I don't think this is an attempt to label everything bad you might do as an "addiction" needing medical treatment rather than conventional punishment. I think this is just people using sloppy English. The noun "addiction" has gradually - casually - come to have the meaning "something you do a lot" instead of "something you have a genuine inability to stop doing".
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.
Actually I think you'll find terrorist organisations do sometimes provide advance warning. The IRA have done this in London a few times. IIRC they let the police know the approximate location and date (I'm not sure if they generally give enough to find the bomb or not). The reason? So that they can stake a valid claim to being responsible. ANYBODY can claim responsibility AFTER the fact.
it's mysterious, has dead ends and redirections, uses cryptic codenames and strings of alphanumeric characters that hints at something much larger and sinister behind it
...and I suspect Lost won't have a particularly satisfying conclusion either...:)
...but I always thought most videogame consoles had lousy names. I mean, to start with. Did anybody else here think "GameCube" was a dumb name for a console? At least compared to its codename, Dolphin. Xbox? PlayStation - sounds like a pre-school toy. SNES? MegaDrive? Game Boy? Just think about them for a while. Tell me I'm not the only one who thinks this.
Of course, the fact of the matter is that console names grow on you after a short while. Like a joke getting old quickly. Nobody would dream of laughing at the names PlayStation or Game Boy nowadays. Six months from now nobody will raise an eyebrow at the name of the Nintendo Wii.
And, for some reason, the consoles with relatively "sophisticated" names - Phantom, Nuon, Jaguar, anybody? - tend to sink without trace...
But where's Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge (now with free scoring pencil!)? My Dinner With Andre? SimReich? Angus Pogordny's Caber Toss? Razor Fight II: The Slashening? And so on...
Monochrome laser projector, eh? If you can format your video signal properly, could you not get three of them, one with a red filter, one with a green one, one with a blue one, and combine them to get a full colour picture?
I'm not a fan of horror games, but I always liked the idea of that GameCube game (Eternal Darkness?) where sometimes, when you pause and try to save the game, it goes to "delete" instead and then when you try to back up you ACCIDENTALLY WIPE YOUR WHOLE MEMORY CARD - then it turns out the game was just tricking you. As a gamer I can't imagine anything more terrifying:)
If it's hard for just anyone to get a gun though, then you're less likely to be defending yourself against a gun.
Do you have any idea of the level of tech required to build a basic firearm? Not talking about a "safe to use" firearm, or an extremely accurate one, but a device capable of accelerating a small projectile in a specific direction (more or less) to sufficient velocity to penetrate a human body?
I'm not sure what point you're making, unless it involves crossbows or something. I have never heard of ANYBODY building a gun on their own. Even in fiction. Also, you can't argue with the fact that 1) guns are all but illegal in the UK and 2) gun crime in the UK is lower than even in those three states you quote. I guess two results is pretty poor statistics.
I think the issue is probably a sociological thing. If you ban something, everybody wants it more. But in the UK, guns are not and never were part of the culture. They're simply not there to be banned, so it doesn't even register. Same reason why we're relatively heavy drinkers compared to the Europeans, where (if I may grossly oversimplify) kids often have wine with dinner.
I feel it necessary to point out that nobody said cars were safe, or even that they were safe relative to guns. All that was said was that guns are unsafe, and all your argument shows is that cars, if anything, could use even stricter controls than guns currently have (something I agree with).
I'm kind of ambivalent about the whole gun issue myself. Living in the UK, where you can go a lifetime without ever seeing one, I don't consider myself qualified to pass judgement.
* Offensively bright yellow backdrop
* Backdrop clashes with photograph
* Worst possible choice of font
* Text too bold and "shouty"
* Black/yellow/white combination makes it look like a police warning notice
* Hideous layout
* "Declare your independence" needs a period at the end
* Everybody will think "OpenOffice.org" is a website, not an office suite
* Fails to mention the phrase "office suite"
* "Free Software for a Free People" is not something the average office user cares about
* Mount Rushmore image will do nothing but confuse people
* "They'd download it..." is ambiguous; is that opposed to "They wouldn't download it" or "They'd buy it from a shop"?
* "Free Software for a Free People" is questionable capitalisation at best
* Fails to provide any kind of favourable comparison with Microsoft Office, most notably in price
* Fails to mention that you can use it on Linux
* "World's best word processing, spreadsheet, slideshow, drawing and database" is not an objectively true statement
* "World's best word processing, spreadsheet, slideshow, drawing and database all-in-one clean package" doesn't make a lot of sense (needs "The" at the start at the very least)
* "All-in-one" needs hyphens removing
* Does it matter who produced or designed it? Do you often see credits at the bottom of newspaper advertisements?
* Giving two email addresses is confusing
Is that all?
Fun fact: it's possible to have close friends on the internet. Better, it's possible to talk about important things to people on the internet. In fact, it's often easier. Anonymity can help you to open up. Finding a crowd of people with similar interests/issues can help too, and that's more likely to happen online.
