Both sides have valid points, but now consider this: Our enemies get a hold of just exactly how that body armor is flawed and use that against our men and women deployed.
They already have been using this flaw against us simply by shooting and killing our soldiers! The flaw exists regardless of whether or not it is publicized. Do you think the bullets have to know that the armor failed ballistic tests before they can penetrate it?
The only reason to keep that information secret is to avoid political embarassment at the expense of soldiers' safety.
In the.pdf where the body armor was mentioned, it says that after the results were attained through the FOIA and was going to be released in newspapers, the government reversed the decision and recalled the faulty body armor.
Thus freeing the information actually resulted in our soldiers being safer because they are no longer saddled with equipment that won't protect them!
This is completely typical of the way this war has been fought. Decisions that endanger our soldiers are made, and either concealed or backed up with bullshit. Guess what? Reality doesn't care what story you tell to cover your bad decision; your soldiers still die. But the cover up is never about making our soldiers safer anyway. It's about politics. Our war is being run by politics, and politics is the opposite of reality. War is not.
Whatever. The Norse totally ripped off the idea for trolls from Tolkein. Though on the other hand, Tolkein totally ripped the idea of a bad-ass villain with a lesser, but still bad-ass minion who used to be on the side of good from Lucas.
In Nethack you can spend a long time sitting in one spot debating whether you're going to try an unknown potion or scroll and possibly die. In Diablo if you spend a long time thinking, you *will* die.
Another difference -- though it is related to the real time vs turn based nature -- is the number of different actions you can take. In Diabl2 you typically have only a few effective skills you can use, so you are mostly deciding where to move and on what to unleash those skills. In Nethack, the number of things you can do is extremely large, so it makes sense to actually take your time and consider the possibilities.
On of my favorite examples involves someone who actually posted to rec.games.nethack to ask for advice on how to deal with Demogorgon, who had been gated in (at extremely low probability) by a lesser demon and was about to unleash disease-laden whoop-ass on the character. A bunch of ideas flew around, some very creative, but what the player eventually did was polymorph themselves into a cockatrice so that Demogorgon turned himself to stone when he struck with his bare tentacles, giving the character a couple turns to turn themself back and cure the disease Demo inflicted.
That's why I love nethack -- every situation is unique, and there are a huge amount of possible solutions to nearly every problem.
Though I also like Diablo2. It turns out that a graphical real-time rogue-like can be pretty dang fun. And the multiplayer. The Gauntlet comparison someone else mentioned is pretty apt, now that I think about.
As Creative has shown, just because you don't patent an idea that you had doesn't mean someone else won't patent that very same idea.
Having an idea, using it in a product, and then just hoping nobody notices that you are using a patentable idea without patenting it, is naive, foolish, and bound to get you crushed.
"Compete on execution" is nothing but fantasy fluff in the face of patent law.
You're right, and that confusion is what is motivating a lot of the comments here.
Yes, some people will choose to release things into the public domain. Lessig's point is that all such culture is supposed to eventually enter the public doman. Now, only those who actually want this to happen will do it, while anyone who wants to make money off their product for 10 years will lock their work in copyright and DRM forever.
The only reason we give authors the exclusive rights to their work is to incentivize them to create it so that eventually it will become ours. We are now being screwed out of our end of the bargain.
That is Lessig's point. That is the problem with copyright today.
I don't know if I actually believe anti-trust laws are a good thing. I mean, let's take a look at the market... it seemed there wasn't any need for lawsuits.
Yes, because Intel's actions were greatly limited by anti-trust law!
Intel is alleged to have anti-competitive practices by basing their prices to OEMs on how many AMD parts they sold, as a direct financial incentive to not buy AMD, and supposedly several major OEMs caputilated entirely and dropped AMD from their lines. Yay market?
And that's with Intel being afraid of anti-trust action (and I assure you they are). If there were no anti-trust laws, what do you think they would do? Let me give you a hint: Intel makes more profit in a quarter than AMD sees gross revenue. They could easily cut their prices to almost nil and provide whatever cash incentives it took to get OEMs to sign contracts stating they would not buy AMD parts for N years, where N is long enough for any holdouts to feel the pain and long enough for AMD to be unable to pay the upkeep on their fabs.
Once AMD lost its fab, and Intel was the only game in town, how much do you think your precious market would set the price of processors at?
