.... or so it seems so far to me... about three weeks in.
> The concern that I have is how did this get past the QA testers at CCP and into a production build?
And that's the rub. Not that the game isn't good and concept, and not that the working bits aren't pretty awesome. But there are so many issues that should never have made it through QA testing, much less beta and onto a release.
Haha though.... And *I* was a bit miffed when I found out that they had left Mac users in the lurch entirely, with no enhanced graphics at all. Better that, I guess, than bricking the computer!
But seriously.... WTF. As much as the EVE community will go into hysterics when you mention "those *pther* MMOs, we don't see these things happening when Blizzard patches, expands, or upgrades World of Warcraft. All of the new WoW content is available for BOTH windows AND Macintosh on patch/expansion day.... none of this "We'll give you the new game logic, but not the new content" business. And I NEVER had as many problems with a Blizzard online game, even when I bought Diablo II and WoW fresh out of the stores at version 1.0, as the EVE client gives me. There's a laundry list of so-far-unaddressed bugs (even in Trinity), that goes right down to the keyboard mapping being broken!!! (Seriously... EVE swaps the function of the command and control keys on me WTFH!?!?!?)
As much as I actually dislike the WoW experience, and think EVE is a better game.... in concept.... Blizzard sure appears to be a much better company, with a much Much MUCH better engineering and QA department.
> You mean you were a crazy luddite ~3 years ago. It's a lot more difficult now, > believe me. It's almost a personal hair-shirt thing by this point. And yet people > still say to me, "You don't have a cell phone? You're so lucky!".
Obviously, those people have not mastered the fine art of ignoring the thing when it would be inappropriate for them to take a call... or when they just don't feel like it... or whatever.
I got some STRANGE looks, a couple of weeks ago, from some co-workers when we were out for lunch a couple of weeks ago. (I'm the new guy in the office.) My phone rang, I pulled it out of my pocket oh so very briefly, silenced it, put it away without even looking to see who was calling, and went on with lunch. The looks were not with annoyance at my having forgotten to put it on vibrate in the first place. They were with confusion that I did not treat a ringing cell-phone as a moral imperative to drop everything, no matter when or where I am or what I'm doing, and take the call.
Even some people who know me better are sometimes shocked. But my celly is for *MY* convenience, and no one else's. And if it's not convenient for me to take the call... well that's what voicemail and text messages are for. And I'll check and respond to them at my convenience. Honestly, *I* don't understand all the people who think or act otherwise with their mobiles.
And I'm sure that every formerly-awesome game studio that got gobbled up by EA spat out a press release saying basically the same thing. And so did Bungie when they were assimilated by the beast of redmond.
I guess I can just hope that Blizzard gets Starcraft 2 out before everything goes to shit there.
By your logic, there are at least half a dozen people who should locked up in prison for the rest of their lives for "murdering" me in EVE Online. For that matter, so should I, because on one of those occasions I had a combat ship in the same system; and I was able to get my pod in place, warp back to the scene of the "crime" and exercise my CONCORD kill rights before the "murderer" fled the scene.
> However, it is important to remember that correlation does not equal
> causation. It seems just as probable, if not more so, that people who
> buy more CDs are more likely to engage in file sharing.
Well, that should come as a big fucking DUHHH!!! to anyone with half a brain. People who are into music in a big way will still be into music in a big way regardless of the format it comes in. Why can I come up with that little bit of common sense, be the RIAA/metallica, with their million-dollar marketing types and focus groups can't???
Throw in the instant-gratification culture in modern America and it's easy to see when the album didn't come with the extended trance remix you heard at the party the other weekend, people who HAVE the CD won't hesitate to hop on Limewire and download the exact version the DJ played. OTOH, since it's well-nigh impossible to get a complete album off p2p (And most of the records I listen to, for example, are continuous DJ mixes.) those very same people aren't shy about going down to the record store and actually buying the CD. At the end of the day, if you like and consume music, you like and consume music.
In my own defense though, I haven't bought a *NEW* CD since the RIAA/metallica crusade against Napster and the tech industry. San Francisco is blessed with a wonderful, huge, comprehensive, and INDEPENDENT record store called Amoeba. I haunt it's aisles pretty regularly, and if the CD I want if from an RIAA/metallica label (They kindly provide a list, a copy of which I leave in my car for when I go music shopping.) I buy used or do without until what I want IS available with that yellow tag.
