The Return of the King is one of the best games I've ever played. I pull it out every couple of months and play through it from scratch. I've beaten it four or five times since I bought it and I'm sure I'll play it a lot more. There are *very* few games in my library that keep me that interested. It's basically perfect IMO.
Exactly. Voice chat is not responsible for killing the mood, his own prejudice is.
Prejudices do come into play, but it's not the only factor. To expand on the article's point, with voice chat you can open up and be yourself and say whatever comes to your mind. So with voice chat you really get a much better impression of what the other person is like. That might result in you deciding that you don't like them. Not because of thier age or the sound of thier voice but because you know more about them and you just dont like them.
BTW, the 11-year old was just as uncomfortable playing with him once he heard the voice of someone who could be his Dad.
3. The media and the general population don't understand the technology or the implications of the law.
See, even if the politician does understand the problems with the proposed law, if the population doesn't then he can't oppose the law without taking a severe hit on his popularity. People will just think he supports illegal hacking activities and it's very hard for him to explain his position to people who don't understand the technology. That's also, I think, the reason why so many states in the US have passed stupid anti-violent games bills. Voting no is much more likely to get you booted out of office then voting yes. Even politicians who understand the stupidity of it are just thinking: "I don't want to lose my job over this.. lets just pass the law and let the courts deal with it."
Now I can't believe that they coded their own OS to run on the bare metal and I somehow doubt they were using Windows. So that basically leaves Linux, right?
No, it runs on the xbox os. The same one that all the games use. It was coded with the xbox development kit the same as any game. The port to linux requires writing sdl and opengl implementations of all the libraries that microsoft provided in the xbox sdk.
I believe that being poor but with your rights is more important than being moderately well-off, but with less rights.... I believe that such a society can work, even if it may cause some people to be very poor.
I don't believe you would feel the same if you were really poor. And I don't mean homeless-in-new-york poor, I mean Malawi or Somalia poor. A society that doesn't help those people is not ideal. I think you're still talking about something in the middle of the spectrum: a little bit poor with a lot of freedoms vs a little bit richer with fewer freedoms. A pure Libertarian system would be far more extreme.
Let me put it this way: Libertarian is about making sure everyone has equal rights, Communism is about making sure everyone has equal wealth. They both have opposite, equally bad problems: in a Libertarian system you get a huge imbalance between the rich and the poor (because you're not allowed to tax the rich to help the poor), and in a Communism system you get a huge imbalace in freedoms (there's the group of people who make the rules and the group of people who follow them). An ideal system, IMO, is something in the middle which focuses on making sure everone has the same standard of living. That means keeping a balance between both individual rights and individual wealth. And that's bascially the type of government that we have now (not that's it's perfect - a long way off for sure).
The only reason Libertarianism is not as widely denounced as Communism is because it has a tendancy to naturally evolve into a more moderate system before things starting getting too bad. When America was first founded it was very strongly Libertarian but has moved quite a bit away from that extreme since then. The wiki entry for Libertarianism has a lot of good info.
It should be the government's job to insure that people can productively live in a society, without interfering with each others rights.
That's an extreme Libertarian philosophy. The opposite extreme is Communism (which China is desperately trying to cling too). Both of those systems can be perfect in theory, but in practice they both cause a large imbalance in the quality of life across the population. i.e. They can produce some extremely rich people and some extremely poor people, or some people with many freedoms and some people with no freedoms, or more likely a combination of both (since wealth and 'effective' freedom are often closely linked). A more practical system to minimize those effects, which nearly all current governments are based on, is something in the middle.
After the novelty of playing tennis on your couch wears off (which it will after about two weeks or so) the only thing left to keep the game interesting is the challenge of getting best score you can and beating all the AI opponents. Getting a high score in Wii Tennis is %100 timing of your swings. After a bit of experience you learn that you can only get consistently precise timing using small motions. If you want a score near 2000 then you need to learn sharp, precise wrist actions.
