind's eye) with varying degrees of attempted and actual accuracy. Trying to rigorously paint "what one sees" -- though still with large amounts of abstraction and representation -- was actually a major advancement of the Impressionists. For example, I believe they were one of the first movements to paint shadows that weren't black.
Seeing and understanding what you see are not the same, and the second is not necessarily easy.
That Van Gogh represented with high accuracy mathematical aspects of turbulence that are not obvious to casual observers, other painters, or even the scientists of Van Gogh's days who studied things like turbines indicates that he was onto something special and asking why he was able to gain these insights is in fact a very interesting question. Ergo, your whole post is moot.
I think most of use would probably agree that we are slower, dumber, and more surly on Monday mornings, especially before the caffeine begins to sink into our nervous systems.
Some of us get caught up in simple things, like badly edited sentences in the slashdot blurbs. Heh, nothing wrong with that.
Some of us get high and mighty and start criticizing the observations of theoretical physicists with crackpot and at best amateur comments that such things are obvious or inconsequential.
Honestly, between this article and the Van Gogh accurately representing some of the deep mathematics of turbulence, with people going "So what that's obvious and stupid" I have to wonder what...
Fuck I can't remember what I was wondering. I'm just being surly on a Monday.
You may say that it is obvious it is a joke, but can a school not act and in turn risk potential injury to its students in guessing it is a joke or is it on the level of an air port that can not risk potential injury to its passengers and others by assuming a mention of a bomb is a joke?
What's this about guessing, as if there's some reasonable chance it could go either way and there's no way to distinguish?
The cops looked into it. A psychologist looked into it. Both concluded things were as they appear: a joke by a teenager with no real danger behind it. Yet the school board persisted in treating it as though it were an actualy threat. This is retarded. The fact that the school board -- and only the school board -- was unable to distinguish between this and a real threat is not an argument in support of their position. It is an argument for recognizing that our institutions are becoming deliberately stupid.
The decision to suspend was school policy, that was given. The complaint made by the parents in objection to the suspension that the article considered a thread was somehow protected speech was struck down. It is not protected according to the court and so the objection made by the parents failed. That is it. This is logical.
All the court ruled was that the school's actions were not illegal. That's a far cry from logical. The court doesn't rule on whether school policies are stupid or not.
So school policy is to suspend students on the basis of tasteless jokes made off school grounds, and this is supposed to be logical. Where's the logic in showing students that the faculty not only doesn't understand them, but mistrusts and fears them as well? Treating people as though they are threats is one way to create a threat where none existed.
But yes, it's so logical to treat people as though they are threats even though any reasonable person could see they aren't. Since these people are so stupid, I almost feel I should help them out by pointing out that it's usually the quiet ones who actually end up hurting people rather than just making jokes about it. Sadly, armed with this information the school would surely start persecuting kids who don't make animated gifs about killing authority figures. After all, not acting out in any way could be a sign of lethal intent, and how could they possibly know for sure if it is or not?! Think of the liability issues if they are wrong! That really isn't any more stupid than what took place here.
Whether it was intended as a joke or not, it's still a threat - just like those signs you see at the airport warning you not to joke about a bomb in your suitcase.
Um, no, that doesn't make a joke a threat. The airport signs state that for security purposes they are required to take jokes as if they were real threats, so don't do it. That doesn't turn a joke into an actual threat.
This isn't an airport. We aren't required to be deliberately stupid and pretend we don't know the difference between a joke and a real death threat.
Any fool could see that he wasn't serious. Hell, he was showing it around to all his friends probably just to show them that he was daring enough to say something bad. Does that make it cool? No. So give the kid detention, or if you really want to go hard on him then suspend him for a couple days.
But a whole semester? That's out of line, and is going to seriously impact his school year, just because they're deliberately misunderstanding their own student. We have to end this paranoid craziness! If things like this were punished in the same way when I was in school, I never would have graduated.
I think a 360 has a lot more components in it than a NES had. Take out the hard drive and the DVD drive, memory card ports, wireless, etc. and I think you could make a more accurate comparison... and your point about similar components being much cheaper would hold true.