So I get to have my cake and eat it too; with the added bonus that the store actually makes a higher margin off used CDs, so I'm supporting a local independent business that much more as well!
Though they're recently finally getting a taste of their own medicine, Qualcomm is quite notorious for squatting on US patents, and using them to extort tribute from foreign competitors. And don't forget unisys and the GIFs.
Traveling by train pretty much rocks... in the more civilized parts of the world that actually HAVE a decent rail system... Japan and Europe especially, have the Shinkansen and Eurostar which are IMHO the best way to travel... EVER.
That half-assed, run and planned by half-wits, sorry excuse for rail "service" that we call Amtrack, OTOH... woe betide the poor fool who's gotten used to Shinkansen or TGV or ICE and tried to rely on amtrack. The whole bloody lot of them should really just be fed into a wood chipper. Then we could just hire the Japanese or Germans to come build a new rail system the right way.
> Maybe things will turn out like Firefly/Serenity predicted: Mandarin Chinese > and English would be left as the two languages spoken by all humans.
Japanese apparently survived into the Firefly era. I can't recall actually hearing any dialogue in it, but there were definitely several instances of written Japanese (hiragana and katakana) visible in the series.
Laptops, from any manufacturer, come in just a handful of known configurations, and generally are customizable only by RAM, and maybe hard drive upgrades. Easy to make them in advance overseas.
Dell's big schtick with desktops though... and it's true of plenty of other makers as well... is building the machine to your specs as you order it, and having it to you within 48 hours, maybe even overnight. That's hard, and exorbitantly expensive, to do if you have to deal with international shipping and customs.
You might want to crack open your copy of Jane's Fighting Ships, and check the date of publication. Yours appears to be about sixty years obsolete, because it's been about that long since Japan has operated any battleships. Even the US Navy hasn't operated a battleship since the mid-90s, and it's been trying for years to pawn off those four they have in mothballs as museum pieces.
The thing is though... this isn't just some "various school" we're talking about here. It's the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When I was studying CS, at least three of the profs were MITers as was the department head. So yeah, even though I've never attended a class in Cambridge myself, I got a healthy exposure to the kind of people who do; and I damn well knew what Course VI meant! I'd imagine the situation would be the same most anywhere else. The top-tier schools do produce a disproportionate number of senior faculty, after all.
You are correct, though, that all the news exposure makes my own proposal completely invalid. But I still suspect that I'd have found a good percentage of clue, even if I had I asked before this story broke.
... when I go in to work on monday, I'll ask the first half-dozen or so co-workers* I encounter what and where a college student is studying in "Course VI"; and get back to ya in this thread.
*And just to be fair, I'll skip the one who actually *IS* a Course VI alumnus.
I'd bet money, right now, that no less 75% will get it right. Depending on who winds up coming in when, I'd not be a bit surprised if 100% get it right.
Because as long as it is not, IN FACT, a bomb, and all of the naughty bits are covered; it's none of anyone else's damn *business* what sort of fashion sense she has in choosing her outerwear.
> And I disagree that only an idiot could mistake it for a bomb. If you were > in that airport and saw her wearing electronics on her shirt, what would you think?
When I saw that the shirt also had "Course VI" written on it, especially if I was in BOSTON at the time; I'd assume that it was a CS/EE student from MIT being proud of the fact... especially considering that any Course VI student who was so inclined to do so could do a LOT better at building a detonator or timer than a breadboard with some blinkenlights.
Maybe you (and your stick-up-the-ass compatriots in boston) should use the skills taught in those classes they made you take that aren't specific to EE. You know, the ones where you take these little squiggley symbols called "letters" and string them together. Chain those "letters" together, and you get these things called "words". "Words" have meanings. As a corollary, the romans used some "letters": I, V, X, and some others, to make these things called "numbers". "Numbers" also have specific meanings. When you chain "words" and "numbers" together in special ways, those meanings get even more specific,
To wit... when someone has the word and number:
"Course VI"... written on their clothing, it means they are a CS/EE major at MIT. No MIT CS/EE would make their bomb so shoddily as if that shirt were a bomb. They also have an institutional history of being incorrigible screwballs who like to draw attention to themselves in annoyingly clever ways.
An ounce of literacy and a dash common sense would have acquitted those gun-toting knuckle-draggers a whole lot more than the whole Rambo self-image they've got going on. Looks like you could use a dose of both as well.
