I understand this, having at one point made the same decision with full knowledge of the annoying time sink that would result, but I highly doubt that is the case here.
So... your theory is that some group has been closely following the progress of a black ops type project for over a decade, a project that in theory they never should have known existed yet they were devious enough to discover... and they'll be thrown completely off the trail by speculation that the project was cancelled? Somehow I doubt that.
Maybe online MMORPGs aren't for you. Or at least not the one you're playing. If you "don't have the time" to earn gold then you probably "don't have the time" to gain levels or do any of the other time sinks computer RPGs and especially MMOGs are famous for. Case in point -- the author was skinning level 10 boars in a game with a level cap of 60, which would be insanity if you were high enough level to kill and skin higher-level beasts with more valuable pelts. So he hasn't put in the work to level up, but has already spent $60 to buy what would be a ridiculous amount of gold for his level. How long until he just gives that up and buys a level 60 character with all the best loot because "I simply could not abide the prospect of doing even one more 'kill X many of Y creature' quests".
I understand that MMORPGs are huge time sinks, and lots of people don't have the time to spend on them. If you can have fun playing, then I suggest that you just settle for never being rich, and never having the very best items. If you can't have fun without being rich and having the best loot, may I suggest another genre?
Do the Democrats who voted for Nader and the Greens really think we're no worse off under the current regime? If they do, I know they're too stupid to run a country.
In 2000, I supported Nader because I didn't see a difference between Bush and Gore, that both were equally bad.
It's as if Bush has spent the last six years specifically trying to prove me wrong. Message to President Bush: I get it. I'm sorry. I'll never confuse the two parties again (even if I still hate both of them).
You're right about Iraq -- we wouldn't be there if Gore had been in office, and that right there is enough of a difference (in hindsight) for me. Afghanistan, most probably. The Dems voting for Iraq and Patriot, well, that's just because they're spineless kow-towers (part of what caused my furstration in 2000). It definitely wasn't their idea.
As luck would have it I moved to Texas after that, so in 2004 I still voted for a 3rd party since of course it didn't matter who I voted for.
Technology has eliminated jobs constantly for over 100 years, and yet almost everyone still has a job.
Which has nothing to do with the issue at hand. In those cases, the technology that eliminated an old job created a new one.
In this case, we're talking about still-needed jobs leaving, with nothing to replace them. Have you been to Detroit lately? Nothing has come to replace the auto industry jobs that left. Nor would one expect something to, as unlike with the case of buggy-whip manufacturers, we're still all driving ICE cars.
People have been complaining that the rich are destroying the middle class for over 100 years, yet the middle class is still here. DO you honestly believe that the "executives" today care less about their workers than the "robber barons" of 120 years ago? I don't know of any modern executives that routinely murder their employees to maintain their position, yet that was common once.
Actually the middle class took a severe beating and did nearly vanish, so acting like this is just idle chatter is foolish. It recovered both because of specific actions designed to prevent it (corporate reform laws) and happenstance (economic revitalization caused by the war effort). I don't think the executives care any less about their workers, but I don't think they care any more, either. True, executives of today couldn't get away with murdering their employees. Yet the robber barons of old couldn't move their operations to another country as easily, either. The threat is and has been real; dismissing the threat because it has been avoided so far is perilous.
Why will India be any different? People wil whine and complain, and 50 years form now India will be just as wealthy as the US, and Indian companies will have call centers in the US. I don't seem to be any poorer for the decades of manufacturing "moving to Japan", I just have a far better car than I otherwise would, and that car is built in a factory in the US, despite being a "Japanese" car.
You aren't any poorer because you don't live in Detroit and you didn't work in the auto industry. Lucky you. Most of the jobs that left never came back -- cars are assembled in the U.S., but the majority of the manufacturing is done overseas.
This is not -- I repeat not -- the fault of competition from Japanese auto makers. That was causal, for sure, but the result was not inevitable. It was the actions of the American auto makers -- and by this I mean the ones running these companies -- that are to blame. They failed to compete against the Japanese effectively for years, refusing to change and make cars that were what people wanted (for example, ones that were reliable enough to last a decade without replacement). When profits dropped they closed down factories, destroying the economies of entire cities.