But those are all things that a modern low-end PC has which a PC in 1985 didn't. Including in many cases the hard drive; my friend's multi-kilo-buck computer had two 3.5" floppy drives to work with. Electronics have gotten so much cheaper that we can have many more components in them and still have them be cheaper than they ever were before. So the 360 costing the same as a 1985 console is really not impressive at all -- or unimpressive, my point being that whether or not it is expensive should be based on the analysis of today, not compared to 1985 before the PC revolution really took off.
According to a calculator I found online (grain of salt, but it passes my smell test and I can't be arsed to really research this just now), $200 in 1985 translates to $363 in 2005. Which means that the premium XBox 360 is a whole $36 more expensive than the NES (and the core system $63 cheaper!), in terms of real purchasing power. This has not stopped plenty of people complaining about its price.
I don't see why they shouldn't complain if they want to, as far as the console itself goes. The cost of electronics has been going down steadily since the 80s, both absolute and inflation adjusted. This is because producing them has become cheaper. In the late 80s a PC would cost thousands of dollars; today you can get one for $500 at Walmart. A game console in 2005 costing the same as a game console in 1985 after adjusting for inflation isn't impressive in the least. So if people percieve the price of the 360 as too high, well, there's some basis for that. Personally I don't think it's bad.
For games it is easy to see that they have actually gone up in cost to produce, so it isn't surprising that their purchase cost has gone up. I think this gets to people because they have the reasonable expectation based on experience that technology should go down in price (or stay the same in absolute dollars and thus become cheaper due to inflation), and they see the games as being an extension of that technology. This is the acclimation you're talking about. Or maybe they're like me. I certainly appreciate that games cost more to produce, but honestly I don't care. Telling me how many millions a game cost to produce doesn't make the $100 or whatever price any lower, and doesn't make me want to pay that high a price either.
If it's a super hit game, then charging $100 on the first day or for pre-release is only good economics -- if there are people willing to pay that much, why not?
Because it colors the perceptions of those who think $100 is a ludicrous amount, so that even after you lower the price they won't buy your product because you've already turned them off?
Like-a-so: "$100 for a game?! No way!"
"Hey, remember that $100 game? It's now only $70!" "That's still expensive, not that I care. I bought a 360."
But other than that, no reason not to have $100 games at all.
It seems like a case of people liking those elements 'cause they're weird, not because they're fun.
I suppose you could say that, if that's the only axis you want to look at things on.
My point is that the game broke the fourth wall deliberately in a way that simultaneously removed the player from their role as Solid Snake, Super Spy, while simultaneously drawing the player in as themselves.
How do you show that Psycho Mantis has mind reading powers? Purely in-game he could read Snake's mind quite easily, and maybe that'd say "spygame" more, but it would be contrived. "You're thinking about Albuquerque!" "Amazing!" So instead they give him the ability to read the player's mind... well, read what video games he plays, which is as close as they can get.
This and the other 4th-wall examples don't by themselves constitute "fun". However they do represent a way of involving the player in the game that few others have tried. Like breaking the 4th wall in theatre, making characters in the game aware of and respond to the player builds a connection with the player. That can make the subsequent game playing feel more involved with what is otherwise a pretty disconnected experience (mashing buttons on a game pad to make super spy aim and fire weapons).
The overall effect isn't one you're very conscious of while playing, but it works. I didn't really list them to be examples of awesome in the game (such a list wouldn't have many of these elements in it, there's much better to choose from), but examples of how the 4th wall breaking technique was used.
This is disgusting! Until it can be proven that carbon atoms are not alive according to God, these evil scientists must be stopped from experiment on them!
You're right, so I asked God. He said no, carbon nanotubes are not living beings in His eyes. Then he said that skin cells were, and I was going to Hell for so brazenly sloughing them off by the thousands right in front of Him. He sounded really angry, and I got really scared, then He told me he was just kidding, cells were part of my body and their deaths were a natural part of my life. Then He said that viruses were not part of my body, and that most of my white blood cells were going to Hell. He vanished before I could ask him if he was joking or not.