It says right there in both articles that the sweatshirt also had Course VI written clearly on it!!! If you're especially dim, it even reminds you what that means.
Meanwhile, here in the world of sanity, when *I* see someone with a Course VI shirt, I don't assume that said person is a terrorist. I assume that said person is a MIT CS/EE student or alumnus, is proud of the fact (and well they should be), and is trying to draw attention to the fact. Likewise, knowing the goofiness that it occasionally the wont of MIT types, I cease to be surprised or shocked if they have random bets of technology flotsam and jetsam on their person or in their vicinity.
But then, we're talking about boston, where the locals think that brightly lit flashing Mooninites flipping the bird to passersby is ALSO a terrorist threat.
> One or two established publishers stop going through the ESRB. In this case, the move > would first be noticed by two groups: Retail store buying agents who might notice that > some games suddenly dropped off the list of what company policy allows them to buy, > and fans of those publishers' games who might notice that suddenly they can't find them > in any retail stores. Both of those would move on to the available alternatives.
That depends a lot on who those one or two publishers are.
If some two-bit developer from Armpit, Texas; who's really doing nothing more than living off past glories and empty promises were to take this stand; then yes you're right, they'd die an ignominious death and be quickly forgotten.
If it were someone like Square, EA, or Blizzard who were to grow a pair and take the principled stand that they were no longer going to be censored by the bunch of nosy busybodies that are those esrb people; than the results would be different. Denied their Final Fantasy, Madden or World of Warcraft fix, they'd be at the gates of EBgames, and the like, with torches, pitchforks and ropes, and a makeshift gallows. Having had their lynching, they'd promptly flock to whatever retailer didn't give in to the xtian-right goonsquad and buy the games they wanted; accepting no substitutes. Seriously... have you ever met or seen those people?!?!? FF, Madden, and WoW player cosplay as their favorite characters, FFS!!! Those people are stone-cold fanatics!
> That's one major reason why the Horde got Blood Elves in the Burning Crusade expansion. > Blizzard just caved in and realized that the only thing that would even start to even the > odds was to give the Horde a pretty and human-looking race. In fact, one prettier than > the Night Elves on the Alliance side.
I thought the Blood Elves were the one that had the big controversy...... some developer or beta-tester or someone decided that the Blood Elves were just *TOO* good-looking to be an evil race, and proceeded to make such a big stink that Blizzard felt compelled to ugly them up a bit.
> I see no problem with an organization doing voter > registration drives and turning in registration forms
Isn't ACORN the one that was "accused" of doing their voter registration drives almost entirely in traditional liberal enclaves.... college campuses, immigrant communities, progressive cities life San Francisco and Berkeley, rock concerts and music events, and generally where the youth of the country and so on congregate?
I seem to recall the cons getting pissy when the registrations turned out to reflect the demographics of those same communities, and come up short (in their minds) on bushies.
... it's just that they are not "B games" because they're "so bad that they're good", they are "B games" because they were some publisher's second-string lineup that no one *expected* to be any good.
Consider:
Katamari Damashii was a low-budget, barely translated, non-marketed, import that Nameco dumped straight into the $20 bargain bin when they released it to the US. They probably figured that since there was so very little work to do to localize it for the US (No voice acting... just translate some text.), that if even a handful of copies sold to the extreme Japan-o-nerds for $20, they'd make a few extra free bucks. The release of Katamari Damashii very much followed the pattern of a B movie... in the olden days it would be the first movie shown on the drive-in before the frature attraction, and now it'd go direct to DVD without ever seeing a theatre screen.
Katamari was a "B game" in pretty much every sense except being bad... It turned out to be so uniquely, spectacularly, and unexpectedly great that people forget, now, that in the US it was intended only as a second-string and second-rate release.
Watch some of the hilarity that ensued when people dropped the "Snape kills Dumbledore" (in one case, via bullhorn no less...) bomb on the renfair rejects lined up at bookstores the last time around.
"NOOOOOO.... you bastard! How could you? Oh, the humanity!!!", in the finest over-the-top oh-the-humanity voice since the crash of the Hindenberg.
Sounds like a worthy YouTube project to me. And, if JKR is serious, this is the last opportunity.
(Junior ROTC == "the military") in your mind? WTFH?!?!? *JUINOR* ROTC??? Kids who aren't even old to enlist or go to college pretending they're in a college program where slightly older kids pretend they they're in the military, some with hopes of eventually becoming second-rate commissioned officers (The military really prefers graduates of its own service academies.) has about as much to do with the military as the high school marching band in which I participated!