I guess my ideas do come primarily from a fencing background. Fencing doesn't usually involve any large sweeping attacks that threaten to cleave your opponent in two, which are what you're probably thinking about. I suppose other sword fighting styles that do have such attacks might be a bit harder to execute without controller resistance. But I still say it's best to keep an open mind until we get a chance to play the actual games.
You should have an open mind instead of declaring that you wouldn't want to play a game that doesn't exist yet because of imagined problems with a control scheme that doesn't exist yet.
I've studied fencing and I believe that even without resistance, if the game could properly recognize and translate the basic forms for thrusts, slashes, parries, and feints then it would work perfectly fine. It wouldn't even need to be completely free form, just have four different types of each for the four quadrants of your (or your opponent's) torso. To be complete though they would need both clockwise and counter-clockwise parries and feints, and slashes in a couple different directions, but I think they could still get away with not being completely free form.
So even without resistance I think it would work. Not to mention that in real life you're supposed to execute the forms the exact same regardless of resistance anyway; the resistance just helps your reflexes to choose the next form. But the game wouldn't be as fast as real life so that's not as critical. Plus it's not entirely reflex anyway; it's mental as well. You have to decide before hand what your set of possible next moves will be depending on how your opponent reacts. And sometimes you just have to guess your best next move, either because you know your reflexes won't be fast enough to react, or because you want to respond so quickly that he won't be able to react himself. That can all still work without resistance from the controller. In truth, the skills needed would be basically the exact same as those needed for a traditional fighter like Tekken.
Nope. The government will say you have to pay taxes equal to P*(S+(P*S)). i.e. If the lottery gives you X cash and then Y cash to "pay the tax" then the government will just consider your income to be X+Y and charge you tax on that amount.
The more money you get then the more tax you will pay, period. The only way around it is with special lottery tax rules that specifically allow the organizer to pay the tax for you so that you can claim the amount as a non-taxable income. Some states have such rules I believe.
They could still pay for the taxes for them. Yes, even that payment would be taxed, but you just work in how much. It still ends up a finite amount in the end.
No, it doesn't work like that. The post is misleading. If they give you a $138,000 check and then a $25,000 check "to pay the taxes", then the government will just consider your income to be $163,000 and then charge you 18% of that, i.e. $29,000. There's no way around it. The more money they give you the more taxes you will have to pay.
Because if she was drinking a sports drink like gatoraid instead of water then she'd have been fine.
This the fault of irresponsible event organizers who didn't understand the hazards of water poisioning and lead the competitors to believe that it was safe to drink that much water.
Why should we care WHY a tiny, insignificant minority of people decide to kill in a manner that happens to fascinate us, but doesn't make an impact at all compared to all the other ways people are killed?
It may be rare now, but if you don't understand why it happened then you have no basis to predict that it will be rare in the future. You're just guessing. The conditions in society that promote that type of behavior might be increasing but you wouldn't know that because you didn't bother to figure out what they are.
In the world of television, my favorite example of this is a show like "Malcolm in the Middle." I loved the early episodes, but my wife hated them. As the show evolved, the writers and actors developed a better sense of what the show was about, what jokes made sense and what you could do with the characters. That evolution won my wife over. Episodic games have this same opportunity.
This is a seriously bogus comparison. Apples and oranges.
Did you bother to read the whole article? Keep going. Several paragraphs later he explains the analogy in more detail.
Broadcast TV shows are free to consumers. Maybe you pay a monthly fee for cable access, but at the end of the day nobody is paying $8.99 for an episode of Malcolm.
The network does. And they base that buying decision on the ratings (or anticipated ratings).
If people don't like the first episode of a video game they had to pay for, are they really going to buy the next episode to "give it a chance"?
What's important is the aggregate. If the first episode isn't that good then maybe 30% of consumers will buy the next episode instead of 70%. As long as the reception isn't so bad that the game gets cancelled right away, then the developer can look at the reviews and reactions and try to fix the problems in the next episode. Then when word spreads that the game is improved in newer episodes, customers that quit may come back and try again (especially if the plot is such that they can skip the episodes that they don't like).