It seemed that no one would pick it up when left within our view.
Well what kind of cashier would accidentally leave a bill out on the counter in their own plain sight? Sure it could happen but it'd look rather conspicuous; if I was in any way feeling larcenous, my first thought would be that it was left there deliberately to try to tempt people. I've seen this at work. Someone thought the cleaning staff had sticky fingers, so someone else left a couple dollar bills on their desk to test the theory. Surprise! The bills left out in plain sight for no obvious purpose other than to be conspicuous unattended money were not touched! Whether they would actually steal or not, who would fall for such an obvious trap?
I think the printed eyes may have been similar. Like the eyes on the Neighborhood Watch signs, it isn't the presence of an eye that is supposed to deter neer-do-wells. They aren't just eyes, they're symbols representing the fact that you are being watched. I think a lot of people would have assumed the painted eyes were accompanied by real eyes. Why would you put up the sign otherwise?
Sounds like a big flaw in the study to me: Assuming that the people who saw the eyes only reacted to the eyes themselves, and didn't make any further connections or inferences.
Are you drunk? What did I "lie" about, exactly? When did I say that I never debated about anti-trust shit on slashdot?
You: "but when it comes down to anti-trust laws, there is NO debate, whatsoever"
Which, seeing as you yourself have engaged in the debates you say never occur, you know isn't true. Now shut the fuck up, liar.
"anti-monopoly" laws are in fact, punishing a company for being too successful and earned their status
And this is why the debates died off, because the only things the "pro-trust" side can come up with is lies like this. No, it isn't punishing them for success. Being a monopoly is okay, being ridiculously successfull is okay. It is abusing that status in anti-competitive ways that is punished. But of course you know this -- it's been covered a hundred times in the debates you claim don't exist -- and are merely pretending to be ignorant of the distinction.
Oh, what a crock of shit. Every time there's a story about somebody getting convicted of stealing software/music/whatever, the Slashdot Mind screams about how unfair their "punishment" is.
*snap* *snap* Pay attention! "but that would have no impact on whether the poor slob convicted received their punishment"
Neither Slashdot nor the average casual copyright infringer has the power to avoid obeying the court's decision without becoming an outlaw. For Microsoft, this is apparently not the case.
Stealing software is not bad. Being too successful is bad. Wow. Buddy, you really shouldn't skip your meds...
Dude, whatever medication it is that makes you think that Microsoft was punished for "success" rather than the anti-competitive practices revealed in the trial, I'm sure as fuck not going to take any. You really shouldn't go rifling through your parents' medicine cabinet. Those brown bottles are prescription-only for a reason.
In the US, under Clinton, there was an overwhemling victory against MS. When the judge could not keep his mouth shut and the case was up for retrial, under Bush, the government struck a sweetheart deal.
I, personally, did not see any problem with a judge calling a bunch of criminals, criminals, after he had seen all the evidence, but hey, what do I know, I live in the real world.
Well, I think the comments while accurate were probably out of line with how a judge should act. What I find rather telling is that even though the appeals court did find that the judge had accted innapproriately, they upheld his finding of fact in its entirety and upheld his ruling. The case was very solid enough that there was no basis for appeal. It was a slam-dunk victory, and the DoJ was clearly excited. This is why the abrupt turn around after Bush took office and appointed a new attorney general was so apparent. I was expecting a change in attitude, but not for them to just drop all ambitions of real penalties. The worst part being their excuse, claiming it would be too difficult to get a penalty that Microsoft would agree to. What? I would have thought the hardest part was proving Microsoft had broken the law; having done so, how on earth could it then be difficult to punish them? It's not, the new doj just didn't want to punish them.
I love it how The Slashdot GroupThink questions the validitiy and constitutionality of laws such as the DMCA, copyright laws, IP laws, etc., but when it comes down to anti-trust laws, there is NO debate, whatsoever, and people such as yourself continually just parrot "They broke the law! They broke the law!". Nice.
I love how you frame your troll by pretending to not have ever engaged in debate on anti-trust law right here on slashdot yourself, you lame-ass liar.