This is the "cost" you mentioned -- a cost that the executives of the American auto manufacturers didn't want to pay themselves. Notice how all of them never ceased being wealthy, while their employees were out of jobs? Strange how that works. Funny how when you're at the top you get to pick and choose who has to bear the "cost" of your decisions. Maybe that's why Bush doesn't see this as a big deal.
The problem with outsourcing is not outsourcing. It is the way in which the executives doing the outsourcing use it to maximize their own profit at the expense of those less fortunate.
We cannot allow this to keep occuring. The rich are bound and determined to gut the middle class of our country, and once they do, once every city in the U.S. looks like Detroit, they'll just pick up and move to somewhere nicer, because they can.
Personally I found Gish to be very "innovative". Just because it's a side-view 2D scrolling game like many before doesn't exclude it from that title, to me -- how many ways to present something in 2D are there? A "platform game" whose fundamental basis is a very sound physics engine (and abilities which involve modifying said physics) seems like a truly unique approach to me.
But yeah, it isn't "truly innovative" in the sense that isn't similar to something we've seen before in some way. Black and White is a take on the classic God Game like Populous where you don't directly control characters, but with an extra level of indirection between you and the game environment in the form of the creature. I agree this is an innovative game, but I don't get why this qualifies as "truly" but Gish doesn't.
Which is basically my problem -- he seems to be drawing a line somewhere between "incremental" and "true" innovation, and I just don't see it, and I don't see how it's exclusive to the big names. Puzzle Pirates isn't innovative because it's just a puzzle game only cooperatively multiplayer... So now to be innovative you can't be described as a "puzzle" game? But B&W is just a God game with a creature you train, so it is? Personally I think both these games are "truly" innovative, even if both are mostly comprised of things I've seen before.
Besides, the only reason the "truly innovative" games are going to come from Electronic Arts is because they have Will Wright. On that note, Spore looks likes its going to be incredible, and unlike any game before... unless you look at it as being the merger of the "God" game and various "Evolution" games. So maybe even Will Wright can't claim the title of "innovator".
I can see his main point -- that you shouldn't expect indies to be some kind of Fountain of Originality which will obviate the big players -- but I don't get how his examples of what I consider innovative games from indies and his examples of what he (and I for that matter) consider innovative games from the big guys differ on this particular metric.
Like Likes are definitely not in my list of fond memories!
I remember only being able to stab with my wand while the fire was burning. Whether it was that or just a delay, I used the wand as a sword replacement so the book was out.
Once every couple of years, I pull my NES out of the closet and load up The Legend of Zelda. Yes, I get all nostalgic when I hear the intro music, and when I walk into that first cave to get my little wooden sword which Link is so proud to hold above his head. But after playing halfway through the first quest (or using the name ZELDA to skip directly to the second) the nostalgia wears off and I realize... the game is still actually fun. Lots of fun. Decades of playing has made the exploration part not quite so exciting... but navigating the dungeons, beating the bosses, collecting the items... Fantastic. This is truly a game that stands the test of time.
Yeah, those were evil. I do think there were always blue clouds available, if hard to find and a pain to get to.
One of my favorite memories: Figuring out the that the Magic Wand was equal to the White Sword except it could shoot no matter how much health you had, and that you shouldn't get the craptacular Magic Book that made the wand shoot fire like the Candle because the wand wouldn't shoot its beam while the fire was still burning.
Magic Wand was great when you got nailed by the red clouds. I think there were several enemies (darknuts?) that were immune to the wand though.
I pretty much agree with you, and I loved the game, but it is also pretty clear that the entire Triforce search aspect was tacked on to increase the number of hours in the game. Remove the necessary sailing around to the islands, and then to the locations where you grab the Triforce pieces, and you've probably knocked 20% of the length of the game off.
Not that you can't spend a lot of time trying to find everything if you so choose, and not that a shorter game is really that bad. Beyond Good and Evil was fairly short, and I think it was better than Wind Waker in pretty much every way. Forcing the game to be longer by adding in a non-optional time-sink was a bad decision, imho.
Actually, my main problem with the sailing *was* the graphics. The cel-shading made the characters and buildings and so forth look great. The water though wasn't great it was *boring*. And there was so much of it. Staring at the flat blue oceans with the little inverted V crests was mind-numbing. Personally I would have loved something like Waverace's water, and I think it would have actually gone very well with the rest of the graphical style. Swirling around a vortex in a rain storm that actually -looked- rain-stormy would have been nice. But that's just me.