A quick googling shows that 1... USF, UCSF, and SFSU all have real RTOC programs, and 2... the high school JROTC programs got themselves de-funded because the screwballs running them set the program up as a hate group, very much in violation of non-discrimination policies of the board of education and city law.
The Iowa is also not "the military". It's not even an active warship. It's a sixty year old heap that the Navy doesn't even want for itself, and has been trying to dump on various cities as a "floating museum" so it doesn't have to eat the expense of maintaining or scrapping the thing itself.
> However the FACT that at least ONE person tried to stop it is at > least evidence of the ANTI military bias in SF.
First off, you can find ONE person in pretty much any sizable group with pretty much any screwball opinion. And plenty of people here will readily admit that Daly is a screwball. Second, yes there is an anti-military bias here. What do you expect? It pretty much goes along with the place being a progressive city with many people opposing bush and his war.
But that's not what you claimed. You claimed that SF had: "KICKED OUT THE MILITARY" (demonstrably untrue), that there was no ROTC here (also a lie), and that we'd kick out every vestige we could, given the chance (also demonstrably untrue... Chris Daly speaks for neither the entire city, nor the entire board. And Fleet Week is scheduled to go ahead as planned.).
> And yes, they've KICKED OUT THE MILITARY, "No ROTC"...... Maybe not completely, > but they don't have a choice on some of the Military being there, or else it would have.
First off, ROTC is not the military. It's an elective and extracurricular that lets college kids run around in uniform and pretend. Some of them eventually go on to get commissions. Many don't.
Second, while a handful of bay area colleges have dropped their ROTC programs in the last few years, many more haven't HAD them since the '60s. Also, the city of San Francisco doesn't have authority over any of them, save CCSF; which, to my knowledge, never had one in the first place. Any which HAS dropped its ROTC program did so by its own decision and for its own reasons.
Third, you're obviously not current on local politics. About a month ago, Chris Daly started flapping his mouth again and tried to get Fleet Week cancelled this year. The rest of the Board of Supervisors promptly slapped him down and told him to STFU. Kind of hard to claim that The City has "kicked out the military" when there's an aircraft carrier parked in The Bay, a cruiser and some destroyers moored on The Embarcadero, and the Blue Angels flying overhead.
An ex-roommate of mine has a PS3... I got to play with it a fair bit when he lived here,
In all fairness, it's not a bad machine... perfectly playable. But the problem is that no matter how impressive the console is; if all the games for it blow chunks, as is the case with the PS3, then the console effectively blows chunks as well. At the end of the day, it got used mostly for playing God of War 2 and Final Fantasy XII; both of which really would run fine on the PS2 sitting next to the thing. But I guess there's the cachet of having and playing on a PS3. The only game he had for the thing that was even worth loading was Resistance, Fall of Man. And even then, it was only worth that much for the cut-scenes. (Why, oh why, do they keep dropping FPSs onto consoles?!?!? Ugh.)
Maybe when GTA IV, FF 13, and MGS 4 are finally out, there will be reason to get a PS3 of our own. Until then, the PS2 is all we need.
I'll try to be a bit less abrasive than the other guy...
But New York really does have a lot of good stuff to offer. The trick is, you won't see any of it in your typical week-long tourist or business visit. But if you have family or friends who live there, and have learned their way around, who can show you the ropes, you can have the time of your life, and not pay overly much either.
If it's just flat-out not for you, fine. But if you ever have a good friend or family move there; you'd do well to first give them a couple of years to learn the ropes, and then give New York another chance yourself... with your friend or relative showing you all the places that tourists don't go. I think that kind of visit will paint a much better picture.
Here in San Francisco, it's kind of the same way. Aside from the fact that the views of the City, Bay, and ocean from some of them are quite spectacular; most of the touristy places are pretty dreadful. Whenever I have friends or family visit; the first thing I always try to do is drag them away from Fisherman's' Wharf to the Tenderloin or the Mission for lunch or dinner. It really does wonders.
Slashdot Mirror
.... or so it seems so far to me... about three weeks in.
> The concern that I have is how did this get past the QA testers at CCP and into a production build?
And that's the rub. Not that the game isn't good and concept, and not that the working bits aren't pretty awesome. But there are so many issues that should never have made it through QA testing, much less beta and onto a release.