That's extreme, but not impossible, especially back in the days before Athlon when AMD was even smaller and weaker.
Anti-trust laws are there for a very good reason. Free markets are not fair markets, and a company that is vastly larger and has vastly more marketshare and cash than their competitors has a huge advantage regardless of the quality of their processors. Anti-trust is there to put a reasonable restriction on that advantage, such as, oh, not punishing your customers for buying from a competitor.
Those laws being in place are the only reason that great competitive race in the late nineties occured at all. You have to realize that.
the earth will be fine, now and long after humans are wiped from the planet.
I agree completely. We couldn't wipe out life on earth if we dedicated all our efforts to it. It's that last part that I'm worried about.
That we don't know, and some people think that's the same as us being safe and not needing to change anything, is what scares me. We need to know. And in the give and take of "maybe, maybe not" there's a lot to say "maybe" and therefore a lot to say we are screwing ourselves by doing nothing and waiting for a final answer.
My greatest fear is that we will finally solve the issue, and the science community will say with one voice "Yes, we finally realized that we are dooming our own race through our actions... and the last chance to do anything about it was one hundred years ago."
You don't wait until you're 100% sure the snake isn't poisonous before you move your hand away, do you?
That's just my take. I want to save our way of life for my descendents, and I'm frustrated by people who think doing nothing is the best way to do that.
Regardless of what you think a human life is worth, at some point, the money would be better spent somewhere else where you can save more than 0.5 lives per 2 years per US$ 9,000,000.
That is absolutely true. But there are two reasons why it doesn't work that way.
1) Not spending 65K UKP does not guarantee that money will be spent on some other, more cost-effective life saving measure (in particular a measure aimed at the same people benefitting from the pool-nanny).
2) People are completely irrational when it comes to cost/safety analysis with regards to their own progeny. That there may be a better way to protect their own child from more serious danger is irrelevent. The same thing that makes us care about our children makes us unable to reason objectively about it. I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing either (it's allowed us to survive this long).
Oh yeah, those were good ones. I was just going from memory, and had forgotten. I'm sure I could go reminisce about them all at GameFAQs. I played the game through three times with each Ancient (to get the cool, but dissapointingly short uber-ending) and have probably seen all the insanity effects.
Yeah, lots of companies use Linux for their rendering. That doesn't change the fact that this guy needs a specific program that isn't on Linux. Or needed, since that particular example was from 1998. So laugh all you want.
My point is that as long as there is a specific app that you need that isn't on Linux, you can't use Linux, and saying "try using something else (just so you can switch to Linux" is inneffective and rude.
Ever heard of Isaac Newton? Turns out his theories were incomplete in some very fundamental ways, but his theories regarding the motion of objects were the best approximations we had for hundreds of years and are still very useful for macroscopic objects traveling way below c.
That's clearly not what he's talking about. What if Newton had concluded that gravity varies linearly with the distance between masses? For certain ranges, that's not a bad approximation.
Newton wasn't wrong; his result is merely valid only for a certain set of assumptions. Newton was not the last word on motion, but that doesn't make him wrong.
Or like from the article, a study that finds that a gene influences a certain disease may be "wrong" in that the gene is not the sole factor in the disease. Those factors being discovered later would not invalidate the original research. Or it would be actually wrong in that the gene and disease are not related at all, in which case further research would show that the first paper was utterly wrong. It is the second case that he is discussing.
It seems there's a lot of pedantry flying around about "wrong" versus "unsound" versus whatever. The article specifically refers to "false findings", which makes this real though semantic distinction irrelevent. Maybe it would be clearer if the article title had been "Most scientific studies are probably bullshit".
I still don't understand when people say these things, I played Eternal Darkness and not only was I killing too many enemies to possibly get my meter down, but even once it did get down I never had any "nasty" tricks pulled. That's the REASON I played the game, I thought it was going to be a bunch of nasty tricks put together, but it turned into a boring game.
You basically had to deliberately allow your sanity meter to go down and not recover it beyond killing enemies. Picking the green idol at the beginning makes this easier, since the green enemies do more sanity damage. You had to be careful then, though, because strong enemies would do a lot of sanity damage and you would eventually take health damage instead.
I let my sanity ride at about 0 most of the time, because I really liked the creepy sound effects, bleeding walls, skewed angles, and the occasional funny trick. But in general I agree that the idea was very underused. Mainly because very few of the sanity effects actually affected the game. Either it was something completely ignorable, like bleeding walls, or a "hallucination" that would end and warp you back one room with no harm done.