When these people were in power, they were far, far worse than any in the current government in terms of suppressing dissident thought. Think Cultural Revolution.
Which is exactly why I don't trust them. Yet if they're just jockying for influence with the current government, and maintain their totalitarian roots, then I don't understand why they would choose this tack. Are they just willing to forment unrest and revolt in whatever way possible? Seems like they would be undermining their own position... But like I said, I just don't understand.
Let me put my point more conscisely and without the bad formatting (Second time today I've forgotten "preview"; unforgiveable):
There is a fundamental difference between using combat simulators for training, and combat simulators for casual entertainment. Proof? Military training is very effective at producing soldiers who are able to pull the trigger in the real situation, but isn't 100% as many soldiers still have problems firing on a real human. The desired goal is to blur the fantasy of the simulator with reality of the battlefield, but the soldier can still distinguish. Contrast with casual non-military gaming, where only a few out of millions of players actually go on to commit real-world violence similar to what occured in the game.
FPS games are only "murder trainers" if you want them to be, and that desire makes all the difference.
So how do you draw a line between these two? Or is there even a line? Obviously a simulation is just that -- a fake environment that mimics a real environment. But from the sound of this article, simulations have a very REAL effect on those who are participating in them - at least according to the military. So their impact stretches beyond their own environment and "spills out" into real, quantifiable behaviors, actions, and feelings.
The virtual environments don't "spill out", the soldier deliberately chooses to apply the lessons learned in the virtual world to real life. If you go into a combat simulator with the mentality that you are training for real world combat, and that your goal is to be able to fire on the real enemy as easily as you fire on the simulated enemy, then the simulation will affect your behavior in reality because you chose for it to.
Training in a simulator is completely different than casually enjoying a simulator. In one, the line between reality and fantasy is deliberately blurred. In the other, the line is only unclear if you are psychotic (or it's an Ender's Game/Matrix type scenario where you are being misled about which side of the line you are on).
It is absolutely true that video games don't cause a student to go shoot up a school, any more than training simulators cause a soldier to go to war.
Training in a video game prepares soldiers for firing on real humans in battle because they know that is what they are training for. A soldier is a professional killer. They have already signed up to kill people, and are being trained in how to do that. The simulator is just preparation, preparation for a real-life job. Mentally preparing soldiers for the difficult task of firing on another living human was done long before the video game, and this is nothing more than an extension of that training using technology.
This is nothing at all like playing a game casually at home. Could a student bent on shooting up his school use an FPS to mentally prepare themselves, like the soldier? Sure. Could a mentally unbalanced person try to carry over their virtual endeavors into the real world? Sure. But in both cases, whether deliberately or not, you have a person blurring the line between the game and reality. This person was already dangerous/i> and video games aren't doing anything that any number of movies, books, or just imagination couldn't do.
If you are capable of distinguishing between reality and fantasy -- and any sane child over age 9 should easily be able to do this -- then there is no danger of video games causing you to shoot up a school. If you make the conscious decision to use video games to train yourself to kill, then you are either a soldier training for war, or a psychopath training for crime. In no case are video games to blame.
Now "Party Elders" really means "former party officials", so this isn't indicating change from the inside. Still a stunning statement. The close ties of the people signing the letter to Mao seems significant... Though the cynical part of me notes that at least two of them were explicitly propagandists, implying this may simply be more of the same (but to what purpose, I don't know). Yet the statement "only a totalitarian system needs news censorship" is one of those things that is so true it doesn't matter who says it.
Why don't the theorists stick to explaining what can actually be observed and measured, instead of making up stuff in order to prop up theories that have more likely found their limits.
Um, yeah, that's what they're doing. We have [b]observed[/b] and [b]measured[/b] things that the existing theory of gravity doesn't explain, so the theorists are trying to develop new theories to explain it. The ultimate goal being to craft a new theory that can make predictions which further [b]observations[/b] and [b]measurements[/b] can either falsify or verify. If the data verifies the predictions, then we have a good theory -- until we make an observation that the theory does not predict.