Haha though.... And *I* was a bit miffed when I found out that they had left Mac users in the lurch entirely, with no enhanced graphics at all. Better that, I guess, than bricking the computer!
But seriously.... WTF. As much as the EVE community will go into hysterics when you mention "those *pther* MMOs, we don't see these things happening when Blizzard patches, expands, or upgrades World of Warcraft. All of the new WoW content is available for BOTH windows AND Macintosh on patch/expansion day.... none of this "We'll give you the new game logic, but not the new content" business. And I NEVER had as many problems with a Blizzard online game, even when I bought Diablo II and WoW fresh out of the stores at version 1.0, as the EVE client gives me. There's a laundry list of so-far-unaddressed bugs (even in Trinity), that goes right down to the keyboard mapping being broken!!! (Seriously... EVE swaps the function of the command and control keys on me WTFH!?!?!?)
As much as I actually dislike the WoW experience, and think EVE is a better game.... in concept.... Blizzard sure appears to be a much better company, with a much Much MUCH better engineering and QA department.
cya,
john
> You mean you were a crazy luddite ~3 years ago. It's a lot more difficult now,
> believe me. It's almost a personal hair-shirt thing by this point. And yet people
> still say to me, "You don't have a cell phone? You're so lucky!".
Obviously, those people have not mastered the fine art of ignoring the thing when it would be inappropriate for them to take a call... or when they just don't feel like it... or whatever.
I got some STRANGE looks, a couple of weeks ago, from some co-workers when we were out for lunch a couple of weeks ago. (I'm the new guy in the office.) My phone rang, I pulled it out of my pocket oh so very briefly, silenced it, put it away without even looking to see who was calling, and went on with lunch. The looks were not with annoyance at my having forgotten to put it on vibrate in the first place. They were with confusion that I did not treat a ringing cell-phone as a moral imperative to drop everything, no matter when or where I am or what I'm doing, and take the call.
Even some people who know me better are sometimes shocked. But my celly is for *MY* convenience, and no one else's. And if it's not convenient for me to take the call... well that's what voicemail and text messages are for. And I'll check and respond to them at my convenience. Honestly, *I* don't understand all the people who think or act otherwise with their mobiles.
cya,
john
Yeah....
And I'm sure that every formerly-awesome game studio that got gobbled up by EA spat out a press release saying basically the same thing. And so did Bungie when they were assimilated by the beast of redmond.
I guess I can just hope that Blizzard gets Starcraft 2 out before everything goes to shit there.
cya,
john
By your logic, there are at least half a dozen people who should locked up in prison for the rest of their lives for "murdering" me in EVE Online. For that matter, so should I, because on one of those occasions I had a combat ship in the same system; and I was able to get my pod in place, warp back to the scene of the "crime" and exercise my CONCORD kill rights before the "murderer" fled the scene.
cya,
john
> causation. It seems just as probable, if not more so, that people who
> buy more CDs are more likely to engage in file sharing.
Well, that should come as a big fucking DUHHH!!! to anyone with half a brain. People who are into music in a big way will still be into music in a big way regardless of the format it comes in. Why can I come up with that little bit of common sense, be the RIAA/metallica, with their million-dollar marketing types and focus groups can't???
Throw in the instant-gratification culture in modern America and it's easy to see when the album didn't come with the extended trance remix you heard at the party the other weekend, people who HAVE the CD won't hesitate to hop on Limewire and download the exact version the DJ played. OTOH, since it's well-nigh impossible to get a complete album off p2p (And most of the records I listen to, for example, are continuous DJ mixes.) those very same people aren't shy about going down to the record store and actually buying the CD. At the end of the day, if you like and consume music, you like and consume music.
In my own defense though, I haven't bought a *NEW* CD since the RIAA/metallica crusade against Napster and the tech industry. San Francisco is blessed with a wonderful, huge, comprehensive, and INDEPENDENT record store called Amoeba. I haunt it's aisles pretty regularly, and if the CD I want if from an RIAA/metallica label (They kindly provide a list, a copy of which I leave in my car for when I go music shopping.) I buy used or do without until what I want IS available with that yellow tag.