Also, putting "MUTE" on the screen wasn't the nastiest or best trick ever pulled... instead of "MISSION FAILED" it said "FISSION MAILED".
Cute. Actually the MUTE thing wasn't the best trick in ED by far, especially because it was obvious it wasn't for my TV. Some better tricks (on the player) in order of increasing freakiness:
Room full of zombies start beating the snot out of you and an authentic replica of the game's "Controller not found please check your connection" dialogue appears.
You access the save menu, and suddenly a progress meter appears saying "deleting..." as you watch your save games vanish.
And the best: You finish a mission and return to the "hub" level of the mansion, and suddenly a screen appears: "Thank you for playing Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. Continue the battle against the Ancients in Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Redemption, coming soon to the Game Cube!"! That one actually got me to shout "What the fuck!" at my screen. Then I laughed because suddenly I understood how Shenmue players felt.
In summary, Eternal Darkness was a great game, but its main gimmick was underdeveloped and somewhat dissapointing despite a few gems (that you missed, much is the pity). Oh, and patenting an Insanity Meter is fucking retarded.
Transgaming is good if you are a Linux user who wants to play Windows games that you would otherwise be completely unable to play. I've used it myself to do that, and am probably going to soon in order to play WoW. Since I'm never going to use Windows again, some level of Windows gaming support is better than zero. Yet suggesting that it would allow someone who is primarily interested in playing games for Windows to ditch Windows is unjustified.
Even the officially supported games have many problems that Windows users don't have to suffer. Bugs, crashing, performance divits, non-working features even in "officially supported" games like WoW and Counterstrike. Even if it does work more or less flawlessly on one release, that is no guarantee that it will work on the next (in fact WoW is apparently just such a case).
And that's still ignoring that there are probably thousands of games that aren't even in the transgaming database, or are there but have no playability rating and don't work at all if you try. You are at best limited to a small sampling of the total number of games available for Windows .
Cedega is a fine way for a Linux user to expand the number of games they can play. It does not in any way allow a Windows gamer to ditch Windows.
I remember comming across a page with 3d modeling software titles for linux.
Haha. I'm not laughing because there are no 3d modelling tools for Linux, I'm laughing because if you need a plugin for 3dsmax to do your job, then none of those alternatives matter. "I must use 3dsmax" implies "I must use windows". End of story, sadly.
Get cedega, they support virtually everything within a week of release. (check their database... if you have a few days to read all the titles that is)
Okay, now I'm just laughing. You can't just read the titles, you have to check the functionality level and then read the comments to see what functionality that missing star or half-star actually represents. Even their "officially supported" titles have missing features, bugs, quirks, random crashes, performance pitfalls, and other problems that don't occur when running in Windows (i.e. above and beyond what the windows user deals with). And just because one version works more or less completely doesn't mean the next patch level will work at all.
Don't get me wrong. Transgaming is great if you are a Linux user who wants to play some Windows games. That's me. I've used it in the past, and am considering using it again for WoW (for which all the caveats I mentioned in the previous paragraph apply). However suggesting that Cedega is a suitable replacement for Windows for someone who primarily identifies themselves as a PC gamer is ludicrous.
You have an application that you have to run that is only available for not-Linux. No, Office doesn't count, but there are a lot of things that do.
I've done the Linux advocacy thing before, and whittled down a number of less-than-stellar objections. But when I hear "I need to run 3dsmax for my 3d modelling job" or "I want to play game [X] (or a wide number of new games)" then I stop. Well, for that need, Windows isn't "best" so much as "the only option".
The funny part is how these people are aware of and irritated by the limitations of Windows and are often otherwise willing to consider a switch. Ah, the joys of the OS monopoly!
I'll let you decide if that influence is good or bad... personally, I'm thinking it ain't great.
That depends on whether you think getting rid of people who think everything that is natural is therefore good for you is a good thing or not. Personally I put them along with the people who think that because we have no natural predators that we are perfectly safe getting our pictures taken with bears and other large, dangerous animals. As in it would be great, especially if they off themselves in a particularly ironic fashion.
Personally I've always wondered why the "all nature is great" people would bother with some artificially made anti-venom when bitten by a perfectly natural rattlesnake. Hypocrits.;)
Instead, he encourages replacing that proprietary software as soon as possible.