The point is that it's exactly like TV. I think the analogy confused you because in the case of TV the consumer is a combination of the network and the viewer.
Would WoW be fun if the server had a total of 500 players?
If the world was smaller then yes. It's all relative. It's not as if you interact with more then a few dozen players each session, so if the world is properly designed for 500 players then it can be just as fun as a server designed for a larger population.
If you can quit cold turkey then it's not addiction. Prior to deciding to quit you wanted to play. All those hours you logged and time you spent was time you wanted to spend. That's obsession, not addiction. Addiction is when you can't stop even when you want to. The moment you decided that you didn't want to play, you stopped. That's not addiction.
Changing paper money does nothing to resolve this.
What are you talking about? Ofcourse it does. With paper money a blind person knows exactly how much he's paying, and if the bills had raised text (like the rest of the world) he'd know exactly how much change he's getting back. He might be charged more then the price on the tag but at least he knows how much it is so he can refuse if he knows it's wrong. With a debit reader he has now idea how much he's being charged; the clerk can say $10 but type in $100.
I completely disagree. Aimbots play first person shooters (FPS) far better then most people, but that doenst mean that FPS require no skills or thought.
You're impling causation in his argument where there is none. He didn't say that the game requires no skill because you can write a bot to play it. I can write a program to play chess and I can write a program to play tic-tac-toe and that has nothing to do with the level of skill required in the game. He didn't suggest otherwise.
What he is saying is that the tasks that this specific bot is designed to automate are monotonous and the fact that this type of bot is so popular and useful reflects how monotonous the game is overall.
You are correct. It was a bad example for me to use. However if the investment interest is higher then the loan interest, which it always is if you invest properly (hint: not a CD), then you will make more money my way. Plus you have the added benifit of a large investment balance from the start that you can sell in the event that you need emergency cash.
I'm not suggesting people go take out big loans just to re-invest... I'm talking about a situation where you have 30k in cash already and you invest it and then take a 30K loan out against it to buy a car instead of dropping 30k on the car up front.
One more point: money is fungible. It makes no difference whether you take a loan out to buy something while investing the same amount of cash on hand elsewhere vs. simply borrowing the money to invest.
You lose a fair bit of respect in this discussion when you post a reply that ignores half of my comment:
I'm talking about a situation where you have 30k in cash already and you invest it and then take a 30K loan out against it to buy a car instead of dropping 30k on the car up front. The difference is that if you have 30k cash that you can afford to part with right now then you're not going to go broke if you lose some of it in market fluctuations.
If you're in danger of missing some loan payments then you just sell off some investments; that's no problem. Or if you really don't want to sign the investments as collateral then don't; just get a normal car loan with the car as collateral. Your rate won't be as good but you'll be in the same position as everyone else who loses their job with mortgage and car payments to make. If you manage your finances properly you should have enough cash on hand to survive for a few months (making all your payments) while you look for another job, plus you'll have the investments to sell to boost those cash reserves.
Frankly, I'd rather take out a standard car loan, with the car as collateral, than twist my finances up like you suggest.
I think you're losing the focus of the discussion. I never said don't use the car as collateral, I said don't pay with cash. And the finances aren't 'twisted'; this is a very standard practice.
The risk is very low. The only case where you would end up worse off is in the event of the "next big market crash". I'm glad you don't deny wearing the tinfoil hat. Call any financial planner in the phone book and they'll recommend doing exactly what I suggest. The only time you might not is if you don't trust your regular income to support your loan payments, either because it is too small or unusually unstable.
Slashdot Mirror
the new authority will only be used to go after terrorists.
Ofcourse, who is and who isn't a terrorist will be determined by the Secretary in secret after the fact.