Re:Futurama DOES have a plot (spoilers)
on
Futurama Returns
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
And now for the unresolved plot lines of Futurama, all of which I am hoping to see picked up in the new series:
-Fry loves Leela
The most obvious over-arching story during the series was Fry's adoration of Leela and Leela's continuous indifference to Fry. Obviously this IS something which is meant to work out with a happy ending. Episodes such as "Parasites Lost", "The Farnsworth Parabox", "Time Keeps On Slippin'" and the series finale, "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings" make this pretty clear.
The question is how they'll eventually get together. Leela keeps rejecting Fry because he doesn't have a lot to offer. He's a dumb, dropout delivery-geek - she's a smart, attractive spaceship pilot. Alternate/previous Frys have managed to get close to Leela with romantic gestures: a diamond scrunchie, a holophonor serenade, a love message written in stars. There's another key point, and that's Leela's oft-mentioned but never-seen ex, Sean. In "Devil's Hands", she describes Sean as pasty, unambitious individual whose redeeming feature was his skill as a jazz saxophonist. So it seems like creativity, specifically musical creativity, is the key. The problem is, even though he works hard at it, Fry doesn't even have musical skill. Not as far as his hands are concerned, at any rate. Nor can he sing. Or draw. And he won't artificially enhance his skills if this distorts his personality - "Parasites Lost" makes this clear.
The solution? Either Fry will come up with some other amazing romantic gesture, or he'll find a musical instrument he CAN play well. Or perhaps he'll find some other, more successful creative outlet.
-Fry is the single most important person in the universe
This arc was intended to occur from the very beginning of Futurama's production. "Space Pilot 3000", act three of "Anthology Of Interest", "The Day The Earth Stood Stupid", "Roswell That Ends Well" and "The Why Of Fry" are the relevant episodes. Thanks to his being his own grandfather, Fry is the only person in history to lack the delta brainwave, making him the only person able to fight the evil brainspawn on behalf of the Nibblonians. Fry has twice defeated the brains, but as Nibbler wiped his memory of the events of "The Why Of Fry", he doesn't remember the second time and possibly not the first either.
At the end of said episode, Fry remarks, "If you ever need a saviour again, just ask." Nibbler replies, "Oh, we will. We will." Presumably Fry will need to fight the brains at least once more. And obviously it must be the brains that he fights: against any other foe, Fry is all but useless.
Earlier in that same episode, Fry mentions Leela and Nibbler remarks, "Ah. She must be the other. You must not give up on her..." and promises to help Fry make things work with her. This suggests not only that Leela has some critical part to play in saving the universe next time around, but also that much more hangs on Fry and Leela getting together than just Fry's happiness. These two arcs are obviously strongly linked together.
Side note: while "Anthology Of Interest" is mostly non-canon, the spacetime warp which tears open as a result of Fry failing to be frozen is very important. During "The Why Of Fry" the enormous brain explains: "There is a nexus point between universes at the space-time where you entered the cryogenic tube." Here's why: if Fry fails to enter the tube, he fails to go to the future. If he does that, he isn't present at the supernova and doesn't go back in time, where he doesn't sleep with his grandmother, meaning Yancy Fry is never born and so Fry himself is never born either. The result is a paradox which, as seen in the "Anthology Of Interest" story, destroys the whole universe.
How Fry and Leela's fates are linked, and what shape the next (final?) brainspawn threat will take, remains to be seen.
-Morbo
Newsmonster Morbo is an extremely poorly-disguised spy for his (unnamed) home planet. His race is plotting to take over the Earth. Will they ever do it? Will
Lisa states that "West Springfield" is three times the size of Texas. It appears to be roughly the same shape too. All this does is constrain Springfield's location towards the east of the USA - nobody said West Springfield was all in the same state.
What I want to know is, will they maintain the real time thing? I heard they planned to actually have people get older as the series went on. Certainly the years advanced as far as 3004 by the end of the first series, and Professor Farnsworth advanced from 158 to 161 years old. So will it be 3006/7 in the new series? If so, will any of the characters have visibly aged (Cubert and Dwight in particular)? And what will have happened in the intervening years?
This show's been going downhill since Season 3
on
Futurama Returns
·
· Score: 1
I'm not sure why using a standard controller would be more immersive, it's an extremely abstract control device.
When you're using a regular controller you soon get to the point where you just aren't paying attention to the actual process of pressing buttons with your thumbs. Your field of vision compresses so it just includes the television screen. The controller essentially vanishes from the equation.
Whereas with the wiimote you are waving your arms about. You will have to pay attention to the controller all the time - and, if you aren't in a massive open space - your surroundings, so you don't collide with things. Unless your television screen is six feet wide, it will comprise a very small part of the area in which the game is actually taking place. It will comprise a relatively small part of the game.