Remember that there's a breed of capitalist that views creating your own solution so as not to need the capitalist anymore to be just as much "taking the fruits". It's that sense of entitlement that makes a mockery of the allegedly meritocratic system they espouse.
Anyway, I'm still a little surprised to see posts like the GP claiming free software will kill off the market for programmers. In 1997, there were lots of interesting debates about what would happen. Now it's 2005, and what happened is that there lots of jobs were created by free software because -- surprise -- businesses still need software customized to their needs. So hearing these comments now strikes me as being somewhat like buggy whip makers claiming the automobile will ruin the economy -- ten years after the Model T.
Could it be that oppressed people have lower IQ scores, everywhere? In fact, there are some studies that just show this. (In particular, I am thinking of an IQ study of a population of Japanese that are are segregated against in Japan.)
Any link would be fantastic. I believe the numbers in these studies are generally gathered correctly, but the conclusions are screwy; this would reinforce me theory.
Here is what it seems like I see over and over: "Study of I.Q. tests in nation A conclude that social stereotypes of nation A at the time of the testing are, in fact, biological fact." I find this inherently suspicious because it implies that throughout the ages different people have been oppressed by the powerful but finally we have found the natural order of things. Especially becauset this is always mouthed by the ones who the current order favors.
This has always seemed like an odd coincidence to me.
In this case, it sounds like he's just studying IQ among populations. There is little to explain why. He's just assuming that it's intrinsic.
It's the same assumption they always use, because they have to assume it. The logic, which is somewhat backwards, goes roughly like this:
I.Q. correlates with success. Race and sex correlate with I.Q. Race and sex are genetic, therefore I.Q. is genetic. Success, which also correlates with race and sex, is thus caused by genetic intelligence which certain groups lack.
The conclusion in the second step is there to justify the third. If I.Q. is not genetic, then this means social factors impact I.Q. and success. Without that trip through a genetic and meriocritous metric, the correlation between race and success is best explained by social bias.
Yet that step doesn't hold up. I find it interesting that according to the article Irwing says the I.Q. difference exists "against a background of women dramatically overtaking men in educational attainment and making very rapid advances in terms of occupational achievement." Proof I.Q. is genetic "intelligence", or proof that I.Q. is becoming a worse predictor of success?
I.Q. tests don't actually measure anything but performance on an I.Q. test. Does anyone still think you can define an inherent "processing speed" of a processor based on one benchmark? That's with something as simple as a computer, whose structure is fully understood and specified and whose inherent parameters are, in fact, actually known.
So as whether I.Q. is inherent or actually just a bad estimate of actual success based on real social issues: our intelligence evolved to handle real-world problems. If women are succeeding in solving real-world problems when given the drive and opportunity then I say it is the I.Q. test that is faulty. What can you expect with a standardized test? I have yet to hear of one that you can't do better on with teaching, so the argument that they measure something inherent and unchangeable has always seemed ludicrous to me.
Well, my understanding of the other founders, whom I am generally more familiar with than Paine, does not indicate such a clear-cut agree/disagree. In particular, Jefferson's and Franklin's writtings regarding separation of church and state seem to me quite clearly against granting religion any role whatsoever in the government of the new nation.
Which is different from saying religion should have no role in the nation (i.e. in the hearts and minds of the people). That is a distinction they understood but seems, perhaps, to be missing today.
I also doubt that much credit could be given even by Franklin or others on the effect of religion on science during the period Paine was talking about. The spiritual value of religion that Franklin found does not make the Dark Ages, an era in which religion and politics were one and the same, go away.
Are the domestic defense contractors in turn required to buy only domestic? Are they required to buy domestic steel? The latter is an area of American self-sufficiency that particularly worries me at the moment, though i don't know if it applies to the military.
That's fantastic, but is your argument simply that Thomas Paine should not be granted the status as an authority that we typically do to our Founding Fathers, or is your argument that he is actually wrong in his assessment? If the latter, you do not properly justify it.
The funny part to me is that I went to the trouble of putting the comments in nested mode and searching for angryflower to make sure I wasn't being redundant.
Slashdot Mirror
Both sides have valid points, but now consider this: Our enemies get a hold of just exactly how that body armor is flawed and use that against our men and women deployed.