For the edification of those who aren't merely pretending to be ignorant of said debates, they have happened constantly and in particular in the years immediately after the start of the U.S. anti-trust case. From the anarcho-capitalist "libertarian" to the socialist Euro-geeks, both of whom had found an entertaining home on/., there was plenty of debate. In the end, other than the completely die-hard Laisse-Faire capitalists who believe the "invisible hand" will always fix everything eventually (even if it sucks a lot in the meantime), most people saw that monopolies were a broken corner case of capitalism, and if they began to abuse their unique position to damage the market for their own gain then they needed to be stopped.
It all goes back to the very first post regarding the filing of the DOJ's case against MS, which began: "In a move that only surprised those who think monopolies are a good thing..."
But what's funny is that we could debate forever on the validity of the DMCA or other IP laws, but that would have no impact on whether the poor slob convicted received their punishment. Only in the cases like Microsoft is avoiding paying levied fines even an option.
The game is actually quite immersive (the only breaking of the "fourth wall" I can think of was the second controller trick for Psycho Mantis).
The game was quite immersive, and quite ambitious in terms of story line and character development, particularly outside of RPGs. This was only a problem when Kojima got too preachy about nuclear weapons (about 40 years too late on the "nukes are bad, m'kay" bandwagon there), but in genaral was quite successfull.
However, I have never seen a video game that so frequently and deliberately breaks the fourth wall. Sure, every game does it when they tell you to push the "A" button to fire your weapon, but MGS actually worked into the story. Including ones already mentioned: - Psycho mantis reads your memory card and comments on what games you've played. - You have to use the 2nd controller to beat his mind control (rather clever, really, representing the "higher level" of the mind by the player's own hands). - You read the back of the game case to get Meryl's frequency. - You call up Mei Ling on your codec and ask her to save your game. - In the torture scene, Revolver Ocelot warns you not to use a controller with turbo buttons, because he'll know.
I want to say there are more examples, but I've only added two to this list. Hmmm...
All that said, I don't think breaking the fourth wall constitutes an effort to make the gamer realize the game is silly and absurd. Sounds more like a way to involve the gamer more directly into the game itself. If anything, I say Kojima wanted both the game and gaming itself as an art form to be taken seriously.
2: 1889. Namely, november 6th, 1889. Founding of a little playing card company was made in a little backwards country called japan that would later become Nintendo. The company, not the country...
Oh, obviously. The country isn't going to become Nintendo until 2037.
Well, they got 1972 right. 28th January, 1972 - happy birthday to me! I really couldn't have played a thing without 1972...
Not true. Without 1972, you would have been born in 1973, and everyone would be scratching there heads over why the calendar skipped a year. Bartenders would have been pissed, to be sure.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't aware that one of the necessities of having a role model scientist was that of said role model being the same sex.
That's okay, it's pretty common for males in a male-dominated society with plenty of male role models to fail to see the significance of the sex of said role models. Yet I'm sure that if you think about what you know about role models in general, starting with those basic role models that define how we perceive gender roles -- i.e. our parents -- then you should see how having same-sex role models in professional fields can be important.
Then consider what happens when there are very few or no same-sex role models in a given field, and the opposite sex role models are of the often vocalized opinion that members of your sex are not suitable for that field. I mean, this goes on even today, but think of what it was like more than fifty years ago. In this context a strong same-sex role model is even more important as they can serve as a powerful counterexample to the naysayers.
I don't think all women between the ages of 8 and 80 are feeling robbed by this possibility.
Um, yeah, because if this is true most of them don't know about it -- I'd never heard it before either. That wouldn't alter the fact that they were robbed, even if the impact this had on their lives would in most cases be small. Certainly there are cases where it could have been very big.
Blah blah blah.
I wouldn't screw my cousin, it's gross as hell, because I share the same taboo you do.
But that's what it is -- a taboo. Not every culture shares it. Many don't.
I can understand that. You just keep saying the equivalent of "evil! taboo! dirty!"
You must understand your own cultural context before you can judge others.