If you think "making up" dark matter to explain observations within the constraints of Einstein's theory is silly, what would you have thought about "making up" the concept of masses warping space-time to fix problems with Newton's theory?
The sad part is that DVDs are only harder to use due to decisions made by the people who create them.
Unskippable previews and commercials? Demon-spawn, but also a choice made solely by the producer of the dvd.
Difficult to navigate menus? Same thing. Some DVDs go directly into the main feature when you pop them in. This is the sane thing to do. Most however don't do this, and some, like the Memento dvd, are deliberately designed to frustrate your attempts to watch the movie.
Like you say, DVDs have lots of advantages. The most infurating thing about them is that every disadvantage is unnecessary.
A very good point, and given how recently DVDs came out I'd be surprised if people didn't remember that they were much more expensive. Though what these same people will remember is that it was just 5-8 years ago that they were asked to re-purchase their entire video library. Now they're going to be encouraged to do so again. Now given that VHS was pretty craptacular, in particular in the longevity and reliability department, the advance to DVD was huge and perhaps necessary. What is going to drive me to whichever of the Sons of DVD survives? A little better picture? Room for more extra features, when they already have a hard time finding enough non-drivel to pad out a DVD?
Price is really only part of the picture that makes Son of DVD not look so hot. The price for incremental improvement is a put off, being asked to run the format treadmill so soon after a previous switch is another.
Slippery slope implies situations where one can experience unintended consequences that are hard to reverse.
This is more like an escalator. We're going to end up at the bottom, but that's entirely the point of stepping on in the first place.
The fact that this is a complete non-starter for actually reducing spam is irrelevent next to the intended consequence of making a buck off the problem.
It's really sad that they can get away with "pay to evade spam filters", a horrible idea, by saying it is for the opposite purpose, "prevent spam", which everyone would love. On the plus side, it seems the time is growing ripe for my idea of convincing PETA that I'm saving rabbits by punting them
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I understand this, having at one point made the same decision with full knowledge of the annoying time sink that would result, but I highly doubt that is the case here.
Especially considering that anything that can survive reentry into the atmosphere with a substantial amount of mass intact is a deadly weapon.
That's my one fear regarding easy access to space -- it makes me feel real vulnerable being down here at the bottom of the gravity well.
So... your theory is that some group has been closely following the progress of a black ops type project for over a decade, a project that in theory they never should have known existed yet they were devious enough to discover... and they'll be thrown completely off the trail by speculation that the project was cancelled? Somehow I doubt that.
Maybe online MMORPGs aren't for you. Or at least not the one you're playing. If you "don't have the time" to earn gold then you probably "don't have the time" to gain levels or do any of the other time sinks computer RPGs and especially MMOGs are famous for. Case in point -- the author was skinning level 10 boars in a game with a level cap of 60, which would be insanity if you were high enough level to kill and skin higher-level beasts with more valuable pelts. So he hasn't put in the work to level up, but has already spent $60 to buy what would be a ridiculous amount of gold for his level. How long until he just gives that up and buys a level 60 character with all the best loot because "I simply could not abide the prospect of doing even one more 'kill X many of Y creature' quests".
I understand that MMORPGs are huge time sinks, and lots of people don't have the time to spend on them. If you can have fun playing, then I suggest that you just settle for never being rich, and never having the very best items. If you can't have fun without being rich and having the best loot, may I suggest another genre?
Do the Democrats who voted for Nader and the Greens really think we're no worse off under the current regime? If they do, I know they're too stupid to run a country.
In 2000, I supported Nader because I didn't see a difference between Bush and Gore, that both were equally bad.
It's as if Bush has spent the last six years specifically trying to prove me wrong. Message to President Bush: I get it. I'm sorry. I'll never confuse the two parties again (even if I still hate both of them).
You're right about Iraq -- we wouldn't be there if Gore had been in office, and that right there is enough of a difference (in hindsight) for me. Afghanistan, most probably. The Dems voting for Iraq and Patriot, well, that's just because they're spineless kow-towers (part of what caused my furstration in 2000). It definitely wasn't their idea.
As luck would have it I moved to Texas after that, so in 2004 I still voted for a 3rd party since of course it didn't matter who I voted for.
Technology has eliminated jobs constantly for over 100 years, and yet almost everyone still has a job.