.pdf where the body armor was mentioned, it says that after the results were attained through the FOIA and was going to be released in newspapers, the government reversed the decision and recalled the faulty body armor.
They already have been using this flaw against us simply by shooting and killing our soldiers! The flaw exists regardless of whether or not it is publicized. Do you think the bullets have to know that the armor failed ballistic tests before they can penetrate it?
The only reason to keep that information secret is to avoid political embarassment at the expense of soldiers' safety.
In the
Thus freeing the information actually resulted in our soldiers being safer because they are no longer saddled with equipment that won't protect them!
This is completely typical of the way this war has been fought. Decisions that endanger our soldiers are made, and either concealed or backed up with bullshit. Guess what? Reality doesn't care what story you tell to cover your bad decision; your soldiers still die. But the cover up is never about making our soldiers safer anyway. It's about politics. Our war is being run by politics, and politics is the opposite of reality. War is not.
Whatever. The Norse totally ripped off the idea for trolls from Tolkein. Though on the other hand, Tolkein totally ripped the idea of a bad-ass villain with a lesser, but still bad-ass minion who used to be on the side of good from Lucas.
In Nethack you can spend a long time sitting in one spot debating whether you're going to try an unknown potion or scroll and possibly die. In Diablo if you spend a long time thinking, you *will* die.
Another difference -- though it is related to the real time vs turn based nature -- is the number of different actions you can take. In Diabl2 you typically have only a few effective skills you can use, so you are mostly deciding where to move and on what to unleash those skills. In Nethack, the number of things you can do is extremely large, so it makes sense to actually take your time and consider the possibilities.
On of my favorite examples involves someone who actually posted to rec.games.nethack to ask for advice on how to deal with Demogorgon, who had been gated in (at extremely low probability) by a lesser demon and was about to unleash disease-laden whoop-ass on the character. A bunch of ideas flew around, some very creative, but what the player eventually did was polymorph themselves into a cockatrice so that Demogorgon turned himself to stone when he struck with his bare tentacles, giving the character a couple turns to turn themself back and cure the disease Demo inflicted.
That's why I love nethack -- every situation is unique, and there are a huge amount of possible solutions to nearly every problem.
Though I also like Diablo2. It turns out that a graphical real-time rogue-like can be pretty dang fun. And the multiplayer. The Gauntlet comparison someone else mentioned is pretty apt, now that I think about.
As Creative has shown, just because you don't patent an idea that you had doesn't mean someone else won't patent that very same idea.
Having an idea, using it in a product, and then just hoping nobody notices that you are using a patentable idea without patenting it, is naive, foolish, and bound to get you crushed.
"Compete on execution" is nothing but fantasy fluff in the face of patent law.
You're right, and that confusion is what is motivating a lot of the comments here.
Yes, some people will choose to release things into the public domain. Lessig's point is that all such culture is supposed to eventually enter the public doman. Now, only those who actually want this to happen will do it, while anyone who wants to make money off their product for 10 years will lock their work in copyright and DRM forever.
The only reason we give authors the exclusive rights to their work is to incentivize them to create it so that eventually it will become ours. We are now being screwed out of our end of the bargain.
That is Lessig's point. That is the problem with copyright today.
I don't know if I actually believe anti-trust laws are a good thing. I mean, let's take a look at the market ... it seemed there wasn't any need for lawsuits.
Yes, because Intel's actions were greatly limited by anti-trust law!
Intel is alleged to have anti-competitive practices by basing their prices to OEMs on how many AMD parts they sold, as a direct financial incentive to not buy AMD, and supposedly several major OEMs caputilated entirely and dropped AMD from their lines. Yay market?
And that's with Intel being afraid of anti-trust action (and I assure you they are). If there were no anti-trust laws, what do you think they would do? Let me give you a hint: Intel makes more profit in a quarter than AMD sees gross revenue. They could easily cut their prices to almost nil and provide whatever cash incentives it took to get OEMs to sign contracts stating they would not buy AMD parts for N years, where N is long enough for any holdouts to feel the pain and long enough for AMD to be unable to pay the upkeep on their fabs.
Once AMD lost its fab, and Intel was the only game in town, how much do you think your precious market would set the price of processors at?
That's extreme, but not impossible, especially back in the days before Athlon when AMD was even smaller and weaker.