The average energy of a vacuum can be zero. The deviation of the average amount of energy cannot be zero. The average is not the deviation from the average. State that clearly, and there is no issue. Blur the line, make BS.
If the average is zero, but the deviation is not, then that implies that some points in the vacuum have positive energy and others have, necessarily, negative energy. Sorry, WTF is negative energy?
Ergo, the entire point of the article is moot, he painted what he saw and understood, that - believe it or not - is what artists do.
Actually, that isn't necessarily what artists do. Since the earliest cave paintings to Venus de Milo to modern cartoons, artists paint representations of what they see (with their real eyes or mind's eye) with varying degrees of attempted and actual accuracy. Trying to rigorously paint "what one sees" -- though still with large amounts of abstraction and representation -- was actually a major advancement of the Impressionists. For example, I believe they were one of the first movements to paint shadows that weren't black.
Seeing and understanding what you see are not the same, and the second is not necessarily easy.
That Van Gogh represented with high accuracy mathematical aspects of turbulence that are not obvious to casual observers, other painters, or even the scientists of Van Gogh's days who studied things like turbines indicates that he was onto something special and asking why he was able to gain these insights is in fact a very interesting question. Ergo, your whole post is moot.
I think most of use would probably agree that we are slower, dumber, and more surly on Monday mornings, especially before the caffeine begins to sink into our nervous systems.
Some of us get caught up in simple things, like badly edited sentences in the slashdot blurbs. Heh, nothing wrong with that.
Some of us get high and mighty and start criticizing the observations of theoretical physicists with crackpot and at best amateur comments that such things are obvious or inconsequential.
Honestly, between this article and the Van Gogh accurately representing some of the deep mathematics of turbulence, with people going "So what that's obvious and stupid" I have to wonder what...
Fuck I can't remember what I was wondering. I'm just being surly on a Monday.
Matter and energy are the same thing. Space is a byproduct of that.
No they aren't, for the same reason squares and quadrilaterals aren't the same thing. Matter is a type of energy. Not all energy is matter.
That is all.
You may say that it is obvious it is a joke, but can a school not act and in turn risk potential injury to its students in guessing it is a joke or is it on the level of an air port that can not risk potential injury to its passengers and others by assuming a mention of a bomb is a joke?
What's this about guessing, as if there's some reasonable chance it could go either way and there's no way to distinguish?
The cops looked into it. A psychologist looked into it. Both concluded things were as they appear: a joke by a teenager with no real danger behind it. Yet the school board persisted in treating it as though it were an actualy threat. This is retarded. The fact that the school board -- and only the school board -- was unable to distinguish between this and a real threat is not an argument in support of their position. It is an argument for recognizing that our institutions are becoming deliberately stupid.
The decision to suspend was school policy, that was given. The complaint made by the parents in objection to the suspension that the article considered a thread was somehow protected speech was struck down. It is not protected according to the court and so the objection made by the parents failed. That is it. This is logical.
All the court ruled was that the school's actions were not illegal. That's a far cry from logical. The court doesn't rule on whether school policies are stupid or not.
So school policy is to suspend students on the basis of tasteless jokes made off school grounds, and this is supposed to be logical. Where's the logic in showing students that the faculty not only doesn't understand them, but mistrusts and fears them as well? Treating people as though they are threats is one way to create a threat where none existed.
But yes, it's so logical to treat people as though they are threats even though any reasonable person could see they aren't. Since these people are so stupid, I almost feel I should help them out by pointing out that it's usually the quiet ones who actually end up hurting people rather than just making jokes about it. Sadly, armed with this information the school would surely start persecuting kids who don't make animated gifs about killing authority figures. After all, not acting out in any way could be a sign of lethal intent, and how could they possibly know for sure if it is or not?! Think of the liability issues if they are wrong! That really isn't any more stupid than what took place here.
Whether it was intended as a joke or not, it's still a threat - just like those signs you see at the airport warning you not to joke about a bomb in your suitcase.
Um, no, that doesn't make a joke a threat. The airport signs state that for security purposes they are required to take jokes as if they were real threats, so don't do it. That doesn't turn a joke into an actual threat.