The Return of the King is one of the best games I've ever played. I pull it out every couple of months and play through it from scratch. I've beaten it four or five times since I bought it and I'm sure I'll play it a lot more. There are *very* few games in my library that keep me that interested. It's basically perfect IMO.
Prejudices do come into play, but it's not the only factor. To expand on the article's point, with voice chat you can open up and be yourself and say whatever comes to your mind. So with voice chat you really get a much better impression of what the other person is like. That might result in you deciding that you don't like them. Not because of thier age or the sound of thier voice but because you know more about them and you just dont like them.
BTW, the 11-year old was just as uncomfortable playing with him once he heard the voice of someone who could be his Dad.
3. The media and the general population don't understand the technology or the implications of the law.
See, even if the politician does understand the problems with the proposed law, if the population doesn't then he can't oppose the law without taking a severe hit on his popularity. People will just think he supports illegal hacking activities and it's very hard for him to explain his position to people who don't understand the technology. That's also, I think, the reason why so many states in the US have passed stupid anti-violent games bills. Voting no is much more likely to get you booted out of office then voting yes. Even politicians who understand the stupidity of it are just thinking: "I don't want to lose my job over this.. lets just pass the law and let the courts deal with it."
Now I can't believe that they coded their own OS to run on the bare metal and I somehow doubt they were using Windows. So that basically leaves Linux, right?
No, it runs on the xbox os. The same one that all the games use. It was coded with the xbox development kit the same as any game. The port to linux requires writing sdl and opengl implementations of all the libraries that microsoft provided in the xbox sdk.
I believe that being poor but with your rights is more important than being moderately well-off, but with less rights. ... I believe that such a society can work, even if it may cause some people to be very poor.
I don't believe you would feel the same if you were really poor. And I don't mean homeless-in-new-york poor, I mean Malawi or Somalia poor. A society that doesn't help those people is not ideal. I think you're still talking about something in the middle of the spectrum: a little bit poor with a lot of freedoms vs a little bit richer with fewer freedoms. A pure Libertarian system would be far more extreme.
Let me put it this way: Libertarian is about making sure everyone has equal rights, Communism is about making sure everyone has equal wealth. They both have opposite, equally bad problems: in a Libertarian system you get a huge imbalance between the rich and the poor (because you're not allowed to tax the rich to help the poor), and in a Communism system you get a huge imbalace in freedoms (there's the group of people who make the rules and the group of people who follow them). An ideal system, IMO, is something in the middle which focuses on making sure everone has the same standard of living. That means keeping a balance between both individual rights and individual wealth. And that's bascially the type of government that we have now (not that's it's perfect - a long way off for sure).
The only reason Libertarianism is not as widely denounced as Communism is because it has a tendancy to naturally evolve into a more moderate system before things starting getting too bad. When America was first founded it was very strongly Libertarian but has moved quite a bit away from that extreme since then. The wiki entry for Libertarianism has a lot of good info.
It should be the government's job to insure that people can productively live in a society, without interfering with each others rights.
That's an extreme Libertarian philosophy. The opposite extreme is Communism (which China is desperately trying to cling too). Both of those systems can be perfect in theory, but in practice they both cause a large imbalance in the quality of life across the population. i.e. They can produce some extremely rich people and some extremely poor people, or some people with many freedoms and some people with no freedoms, or more likely a combination of both (since wealth and 'effective' freedom are often closely linked). A more practical system to minimize those effects, which nearly all current governments are based on, is something in the middle.
After the novelty of playing tennis on your couch wears off (which it will after about two weeks or so) the only thing left to keep the game interesting is the challenge of getting best score you can and beating all the AI opponents. Getting a high score in Wii Tennis is %100 timing of your swings. After a bit of experience you learn that you can only get consistently precise timing using small motions. If you want a score near 2000 then you need to learn sharp, precise wrist actions.
I guess my ideas do come primarily from a fencing background. Fencing doesn't usually involve any large sweeping attacks that threaten to cleave your opponent in two, which are what you're probably thinking about. I suppose other sword fighting styles that do have such attacks might be a bit harder to execute without controller resistance. But I still say it's best to keep an open mind until we get a chance to play the actual games.