Which has nothing to do with the issue at hand. In those cases, the technology that eliminated an old job created a new one.
In this case, we're talking about still-needed jobs leaving, with nothing to replace them. Have you been to Detroit lately? Nothing has come to replace the auto industry jobs that left. Nor would one expect something to, as unlike with the case of buggy-whip manufacturers, we're still all driving ICE cars.
People have been complaining that the rich are destroying the middle class for over 100 years, yet the middle class is still here. DO you honestly believe that the "executives" today care less about their workers than the "robber barons" of 120 years ago? I don't know of any modern executives that routinely murder their employees to maintain their position, yet that was common once.
Actually the middle class took a severe beating and did nearly vanish, so acting like this is just idle chatter is foolish. It recovered both because of specific actions designed to prevent it (corporate reform laws) and happenstance (economic revitalization caused by the war effort). I don't think the executives care any less about their workers, but I don't think they care any more, either. True, executives of today couldn't get away with murdering their employees. Yet the robber barons of old couldn't move their operations to another country as easily, either. The threat is and has been real; dismissing the threat because it has been avoided so far is perilous.
Why will India be any different? People wil whine and complain, and 50 years form now India will be just as wealthy as the US, and Indian companies will have call centers in the US. I don't seem to be any poorer for the decades of manufacturing "moving to Japan", I just have a far better car than I otherwise would, and that car is built in a factory in the US, despite being a "Japanese" car.
You aren't any poorer because you don't live in Detroit and you didn't work in the auto industry. Lucky you. Most of the jobs that left never came back -- cars are assembled in the U.S., but the majority of the manufacturing is done overseas.
This is not -- I repeat not -- the fault of competition from Japanese auto makers. That was causal, for sure, but the result was not inevitable. It was the actions of the American auto makers -- and by this I mean the ones running these companies -- that are to blame. They failed to compete against the Japanese effectively for years, refusing to change and make cars that were what people wanted (for example, ones that were reliable enough to last a decade without replacement). When profits dropped they closed down factories, destroying the economies of entire cities.
This is the "cost" you mentioned -- a cost that the executives of the American auto manufacturers didn't want to pay themselves. Notice how all of them never ceased being wealthy, while their employees were out of jobs? Strange how that works. Funny how when you're at the top you get to pick and choose who has to bear the "cost" of your decisions. Maybe that's why Bush doesn't see this as a big deal.
The problem with outsourcing is not outsourcing. It is the way in which the executives doing the outsourcing use it to maximize their own profit at the expense of those less fortunate.
We cannot allow this to keep occuring. The rich are bound and determined to gut the middle class of our country, and once they do, once every city in the U.S. looks like Detroit, they'll just pick up and move to somewhere nicer, because they can.
Personally I found Gish to be very "innovative". Just because it's a side-view 2D scrolling game like many before doesn't exclude it from that title, to me -- how many ways to present something in 2D are there? A "platform game" whose fundamental basis is a very sound physics engine (and abilities which involve modifying said physics) seems like a truly unique approach to me.
But yeah, it isn't "truly innovative" in the sense that isn't similar to something we've seen before in some way. Black and White is a take on the classic God Game like Populous where you don't directly control characters, but with an extra level of indirection between you and the game environment in the form of the creature. I agree this is an innovative game, but I don't get why this qualifies as "truly" but Gish doesn't.
Which is basically my problem -- he seems to be drawing a line somewhere between "incremental" and "true" innovation, and I just don't see it, and I don't see how it's exclusive to the big names. Puzzle Pirates isn't innovative because it's just a puzzle game only cooperatively multiplayer... So now to be innovative you can't be described as a "puzzle" game? But B&W is just a God game with a creature you train, so it is? Personally I think both these games are "truly" innovative, even if both are mostly comprised of things I've seen before.
Besides, the only reason the "truly innovative" games are going to come from Electronic Arts is because they have Will Wright. On that note, Spore looks likes its going to be incredible, and unlike any game before... unless you look at it as being the merger of the "God" game and various "Evolution" games. So maybe even Will Wright can't claim the title of "innovator".
I can see his main point -- that you shouldn't expect indies to be some kind of Fountain of Originality which will obviate the big players -- but I don't get how his examples of what I consider innovative games from indies and his examples of what he (and I for that matter) consider innovative games from the big guys differ on this particular metric.