Anti-trust laws are there for a very good reason. Free markets are not fair markets, and a company that is vastly larger and has vastly more marketshare and cash than their competitors has a huge advantage regardless of the quality of their processors. Anti-trust is there to put a reasonable restriction on that advantage, such as, oh, not punishing your customers for buying from a competitor.
Those laws being in place are the only reason that great competitive race in the late nineties occured at all. You have to realize that.
the earth will be fine, now and long after humans are wiped from the planet.
I agree completely. We couldn't wipe out life on earth if we dedicated all our efforts to it. It's that last part that I'm worried about.
That we don't know, and some people think that's the same as us being safe and not needing to change anything, is what scares me. We need to know. And in the give and take of "maybe, maybe not" there's a lot to say "maybe" and therefore a lot to say we are screwing ourselves by doing nothing and waiting for a final answer.
My greatest fear is that we will finally solve the issue, and the science community will say with one voice "Yes, we finally realized that we are dooming our own race through our actions... and the last chance to do anything about it was one hundred years ago."
You don't wait until you're 100% sure the snake isn't poisonous before you move your hand away, do you?
That's just my take. I want to save our way of life for my descendents, and I'm frustrated by people who think doing nothing is the best way to do that.
Regardless of what you think a human life is worth, at some point, the money would be better spent somewhere else where you can save more than 0.5 lives per 2 years per US$ 9,000,000.
That is absolutely true. But there are two reasons why it doesn't work that way.
1) Not spending 65K UKP does not guarantee that money will be spent on some other, more cost-effective life saving measure (in particular a measure aimed at the same people benefitting from the pool-nanny).
2) People are completely irrational when it comes to cost/safety analysis with regards to their own progeny. That there may be a better way to protect their own child from more serious danger is irrelevent. The same thing that makes us care about our children makes us unable to reason objectively about it. I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing either (it's allowed us to survive this long).
Oh yeah, those were good ones. I was just going from memory, and had forgotten. I'm sure I could go reminisce about them all at GameFAQs. I played the game through three times with each Ancient (to get the cool, but dissapointingly short uber-ending) and have probably seen all the insanity effects.
Man, that game was cool.
Penguins with mullets, what could be cooler?
Penguins with porkchop sideburns, but that's about it.
Yeah, lots of companies use Linux for their rendering. That doesn't change the fact that this guy needs a specific program that isn't on Linux. Or needed, since that particular example was from 1998. So laugh all you want.
My point is that as long as there is a specific app that you need that isn't on Linux, you can't use Linux, and saying "try using something else (just so you can switch to Linux" is inneffective and rude.
Only if the USPTO keeps track of how insane the patents they are currently accepting are with some kind of meter...
Ever heard of Isaac Newton? Turns out his theories were incomplete in some very fundamental ways, but his theories regarding the motion of objects were the best approximations we had for hundreds of years and are still very useful for macroscopic objects traveling way below c.
That's clearly not what he's talking about. What if Newton had concluded that gravity varies linearly with the distance between masses? For certain ranges, that's not a bad approximation.
Newton wasn't wrong; his result is merely valid only for a certain set of assumptions. Newton was not the last word on motion, but that doesn't make him wrong.
Or like from the article, a study that finds that a gene influences a certain disease may be "wrong" in that the gene is not the sole factor in the disease. Those factors being discovered later would not invalidate the original research. Or it would be actually wrong in that the gene and disease are not related at all, in which case further research would show that the first paper was utterly wrong. It is the second case that he is discussing.
It seems there's a lot of pedantry flying around about "wrong" versus "unsound" versus whatever. The article specifically refers to "false findings", which makes this real though semantic distinction irrelevent. Maybe it would be clearer if the article title had been "Most scientific studies are probably bullshit".
I still don't understand when people say these things, I played Eternal Darkness and not only was I killing too many enemies to possibly get my meter down, but even once it did get down I never had any "nasty" tricks pulled. That's the REASON I played the game, I thought it was going to be a bunch of nasty tricks put together, but it turned into a boring game.
You basically had to deliberately allow your sanity meter to go down and not recover it beyond killing enemies. Picking the green idol at the beginning makes this easier, since the green enemies do more sanity damage. You had to be careful then, though, because strong enemies would do a lot of sanity damage and you would eventually take health damage instead.