You should have an open mind instead of declaring that you wouldn't want to play a game that doesn't exist yet because of imagined problems with a control scheme that doesn't exist yet.
I've studied fencing and I believe that even without resistance, if the game could properly recognize and translate the basic forms for thrusts, slashes, parries, and feints then it would work perfectly fine. It wouldn't even need to be completely free form, just have four different types of each for the four quadrants of your (or your opponent's) torso. To be complete though they would need both clockwise and counter-clockwise parries and feints, and slashes in a couple different directions, but I think they could still get away with not being completely free form.
So even without resistance I think it would work. Not to mention that in real life you're supposed to execute the forms the exact same regardless of resistance anyway; the resistance just helps your reflexes to choose the next form. But the game wouldn't be as fast as real life so that's not as critical. Plus it's not entirely reflex anyway; it's mental as well. You have to decide before hand what your set of possible next moves will be depending on how your opponent reacts. And sometimes you just have to guess your best next move, either because you know your reflexes won't be fast enough to react, or because you want to respond so quickly that he won't be able to react himself. That can all still work without resistance from the controller. In truth, the skills needed would be basically the exact same as those needed for a traditional fighter like Tekken.
Oops. I stand corrected.
4 You have to pay taxes as P*(P*S)
Nope. The government will say you have to pay taxes equal to P*(S+(P*S)). i.e. If the lottery gives you X cash and then Y cash to "pay the tax" then the government will just consider your income to be X+Y and charge you tax on that amount.
The more money you get then the more tax you will pay, period. The only way around it is with special lottery tax rules that specifically allow the organizer to pay the tax for you so that you can claim the amount as a non-taxable income. Some states have such rules I believe.
They could still pay for the taxes for them. Yes, even that payment would be taxed, but you just work in how much. It still ends up a finite amount in the end.
No, it doesn't work like that. The post is misleading. If they give you a $138,000 check and then a $25,000 check "to pay the taxes", then the government will just consider your income to be $163,000 and then charge you 18% of that, i.e. $29,000. There's no way around it. The more money they give you the more taxes you will have to pay.
Why can't both be true?
Because if she was drinking a sports drink like gatoraid instead of water then she'd have been fine.
This the fault of irresponsible event organizers who didn't understand the hazards of water poisioning and lead the competitors to believe that it was safe to drink that much water.
Why should we care WHY a tiny, insignificant minority of people decide to kill in a manner that happens to fascinate us, but doesn't make an impact at all compared to all the other ways people are killed?
It may be rare now, but if you don't understand why it happened then you have no basis to predict that it will be rare in the future. You're just guessing. The conditions in society that promote that type of behavior might be increasing but you wouldn't know that because you didn't bother to figure out what they are.
In the world of television, my favorite example of this is a show like "Malcolm in the Middle." I loved the early episodes, but my wife hated them. As the show evolved, the writers and actors developed a better sense of what the show was about, what jokes made sense and what you could do with the characters. That evolution won my wife over. Episodic games have this same opportunity.
This is a seriously bogus comparison. Apples and oranges.
Did you bother to read the whole article? Keep going. Several paragraphs later he explains the analogy in more detail.
Broadcast TV shows are free to consumers. Maybe you pay a monthly fee for cable access, but at the end of the day nobody is paying $8.99 for an episode of Malcolm.
The network does. And they base that buying decision on the ratings (or anticipated ratings).
If people don't like the first episode of a video game they had to pay for, are they really going to buy the next episode to "give it a chance"?
What's important is the aggregate. If the first episode isn't that good then maybe 30% of consumers will buy the next episode instead of 70%. As long as the reception isn't so bad that the game gets cancelled right away, then the developer can look at the reviews and reactions and try to fix the problems in the next episode. Then when word spreads that the game is improved in newer episodes, customers that quit may come back and try again (especially if the plot is such that they can skip the episodes that they don't like).