Like Likes are definitely not in my list of fond memories!
I remember only being able to stab with my wand while the fire was burning. Whether it was that or just a delay, I used the wand as a sword replacement so the book was out.
Don't forget how tough those Blue Darknuts were. It was a tossup whether a pack of those or of Blue Wizzrobes were nastier.
Which is why, just to maximize your pain, there were several rooms in the second quest's last dungeon that featured both. *shudder*
Once every couple of years, I pull my NES out of the closet and load up The Legend of Zelda. Yes, I get all nostalgic when I hear the intro music, and when I walk into that first cave to get my little wooden sword which Link is so proud to hold above his head. But after playing halfway through the first quest (or using the name ZELDA to skip directly to the second) the nostalgia wears off and I realize... the game is still actually fun. Lots of fun. Decades of playing has made the exploration part not quite so exciting... but navigating the dungeons, beating the bosses, collecting the items... Fantastic. This is truly a game that stands the test of time.
Yeah, those were evil. I do think there were always blue clouds available, if hard to find and a pain to get to.
One of my favorite memories: Figuring out the that the Magic Wand was equal to the White Sword except it could shoot no matter how much health you had, and that you shouldn't get the craptacular Magic Book that made the wand shoot fire like the Candle because the wand wouldn't shoot its beam while the fire was still burning.
Magic Wand was great when you got nailed by the red clouds. I think there were several enemies (darknuts?) that were immune to the wand though.
I pretty much agree with you, and I loved the game, but it is also pretty clear that the entire Triforce search aspect was tacked on to increase the number of hours in the game. Remove the necessary sailing around to the islands, and then to the locations where you grab the Triforce pieces, and you've probably knocked 20% of the length of the game off.
Not that you can't spend a lot of time trying to find everything if you so choose, and not that a shorter game is really that bad. Beyond Good and Evil was fairly short, and I think it was better than Wind Waker in pretty much every way. Forcing the game to be longer by adding in a non-optional time-sink was a bad decision, imho.
Actually, my main problem with the sailing *was* the graphics. The cel-shading made the characters and buildings and so forth look great. The water though wasn't great it was *boring*. And there was so much of it. Staring at the flat blue oceans with the little inverted V crests was mind-numbing. Personally I would have loved something like Waverace's water, and I think it would have actually gone very well with the rest of the graphical style. Swirling around a vortex in a rain storm that actually -looked- rain-stormy would have been nice. But that's just me.
Always remember this: "Trusted Computing" is not about you trusting them. It's about them not trusting you.
When these people were in power, they were far, far worse than any in the current government in terms of suppressing dissident thought. Think Cultural Revolution.
Which is exactly why I don't trust them. Yet if they're just jockying for influence with the current government, and maintain their totalitarian roots, then I don't understand why they would choose this tack. Are they just willing to forment unrest and revolt in whatever way possible? Seems like they would be undermining their own position... But like I said, I just don't understand.
Let me put my point more conscisely and without the bad formatting (Second time today I've forgotten "preview"; unforgiveable):
There is a fundamental difference between using combat simulators for training, and combat simulators for casual entertainment. Proof? Military training is very effective at producing soldiers who are able to pull the trigger in the real situation, but isn't 100% as many soldiers still have problems firing on a real human. The desired goal is to blur the fantasy of the simulator with reality of the battlefield, but the soldier can still distinguish. Contrast with casual non-military gaming, where only a few out of millions of players actually go on to commit real-world violence similar to what occured in the game.
FPS games are only "murder trainers" if you want them to be, and that desire makes all the difference.
So how do you draw a line between these two? Or is there even a line? Obviously a simulation is just that -- a fake environment that mimics a real environment. But from the sound of this article, simulations have a very REAL effect on those who are participating in them - at least according to the military. So their impact stretches beyond their own environment and "spills out" into real, quantifiable behaviors, actions, and feelings.
The virtual environments don't "spill out", the soldier deliberately chooses to apply the lessons learned in the virtual world to real life. If you go into a combat simulator with the mentality that you are training for real world combat, and that your goal is to be able to fire on the real enemy as easily as you fire on the simulated enemy, then the simulation will affect your behavior in reality because you chose for it to.