So I get to have my cake and eat it too; with the added bonus that the store actually makes a higher margin off used CDs, so I'm supporting a local independent business that much more as well!
cya,
john
Though they're recently finally getting a taste of their own medicine, Qualcomm is quite notorious for squatting on US patents, and using them to extort tribute from foreign competitors. And don't forget unisys and the GIFs.
cya,
john
Traveling by train pretty much rocks... in the more civilized parts of the world that actually HAVE a decent rail system... Japan and Europe especially, have the Shinkansen and Eurostar which are IMHO the best way to travel... EVER.
That half-assed, run and planned by half-wits, sorry excuse for rail "service" that we call Amtrack, OTOH... woe betide the poor fool who's gotten used to Shinkansen or TGV or ICE and tried to rely on amtrack. The whole bloody lot of them should really just be fed into a wood chipper. Then we could just hire the Japanese or Germans to come build a new rail system the right way.
cya,
john
> Maybe things will turn out like Firefly/Serenity predicted: Mandarin Chinese
> and English would be left as the two languages spoken by all humans.
Japanese apparently survived into the Firefly era. I can't recall actually hearing any dialogue in it, but there were definitely several instances of written Japanese (hiragana and katakana) visible in the series.
cya,
john
Laptops, from any manufacturer, come in just a handful of known configurations, and generally are customizable only by RAM, and maybe hard drive upgrades. Easy to make them in advance overseas.
Dell's big schtick with desktops though... and it's true of plenty of other makers as well... is building the machine to your specs as you order it, and having it to you within 48 hours, maybe even overnight. That's hard, and exorbitantly expensive, to do if you have to deal with international shipping and customs.
cya,
john
You might want to crack open your copy of Jane's Fighting Ships, and check the date of publication. Yours appears to be about sixty years obsolete, because it's been about that long since Japan has operated any battleships. Even the US Navy hasn't operated a battleship since the mid-90s, and it's been trying for years to pawn off those four they have in mothballs as museum pieces.
cya,
john
The thing is though... this isn't just some "various school" we're talking about here. It's the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When I was studying CS, at least three of the profs were MITers as was the department head. So yeah, even though I've never attended a class in Cambridge myself, I got a healthy exposure to the kind of people who do; and I damn well knew what Course VI meant! I'd imagine the situation would be the same most anywhere else. The top-tier schools do produce a disproportionate number of senior faculty, after all.
You are correct, though, that all the news exposure makes my own proposal completely invalid. But I still suspect that I'd have found a good percentage of clue, even if I had I asked before this story broke.
cya,
john
... when I go in to work on monday, I'll ask the first half-dozen or so co-workers* I encounter what and where a college student is studying in "Course VI"; and get back to ya in this thread.
*And just to be fair, I'll skip the one who actually *IS* a Course VI alumnus.
I'd bet money, right now, that no less 75% will get it right. Depending on who winds up coming in when, I'd not be a bit surprised if 100% get it right.
cya,
john
Because as long as it is not, IN FACT, a bomb, and all of the naughty bits are covered; it's none of anyone else's damn *business* what sort of fashion sense she has in choosing her outerwear.
cya,
john
> And I disagree that only an idiot could mistake it for a bomb. If you were
> in that airport and saw her wearing electronics on her shirt, what would you think?
When I saw that the shirt also had "Course VI" written on it, especially if I was in BOSTON at the time; I'd assume that it was a CS/EE student from MIT being proud of the fact... especially considering that any Course VI student who was so inclined to do so could do a LOT better at building a detonator or timer than a breadboard with some blinkenlights.
cya,
john
> I don't know what I would have done.
... written on their clothing, it means they are a CS/EE major at MIT. No MIT CS/EE would make their bomb so shoddily as if that shirt were a bomb. They also have an institutional history of being incorrigible screwballs who like to draw attention to themselves in annoyingly clever ways.
Maybe you (and your stick-up-the-ass compatriots in boston) should use the skills taught in those classes they made you take that aren't specific to EE. You know, the ones where you take these little squiggley symbols called "letters" and string them together. Chain those "letters" together, and you get these things called "words". "Words" have meanings. As a corollary, the romans used some "letters": I, V, X, and some others, to make these things called "numbers". "Numbers" also have specific meanings. When you chain "words" and "numbers" together in special ways, those meanings get even more specific,
To wit... when someone has the word and number:
"Course VI"
An ounce of literacy and a dash common sense would have acquitted those gun-toting knuckle-draggers a whole lot more than the whole Rambo self-image they've got going on. Looks like you could use a dose of both as well.
cya,
john
Way to fail to RTFA.