The point is that it's exactly like TV. I think the analogy confused you because in the case of TV the consumer is a combination of the network and the viewer.
Would WoW be fun if the server had a total of 500 players?
If the world was smaller then yes. It's all relative. It's not as if you interact with more then a few dozen players each session, so if the world is properly designed for 500 players then it can be just as fun as a server designed for a larger population.
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6125078.html
... the crowd went berserk when Iwata said that an online version of Super Smash Bros. would be available at launch.
If you can quit cold turkey then it's not addiction. Prior to deciding to quit you wanted to play. All those hours you logged and time you spent was time you wanted to spend. That's obsession, not addiction. Addiction is when you can't stop even when you want to. The moment you decided that you didn't want to play, you stopped. That's not addiction.
Changing paper money does nothing to resolve this.
What are you talking about? Ofcourse it does. With paper money a blind person knows exactly how much he's paying, and if the bills had raised text (like the rest of the world) he'd know exactly how much change he's getting back. He might be charged more then the price on the tag but at least he knows how much it is so he can refuse if he knows it's wrong. With a debit reader he has now idea how much he's being charged; the clerk can say $10 but type in $100.
That's an odd comment.
Verizon offers [x] for [y]. That's cheap, dirt cheap. If you're getting less than [x] for more than [y], you're being totally ripped off.
Seems to me that if [x] for [y] is dirt cheap then less than [x] for more than [y] would be standard.
I completely disagree. Aimbots play first person shooters (FPS) far better then most people, but that doenst mean that FPS require no skills or thought.
You're impling causation in his argument where there is none. He didn't say that the game requires no skill because you can write a bot to play it. I can write a program to play chess and I can write a program to play tic-tac-toe and that has nothing to do with the level of skill required in the game. He didn't suggest otherwise.
What he is saying is that the tasks that this specific bot is designed to automate are monotonous and the fact that this type of bot is so popular and useful reflects how monotonous the game is overall.
You are correct. It was a bad example for me to use. However if the investment interest is higher then the loan interest, which it always is if you invest properly (hint: not a CD), then you will make more money my way. Plus you have the added benifit of a large investment balance from the start that you can sell in the event that you need emergency cash.
I'm not suggesting people go take out big loans just to re-invest ... I'm talking about a situation where you have 30k in cash already and you invest it and then take a 30K loan out against it to buy a car instead of dropping 30k on the car up front.
One more point: money is fungible. It makes no difference whether you take a loan out to buy something while investing the same amount of cash on hand elsewhere vs. simply borrowing the money to invest.
You lose a fair bit of respect in this discussion when you post a reply that ignores half of my comment:
I'm talking about a situation where you have 30k in cash already and you invest it and then take a 30K loan out against it to buy a car instead of dropping 30k on the car up front. The difference is that if you have 30k cash that you can afford to part with right now then you're not going to go broke if you lose some of it in market fluctuations.
If you're in danger of missing some loan payments then you just sell off some investments; that's no problem. Or if you really don't want to sign the investments as collateral then don't; just get a normal car loan with the car as collateral. Your rate won't be as good but you'll be in the same position as everyone else who loses their job with mortgage and car payments to make. If you manage your finances properly you should have enough cash on hand to survive for a few months (making all your payments) while you look for another job, plus you'll have the investments to sell to boost those cash reserves.
Frankly, I'd rather take out a standard car loan, with the car as collateral, than twist my finances up like you suggest.
I think you're losing the focus of the discussion. I never said don't use the car as collateral, I said don't pay with cash. And the finances aren't 'twisted'; this is a very standard practice.
The risk is very low. The only case where you would end up worse off is in the event of the "next big market crash". I'm glad you don't deny wearing the tinfoil hat. Call any financial planner in the phone book and they'll recommend doing exactly what I suggest. The only time you might not is if you don't trust your regular income to support your loan payments, either because it is too small or unusually unstable.