I let my sanity ride at about 0 most of the time, because I really liked the creepy sound effects, bleeding walls, skewed angles, and the occasional funny trick. But in general I agree that the idea was very underused. Mainly because very few of the sanity effects actually affected the game. Either it was something completely ignorable, like bleeding walls, or a "hallucination" that would end and warp you back one room with no harm done.
Also, putting "MUTE" on the screen wasn't the nastiest or best trick ever pulled... instead of "MISSION FAILED" it said "FISSION MAILED".
Cute. Actually the MUTE thing wasn't the best trick in ED by far, especially because it was obvious it wasn't for my TV. Some better tricks (on the player) in order of increasing freakiness:
Room full of zombies start beating the snot out of you and an authentic replica of the game's "Controller not found please check your connection" dialogue appears.
You access the save menu, and suddenly a progress meter appears saying "deleting..." as you watch your save games vanish.
And the best: You finish a mission and return to the "hub" level of the mansion, and suddenly a screen appears: "Thank you for playing Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. Continue the battle against the Ancients in Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Redemption, coming soon to the Game Cube!"! That one actually got me to shout "What the fuck!" at my screen. Then I laughed because suddenly I understood how Shenmue players felt.
In summary, Eternal Darkness was a great game, but its main gimmick was underdeveloped and somewhat dissapointing despite a few gems (that you missed, much is the pity). Oh, and patenting an Insanity Meter is fucking retarded.
Transgaming is good if you are a Linux user who wants to play Windows games that you would otherwise be completely unable to play. I've used it myself to do that, and am probably going to soon in order to play WoW. Since I'm never going to use Windows again, some level of Windows gaming support is better than zero. Yet suggesting that it would allow someone who is primarily interested in playing games for Windows to ditch Windows is unjustified.
Even the officially supported games have many problems that Windows users don't have to suffer. Bugs, crashing, performance divits, non-working features even in "officially supported" games like WoW and Counterstrike. Even if it does work more or less flawlessly on one release, that is no guarantee that it will work on the next (in fact WoW is apparently just such a case).
And that's still ignoring that there are probably thousands of games that aren't even in the transgaming database, or are there but have no playability rating and don't work at all if you try. You are at best limited to a small sampling of the total number of games available for Windows .
Cedega is a fine way for a Linux user to expand the number of games they can play. It does not in any way allow a Windows gamer to ditch Windows.
I remember comming across a page with 3d modeling software titles for linux.
Haha. I'm not laughing because there are no 3d modelling tools for Linux, I'm laughing because if you need a plugin for 3dsmax to do your job, then none of those alternatives matter. "I must use 3dsmax" implies "I must use windows". End of story, sadly.
Get cedega, they support virtually everything within a week of release. (check their database... if you have a few days to read all the titles that is)
Okay, now I'm just laughing. You can't just read the titles, you have to check the functionality level and then read the comments to see what functionality that missing star or half-star actually represents. Even their "officially supported" titles have missing features, bugs, quirks, random crashes, performance pitfalls, and other problems that don't occur when running in Windows (i.e. above and beyond what the windows user deals with). And just because one version works more or less completely doesn't mean the next patch level will work at all.
Don't get me wrong. Transgaming is great if you are a Linux user who wants to play some Windows games. That's me. I've used it in the past, and am considering using it again for WoW (for which all the caveats I mentioned in the previous paragraph apply). However suggesting that Cedega is a suitable replacement for Windows for someone who primarily identifies themselves as a PC gamer is ludicrous.
You have an application that you have to run that is only available for not-Linux. No, Office doesn't count, but there are a lot of things that do.
I've done the Linux advocacy thing before, and whittled down a number of less-than-stellar objections. But when I hear "I need to run 3dsmax for my 3d modelling job" or "I want to play game [X] (or a wide number of new games)" then I stop. Well, for that need, Windows isn't "best" so much as "the only option".
The funny part is how these people are aware of and irritated by the limitations of Windows and are often otherwise willing to consider a switch. Ah, the joys of the OS monopoly!
I'll let you decide if that influence is good or bad... personally, I'm thinking it ain't great.
;)
That depends on whether you think getting rid of people who think everything that is natural is therefore good for you is a good thing or not. Personally I put them along with the people who think that because we have no natural predators that we are perfectly safe getting our pictures taken with bears and other large, dangerous animals. As in it would be great, especially if they off themselves in a particularly ironic fashion.