This isn't an airport. We aren't required to be deliberately stupid and pretend we don't know the difference between a joke and a real death threat.
Any fool could see that he wasn't serious. Hell, he was showing it around to all his friends probably just to show them that he was daring enough to say something bad. Does that make it cool? No. So give the kid detention, or if you really want to go hard on him then suspend him for a couple days.
But a whole semester? That's out of line, and is going to seriously impact his school year, just because they're deliberately misunderstanding their own student. We have to end this paranoid craziness! If things like this were punished in the same way when I was in school, I never would have graduated.
I think a 360 has a lot more components in it than a NES had. Take out the hard drive and the DVD drive, memory card ports, wireless, etc. and I think you could make a more accurate comparison... and your point about similar components being much cheaper would hold true.
But those are all things that a modern low-end PC has which a PC in 1985 didn't. Including in many cases the hard drive; my friend's multi-kilo-buck computer had two 3.5" floppy drives to work with. Electronics have gotten so much cheaper that we can have many more components in them and still have them be cheaper than they ever were before. So the 360 costing the same as a 1985 console is really not impressive at all -- or unimpressive, my point being that whether or not it is expensive should be based on the analysis of today, not compared to 1985 before the PC revolution really took off.
According to a calculator I found online (grain of salt, but it passes my smell test and I can't be arsed to really research this just now), $200 in 1985 translates to $363 in 2005. Which means that the premium XBox 360 is a whole $36 more expensive than the NES (and the core system $63 cheaper!), in terms of real purchasing power. This has not stopped plenty of people complaining about its price.
I don't see why they shouldn't complain if they want to, as far as the console itself goes. The cost of electronics has been going down steadily since the 80s, both absolute and inflation adjusted. This is because producing them has become cheaper. In the late 80s a PC would cost thousands of dollars; today you can get one for $500 at Walmart. A game console in 2005 costing the same as a game console in 1985 after adjusting for inflation isn't impressive in the least. So if people percieve the price of the 360 as too high, well, there's some basis for that. Personally I don't think it's bad.
For games it is easy to see that they have actually gone up in cost to produce, so it isn't surprising that their purchase cost has gone up. I think this gets to people because they have the reasonable expectation based on experience that technology should go down in price (or stay the same in absolute dollars and thus become cheaper due to inflation), and they see the games as being an extension of that technology. This is the acclimation you're talking about. Or maybe they're like me. I certainly appreciate that games cost more to produce, but honestly I don't care. Telling me how many millions a game cost to produce doesn't make the $100 or whatever price any lower, and doesn't make me want to pay that high a price either.
Get a Wii
I've already got that! It's the socket the Wii plugs into that I need.
(Am I the only Nintendo fandboy who loves the name because of all the penis jokes?)
If it's a super hit game, then charging $100 on the first day or for pre-release is only good economics -- if there are people willing to pay that much, why not?
Because it colors the perceptions of those who think $100 is a ludicrous amount, so that even after you lower the price they won't buy your product because you've already turned them off?
Like-a-so:
"$100 for a game?! No way!"
"Hey, remember that $100 game? It's now only $70!"
"That's still expensive, not that I care. I bought a 360."
But other than that, no reason not to have $100 games at all.
It seems like a case of people liking those elements 'cause they're weird, not because they're fun.
I suppose you could say that, if that's the only axis you want to look at things on.
My point is that the game broke the fourth wall deliberately in a way that simultaneously removed the player from their role as Solid Snake, Super Spy, while simultaneously drawing the player in as themselves.
How do you show that Psycho Mantis has mind reading powers? Purely in-game he could read Snake's mind quite easily, and maybe that'd say "spygame" more, but it would be contrived. "You're thinking about Albuquerque!" "Amazing!" So instead they give him the ability to read the player's mind... well, read what video games he plays, which is as close as they can get.
This and the other 4th-wall examples don't by themselves constitute "fun". However they do represent a way of involving the player in the game that few others have tried. Like breaking the 4th wall in theatre, making characters in the game aware of and respond to the player builds a connection with the player. That can make the subsequent game playing feel more involved with what is otherwise a pretty disconnected experience (mashing buttons on a game pad to make super spy aim and fire weapons).