It says right there in both articles that the sweatshirt also had Course VI written clearly on it!!! If you're especially dim, it even reminds you what that means.
Meanwhile, here in the world of sanity, when *I* see someone with a Course VI shirt, I don't assume that said person is a terrorist. I assume that said person is a MIT CS/EE student or alumnus, is proud of the fact (and well they should be), and is trying to draw attention to the fact. Likewise, knowing the goofiness that it occasionally the wont of MIT types, I cease to be surprised or shocked if they have random bets of technology flotsam and jetsam on their person or in their vicinity.
But then, we're talking about boston, where the locals think that brightly lit flashing Mooninites flipping the bird to passersby is ALSO a terrorist threat.
cya,
john
> One or two established publishers stop going through the ESRB. In this case, the move
> would first be noticed by two groups: Retail store buying agents who might notice that
> some games suddenly dropped off the list of what company policy allows them to buy,
> and fans of those publishers' games who might notice that suddenly they can't find them
> in any retail stores. Both of those would move on to the available alternatives.
That depends a lot on who those one or two publishers are.
If some two-bit developer from Armpit, Texas; who's really doing nothing more than living off past glories and empty promises were to take this stand; then yes you're right, they'd die an ignominious death and be quickly forgotten.
If it were someone like Square, EA, or Blizzard who were to grow a pair and take the principled stand that they were no longer going to be censored by the bunch of nosy busybodies that are those esrb people; than the results would be different. Denied their Final Fantasy, Madden or World of Warcraft fix, they'd be at the gates of EBgames, and the like, with torches, pitchforks and ropes, and a makeshift gallows. Having had their lynching, they'd promptly flock to whatever retailer didn't give in to the xtian-right goonsquad and buy the games they wanted; accepting no substitutes. Seriously... have you ever met or seen those people?!?!? FF, Madden, and WoW player cosplay as their favorite characters, FFS!!! Those people are stone-cold fanatics!
cya,
john
> That's one major reason why the Horde got Blood Elves in the Burning Crusade expansion.
... some developer or beta-tester or someone decided that the Blood Elves were just *TOO* good-looking to be an evil race, and proceeded to make such a big stink that Blizzard felt compelled to ugly them up a bit.
> Blizzard just caved in and realized that the only thing that would even start to even the
> odds was to give the Horde a pretty and human-looking race. In fact, one prettier than
> the Night Elves on the Alliance side.
I thought the Blood Elves were the one that had the big controversy...
cya,
john
> I see no problem with an organization doing voter
> registration drives and turning in registration forms
Isn't ACORN the one that was "accused" of doing their voter registration drives almost entirely in traditional liberal enclaves.... college campuses, immigrant communities, progressive cities life San Francisco and Berkeley, rock concerts and music events, and generally where the youth of the country and so on congregate?
I seem to recall the cons getting pissy when the registrations turned out to reflect the demographics of those same communities, and come up short (in their minds) on bushies.
cya,
john
... it's just that they are not "B games" because they're "so bad that they're good", they are "B games" because they were some publisher's second-string lineup that no one *expected* to be any good.
Consider:
Katamari Damashii was a low-budget, barely translated, non-marketed, import that Nameco dumped straight into the $20 bargain bin when they released it to the US. They probably figured that since there was so very little work to do to localize it for the US (No voice acting... just translate some text.), that if even a handful of copies sold to the extreme Japan-o-nerds for $20, they'd make a few extra free bucks. The release of Katamari Damashii very much followed the pattern of a B movie... in the olden days it would be the first movie shown on the drive-in before the frature attraction, and now it'd go direct to DVD without ever seeing a theatre screen.
Katamari was a "B game" in pretty much every sense except being bad... It turned out to be so uniquely, spectacularly, and unexpectedly great that people forget, now, that in the US it was intended only as a second-string and second-rate release.
cya,
john
Watch some of the hilarity that ensued when people dropped the "Snape kills Dumbledore" (in one case, via bullhorn no less...) bomb on the renfair rejects lined up at bookstores the last time around.
"NOOOOOO.... you bastard! How could you? Oh, the humanity!!!", in the finest over-the-top oh-the-humanity voice since the crash of the Hindenberg.