Personally I've always wondered why the "all nature is great" people would bother with some artificially made anti-venom when bitten by a perfectly natural rattlesnake. Hypocrits.
Instead, he encourages replacing that proprietary software as soon as possible.
Remember that there's a breed of capitalist that views creating your own solution so as not to need the capitalist anymore to be just as much "taking the fruits". It's that sense of entitlement that makes a mockery of the allegedly meritocratic system they espouse.
Anyway, I'm still a little surprised to see posts like the GP claiming free software will kill off the market for programmers. In 1997, there were lots of interesting debates about what would happen. Now it's 2005, and what happened is that there lots of jobs were created by free software because -- surprise -- businesses still need software customized to their needs. So hearing these comments now strikes me as being somewhat like buggy whip makers claiming the automobile will ruin the economy -- ten years after the Model T.
Could it be that oppressed people have lower IQ scores, everywhere? In fact, there are some studies that just show this. (In particular, I am thinking of an IQ study of a population of Japanese that are are segregated against in Japan.)
Any link would be fantastic. I believe the numbers in these studies are generally gathered correctly, but the conclusions are screwy; this would reinforce me theory.
Here is what it seems like I see over and over: "Study of I.Q. tests in nation A conclude that social stereotypes of nation A at the time of the testing are, in fact, biological fact." I find this inherently suspicious because it implies that throughout the ages different people have been oppressed by the powerful but finally we have found the natural order of things. Especially becauset this is always mouthed by the ones who the current order favors.
This has always seemed like an odd coincidence to me.
In this case, it sounds like he's just studying IQ among populations. There is little to explain why. He's just assuming that it's intrinsic.
It's the same assumption they always use, because they have to assume it. The logic, which is somewhat backwards, goes roughly like this:
I.Q. correlates with success. Race and sex correlate with I.Q. Race and sex are genetic, therefore I.Q. is genetic. Success, which also correlates with race and sex, is thus caused by genetic intelligence which certain groups lack.
The conclusion in the second step is there to justify the third. If I.Q. is not genetic, then this means social factors impact I.Q. and success. Without that trip through a genetic and meriocritous metric, the correlation between race and success is best explained by social bias.
Yet that step doesn't hold up. I find it interesting that according to the article Irwing says the I.Q. difference exists "against a background of women dramatically overtaking men in educational attainment and making very rapid advances in terms of occupational achievement." Proof I.Q. is genetic "intelligence", or proof that I.Q. is becoming a worse predictor of success?
I.Q. tests don't actually measure anything but performance on an I.Q. test. Does anyone still think you can define an inherent "processing speed" of a processor based on one benchmark? That's with something as simple as a computer, whose structure is fully understood and specified and whose inherent parameters are, in fact, actually known.
So as whether I.Q. is inherent or actually just a bad estimate of actual success based on real social issues: our intelligence evolved to handle real-world problems. If women are succeeding in solving real-world problems when given the drive and opportunity then I say it is the I.Q. test that is faulty. What can you expect with a standardized test? I have yet to hear of one that you can't do better on with teaching, so the argument that they measure something inherent and unchangeable has always seemed ludicrous to me.
Well, my understanding of the other founders, whom I am generally more familiar with than Paine, does not indicate such a clear-cut agree/disagree. In particular, Jefferson's and Franklin's writtings regarding separation of church and state seem to me quite clearly against granting religion any role whatsoever in the government of the new nation.
Which is different from saying religion should have no role in the nation (i.e. in the hearts and minds of the people). That is a distinction they understood but seems, perhaps, to be missing today.
I also doubt that much credit could be given even by Franklin or others on the effect of religion on science during the period Paine was talking about. The spiritual value of religion that Franklin found does not make the Dark Ages, an era in which religion and politics were one and the same, go away.
The military is required by law to buy domestic.
Are the domestic defense contractors in turn required to buy only domestic? Are they required to buy domestic steel? The latter is an area of American self-sufficiency that particularly worries me at the moment, though i don't know if it applies to the military.
That's fantastic, but is your argument simply that Thomas Paine should not be granted the status as an authority that we typically do to our Founding Fathers, or is your argument that he is actually wrong in his assessment? If the latter, you do not properly justify it.
The funny part to me is that I went to the trouble of putting the comments in nested mode and searching for angryflower to make sure I wasn't being redundant.
But no, I can't resist a good Bob reference.
As always, this issue has already been explored by Bob.