The overall effect isn't one you're very conscious of while playing, but it works. I didn't really list them to be examples of awesome in the game (such a list wouldn't have many of these elements in it, there's much better to choose from), but examples of how the 4th wall breaking technique was used.
This is disgusting! Until it can be proven that carbon atoms are not alive according to God, these evil scientists must be stopped from experiment on them!
You're right, so I asked God. He said no, carbon nanotubes are not living beings in His eyes. Then he said that skin cells were, and I was going to Hell for so brazenly sloughing them off by the thousands right in front of Him. He sounded really angry, and I got really scared, then He told me he was just kidding, cells were part of my body and their deaths were a natural part of my life. Then He said that viruses were not part of my body, and that most of my white blood cells were going to Hell. He vanished before I could ask him if he was joking or not.
God has a weird sense of humor.
Heh, you're right, but after years of reading /. do you really expect any of us to recognize what editing looks like? :)
If you're going to ban such online actvities, why not go to the extreme, and ban any sort of social networking site.
Yeah, it's almost as if the ones making the decision have no understanding of the internet at all.
Think of it as a way of helping to maintain Slashdot's signal:noise ratio. They've given us a signal, now all we need to do is supply the noise!
It seemed that no one would pick it up when left within our view.
Well what kind of cashier would accidentally leave a bill out on the counter in their own plain sight? Sure it could happen but it'd look rather conspicuous; if I was in any way feeling larcenous, my first thought would be that it was left there deliberately to try to tempt people. I've seen this at work. Someone thought the cleaning staff had sticky fingers, so someone else left a couple dollar bills on their desk to test the theory. Surprise! The bills left out in plain sight for no obvious purpose other than to be conspicuous unattended money were not touched! Whether they would actually steal or not, who would fall for such an obvious trap?
I think the printed eyes may have been similar. Like the eyes on the Neighborhood Watch signs, it isn't the presence of an eye that is supposed to deter neer-do-wells. They aren't just eyes, they're symbols representing the fact that you are being watched. I think a lot of people would have assumed the painted eyes were accompanied by real eyes. Why would you put up the sign otherwise?
Sounds like a big flaw in the study to me: Assuming that the people who saw the eyes only reacted to the eyes themselves, and didn't make any further connections or inferences.
Are you drunk? What did I "lie" about, exactly? When did I say that I never debated about anti-trust shit on slashdot?
You: "but when it comes down to anti-trust laws, there is NO debate, whatsoever"
Which, seeing as you yourself have engaged in the debates you say never occur, you know isn't true. Now shut the fuck up, liar.
"anti-monopoly" laws are in fact, punishing a company for being too successful and earned their status
And this is why the debates died off, because the only things the "pro-trust" side can come up with is lies like this. No, it isn't punishing them for success. Being a monopoly is okay, being ridiculously successfull is okay. It is abusing that status in anti-competitive ways that is punished. But of course you know this -- it's been covered a hundred times in the debates you claim don't exist -- and are merely pretending to be ignorant of the distinction.
Oh, what a crock of shit. Every time there's a story about somebody getting convicted of stealing software/music/whatever, the Slashdot Mind screams about how unfair their "punishment" is.
*snap* *snap* Pay attention! "but that would have no impact on whether the poor slob convicted received their punishment"
Neither Slashdot nor the average casual copyright infringer has the power to avoid obeying the court's decision without becoming an outlaw.
For Microsoft, this is apparently not the case.
Stealing software is not bad. Being too successful is bad. Wow. Buddy, you really shouldn't skip your meds...
Dude, whatever medication it is that makes you think that Microsoft was punished for "success" rather than the anti-competitive practices revealed in the trial, I'm sure as fuck not going to take any. You really shouldn't go rifling through your parents' medicine cabinet. Those brown bottles are prescription-only for a reason.
In the US, under Clinton, there was an overwhemling victory against MS. When the judge could not keep his mouth shut and the case was up for retrial, under Bush, the government struck a sweetheart deal.