Training in a simulator is completely different than casually enjoying a simulator. In one, the line between reality and fantasy is deliberately blurred. In the other, the line is only unclear if you are psychotic (or it's an Ender's Game/Matrix type scenario where you are being misled about which side of the line you are on).
It is absolutely true that video games don't cause a student to go shoot up a school, any more than training simulators cause a soldier to go to war.
Training in a video game prepares soldiers for firing on real humans in battle because they know that is what they are training for. A soldier is a professional killer. They have already signed up to kill people, and are being trained in how to do that. The simulator is just preparation, preparation for a real-life job. Mentally preparing soldiers for the difficult task of firing on another living human was done long before the video game, and this is nothing more than an extension of that training using technology.
This is nothing at all like playing a game casually at home. Could a student bent on shooting up his school use an FPS to mentally prepare themselves, like the soldier? Sure. Could a mentally unbalanced person try to carry over their virtual endeavors into the real world? Sure. But in both cases, whether deliberately or not, you have a person blurring the line between the game and reality. This person was already dangerous/i> and video games aren't doing anything that any number of movies, books, or just imagination couldn't do.
If you are capable of distinguishing between reality and fantasy -- and any sane child over age 9 should easily be able to do this -- then there is no danger of video games causing you to shoot up a school. If you make the conscious decision to use video games to train yourself to kill, then you are either a soldier training for war, or a psychopath training for crime. In no case are video games to blame.
Now "Party Elders" really means "former party officials", so this isn't indicating change from the inside. Still a stunning statement. The close ties of the people signing the letter to Mao seems significant... Though the cynical part of me notes that at least two of them were explicitly propagandists, implying this may simply be more of the same (but to what purpose, I don't know). Yet the statement "only a totalitarian system needs news censorship" is one of those things that is so true it doesn't matter who says it.
Heh, I'm a moron.
Why don't the theorists stick to explaining what can actually be observed and measured, instead of making up stuff in order to prop up theories that have more likely found their limits.
Um, yeah, that's what they're doing. We have [b]observed[/b] and [b]measured[/b] things that the existing theory of gravity doesn't explain, so the theorists are trying to develop new theories to explain it. The ultimate goal being to craft a new theory that can make predictions which further [b]observations[/b] and [b]measurements[/b] can either falsify or verify. If the data verifies the predictions, then we have a good theory -- until we make an observation that the theory does not predict.
If you think "making up" dark matter to explain observations within the constraints of Einstein's theory is silly, what would you have thought about "making up" the concept of masses warping space-time to fix problems with Newton's theory?
The sad part is that DVDs are only harder to use due to decisions made by the people who create them.
Unskippable previews and commercials? Demon-spawn, but also a choice made solely by the producer of the dvd.
Difficult to navigate menus? Same thing. Some DVDs go directly into the main feature when you pop them in. This is the sane thing to do. Most however don't do this, and some, like the Memento dvd, are deliberately designed to frustrate your attempts to watch the movie.
Like you say, DVDs have lots of advantages. The most infurating thing about them is that every disadvantage is unnecessary.
A very good point, and given how recently DVDs came out I'd be surprised if people didn't remember that they were much more expensive. Though what these same people will remember is that it was just 5-8 years ago that they were asked to re-purchase their entire video library. Now they're going to be encouraged to do so again. Now given that VHS was pretty craptacular, in particular in the longevity and reliability department, the advance to DVD was huge and perhaps necessary. What is going to drive me to whichever of the Sons of DVD survives? A little better picture? Room for more extra features, when they already have a hard time finding enough non-drivel to pad out a DVD?
Price is really only part of the picture that makes Son of DVD not look so hot. The price for incremental improvement is a put off, being asked to run the format treadmill so soon after a previous switch is another.
Slippery slope implies situations where one can experience unintended consequences that are hard to reverse.
This is more like an escalator. We're going to end up at the bottom, but that's entirely the point of stepping on in the first place.
The fact that this is a complete non-starter for actually reducing spam is irrelevent next to the intended consequence of making a buck off the problem.
It's really sad that they can get away with "pay to evade spam filters", a horrible idea, by saying it is for the opposite purpose, "prevent spam", which everyone would love. On the plus side, it seems the time is growing ripe for my idea of convincing PETA that I'm saving rabbits by punting them