Sounds like a worthy YouTube project to me. And, if JKR is serious, this is the last opportunity.
cya,
john
(Junior ROTC == "the military") in your mind? WTFH?!?!? *JUINOR* ROTC??? Kids who aren't even old to enlist or go to college pretending they're in a college program where slightly older kids pretend they they're in the military, some with hopes of eventually becoming second-rate commissioned officers (The military really prefers graduates of its own service academies.) has about as much to do with the military as the high school marching band in which I participated!
A quick googling shows that 1... USF, UCSF, and SFSU all have real RTOC programs, and 2... the high school JROTC programs got themselves de-funded because the screwballs running them set the program up as a hate group, very much in violation of non-discrimination policies of the board of education and city law.
The Iowa is also not "the military". It's not even an active warship. It's a sixty year old heap that the Navy doesn't even want for itself, and has been trying to dump on various cities as a "floating museum" so it doesn't have to eat the expense of maintaining or scrapping the thing itself.
> However the FACT that at least ONE person tried to stop it is at
> least evidence of the ANTI military bias in SF.
First off, you can find ONE person in pretty much any sizable group with pretty much any screwball opinion. And plenty of people here will readily admit that Daly is a screwball. Second, yes there is an anti-military bias here. What do you expect? It pretty much goes along with the place being a progressive city with many people opposing bush and his war.
But that's not what you claimed. You claimed that SF had: "KICKED OUT THE MILITARY" (demonstrably untrue), that there was no ROTC here (also a lie), and that we'd kick out every vestige we could, given the chance (also demonstrably untrue... Chris Daly speaks for neither the entire city, nor the entire board. And Fleet Week is scheduled to go ahead as planned.).
cya,
john
> And yes, they've KICKED OUT THE MILITARY, "No ROTC" ...... Maybe not completely,
> but they don't have a choice on some of the Military being there, or else it would have.
First off, ROTC is not the military. It's an elective and extracurricular that lets college kids run around in uniform and pretend. Some of them eventually go on to get commissions. Many don't.
Second, while a handful of bay area colleges have dropped their ROTC programs in the last few years, many more haven't HAD them since the '60s. Also, the city of San Francisco doesn't have authority over any of them, save CCSF; which, to my knowledge, never had one in the first place. Any which HAS dropped its ROTC program did so by its own decision and for its own reasons.
Third, you're obviously not current on local politics. About a month ago, Chris Daly started flapping his mouth again and tried to get Fleet Week cancelled this year. The rest of the Board of Supervisors promptly slapped him down and told him to STFU. Kind of hard to claim that The City has "kicked out the military" when there's an aircraft carrier parked in The Bay, a cruiser and some destroyers moored on The Embarcadero, and the Blue Angels flying overhead.
cya,
john
An ex-roommate of mine has a PS3... I got to play with it a fair bit when he lived here,
In all fairness, it's not a bad machine... perfectly playable. But the problem is that no matter how impressive the console is; if all the games for it blow chunks, as is the case with the PS3, then the console effectively blows chunks as well. At the end of the day, it got used mostly for playing God of War 2 and Final Fantasy XII; both of which really would run fine on the PS2 sitting next to the thing. But I guess there's the cachet of having and playing on a PS3. The only game he had for the thing that was even worth loading was Resistance, Fall of Man. And even then, it was only worth that much for the cut-scenes. (Why, oh why, do they keep dropping FPSs onto consoles?!?!? Ugh.)
Maybe when GTA IV, FF 13, and MGS 4 are finally out, there will be reason to get a PS3 of our own. Until then, the PS2 is all we need.
cya,
john
I'll try to be a bit less abrasive than the other guy...
But New York really does have a lot of good stuff to offer. The trick is, you won't see any of it in your typical week-long tourist or business visit. But if you have family or friends who live there, and have learned their way around, who can show you the ropes, you can have the time of your life, and not pay overly much either.
If it's just flat-out not for you, fine. But if you ever have a good friend or family move there; you'd do well to first give them a couple of years to learn the ropes, and then give New York another chance yourself... with your friend or relative showing you all the places that tourists don't go. I think that kind of visit will paint a much better picture.
Here in San Francisco, it's kind of the same way. Aside from the fact that the views of the City, Bay, and ocean from some of them are quite spectacular; most of the touristy places are pretty dreadful. Whenever I have friends or family visit; the first thing I always try to do is drag them away from Fisherman's' Wharf to the Tenderloin or the Mission for lunch or dinner. It really does wonders.
cya,
john