I, personally, did not see any problem with a judge calling a bunch of criminals, criminals, after he had seen all the evidence, but hey, what do I know, I live in the real world.
Well, I think the comments while accurate were probably out of line with how a judge should act. What I find rather telling is that even though the appeals court did find that the judge had accted innapproriately, they upheld his finding of fact in its entirety and upheld his ruling. The case was very solid enough that there was no basis for appeal. It was a slam-dunk victory, and the DoJ was clearly excited. This is why the abrupt turn around after Bush took office and appointed a new attorney general was so apparent. I was expecting a change in attitude, but not for them to just drop all ambitions of real penalties. The worst part being their excuse, claiming it would be too difficult to get a penalty that Microsoft would agree to. What? I would have thought the hardest part was proving Microsoft had broken the law; having done so, how on earth could it then be difficult to punish them? It's not, the new doj just didn't want to punish them.
I love it how The Slashdot GroupThink questions the validitiy and constitutionality of laws such as the DMCA, copyright laws, IP laws, etc., but when it comes down to anti-trust laws, there is NO debate, whatsoever, and people such as yourself continually just parrot "They broke the law! They broke the law!". Nice.
/., there was plenty of debate. In the end, other than the completely die-hard Laisse-Faire capitalists who believe the "invisible hand" will always fix everything eventually (even if it sucks a lot in the meantime), most people saw that monopolies were a broken corner case of capitalism, and if they began to abuse their unique position to damage the market for their own gain then they needed to be stopped.
I love how you frame your troll by pretending to not have ever engaged in debate on anti-trust law right here on slashdot yourself, you lame-ass liar.
For the edification of those who aren't merely pretending to be ignorant of said debates, they have happened constantly and in particular in the years immediately after the start of the U.S. anti-trust case. From the anarcho-capitalist "libertarian" to the socialist Euro-geeks, both of whom had found an entertaining home on
It all goes back to the very first post regarding the filing of the DOJ's case against MS, which began: "In a move that only surprised those who think monopolies are a good thing..."
But what's funny is that we could debate forever on the validity of the DMCA or other IP laws, but that would have no impact on whether the poor slob convicted received their punishment. Only in the cases like Microsoft is avoiding paying levied fines even an option.
The game is actually quite immersive (the only breaking of the "fourth wall" I can think of was the second controller trick for Psycho Mantis).
The game was quite immersive, and quite ambitious in terms of story line and character development, particularly outside of RPGs. This was only a problem when Kojima got too preachy about nuclear weapons (about 40 years too late on the "nukes are bad, m'kay" bandwagon there), but in genaral was quite successfull.
However, I have never seen a video game that so frequently and deliberately breaks the fourth wall. Sure, every game does it when they tell you to push the "A" button to fire your weapon, but MGS actually worked into the story. Including ones already mentioned:
- Psycho mantis reads your memory card and comments on what games you've played.
- You have to use the 2nd controller to beat his mind control (rather clever, really, representing the "higher level" of the mind by the player's own hands).
- You read the back of the game case to get Meryl's frequency.
- You call up Mei Ling on your codec and ask her to save your game.
- In the torture scene, Revolver Ocelot warns you not to use a controller with turbo buttons, because he'll know.
I want to say there are more examples, but I've only added two to this list. Hmmm...
All that said, I don't think breaking the fourth wall constitutes an effort to make the gamer realize the game is silly and absurd. Sounds more like a way to involve the gamer more directly into the game itself. If anything, I say Kojima wanted both the game and gaming itself as an art form to be taken seriously.
2: 1889. Namely, november 6th, 1889. Founding of a little playing card company was made in a little backwards country called japan that would later become Nintendo. The company, not the country...
Oh, obviously. The country isn't going to become Nintendo until 2037.
Well, they got 1972 right. 28th January, 1972 - happy birthday to me! I really couldn't have played a thing without 1972...
Not true. Without 1972, you would have been born in 1973, and everyone would be scratching there heads over why the calendar skipped a year. Bartenders would have been pissed, to be sure.
Status Report: Subject still stupid.
Okay, that's the best I've got.