The interactivity factor is way, way up there, as is the intuitiveness factor. But yes, I can understand why this would give less immersion. Immersion needs you to close off the parts of your senses which aren't directly experiencing the game, and that's not going to be easy here.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent Doubleplusgood.
I don't think this is an attempt to label everything bad you might do as an "addiction" needing medical treatment rather than conventional punishment. I think this is just people using sloppy English. The noun "addiction" has gradually - casually - come to have the meaning "something you do a lot" instead of "something you have a genuine inability to stop doing".
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.
No they don't. Not personally owning a television, I pay no TV licence fee :)
Perhaps he meant that fire and water are complicated at infinitesimal scales. Which they are.
Hahahahahaha! Aha! Ha! Oh man! *wipes away tear*
Actually I think you'll find terrorist organisations do sometimes provide advance warning. The IRA have done this in London a few times. IIRC they let the police know the approximate location and date (I'm not sure if they generally give enough to find the bomb or not). The reason? So that they can stake a valid claim to being responsible. ANYBODY can claim responsibility AFTER the fact.
...and I suspect Lost won't have a particularly satisfying conclusion either... :)
...but I always thought most videogame consoles had lousy names. I mean, to start with. Did anybody else here think "GameCube" was a dumb name for a console? At least compared to its codename, Dolphin. Xbox? PlayStation - sounds like a pre-school toy. SNES? MegaDrive? Game Boy? Just think about them for a while. Tell me I'm not the only one who thinks this.
Of course, the fact of the matter is that console names grow on you after a short while. Like a joke getting old quickly. Nobody would dream of laughing at the names PlayStation or Game Boy nowadays. Six months from now nobody will raise an eyebrow at the name of the Nintendo Wii.
And, for some reason, the consoles with relatively "sophisticated" names - Phantom, Nuon, Jaguar, anybody? - tend to sink without trace...
But where's Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge (now with free scoring pencil!)? My Dinner With Andre? SimReich? Angus Pogordny's Caber Toss? Razor Fight II: The Slashening? And so on...
As I recall, "Donkey" was thought by Shigeru Miyamoto to be a synonym for "stubborn" in English. Which is kind of correct, but it doesn't really work.
Monochrome laser projector, eh? If you can format your video signal properly, could you not get three of them, one with a red filter, one with a green one, one with a blue one, and combine them to get a full colour picture?
I think it's a geek thing. Geeks take pride in fixing things for themselves. Geeks take pride in never having to go back to a shop and ask for help.
This is what's known as a metaphor.
I'm not a fan of horror games, but I always liked the idea of that GameCube game (Eternal Darkness?) where sometimes, when you pause and try to save the game, it goes to "delete" instead and then when you try to back up you ACCIDENTALLY WIPE YOUR WHOLE MEMORY CARD - then it turns out the game was just tricking you. As a gamer I can't imagine anything more terrifying :)
I'm not sure what point you're making, unless it involves crossbows or something. I have never heard of ANYBODY building a gun on their own. Even in fiction. Also, you can't argue with the fact that 1) guns are all but illegal in the UK and 2) gun crime in the UK is lower than even in those three states you quote. I guess two results is pretty poor statistics.
I think the issue is probably a sociological thing. If you ban something, everybody wants it more. But in the UK, guns are not and never were part of the culture. They're simply not there to be banned, so it doesn't even register. Same reason why we're relatively heavy drinkers compared to the Europeans, where (if I may grossly oversimplify) kids often have wine with dinner.
I feel it necessary to point out that nobody said cars were safe, or even that they were safe relative to guns. All that was said was that guns are unsafe, and all your argument shows is that cars, if anything, could use even stricter controls than guns currently have (something I agree with).
I'm kind of ambivalent about the whole gun issue myself. Living in the UK, where you can go a lifetime without ever seeing one, I don't consider myself qualified to pass judgement.
* Offensively bright yellow backdrop * Backdrop clashes with photograph * Worst possible choice of font * Text too bold and "shouty" * Black/yellow/white combination makes it look like a police warning notice * Hideous layout * "Declare your independence" needs a period at the end * Everybody will think "OpenOffice.org" is a website, not an office suite * Fails to mention the phrase "office suite" * "Free Software for a Free People" is not something the average office user cares about * Mount Rushmore image will do nothing but confuse people * "They'd download it..." is ambiguous; is that opposed to "They wouldn't download it" or "They'd buy it from a shop"? * "Free Software for a Free People" is questionable capitalisation at best * Fails to provide any kind of favourable comparison with Microsoft Office, most notably in price * Fails to mention that you can use it on Linux * "World's best word processing, spreadsheet, slideshow, drawing and database" is not an objectively true statement * "World's best word processing, spreadsheet, slideshow, drawing and database all-in-one clean package" doesn't make a lot of sense (needs "The" at the start at the very least) * "All-in-one" needs hyphens removing * Does it matter who produced or designed it? Do you often see credits at the bottom of newspaper advertisements? * Giving two email addresses is confusing Is that all?
Fun fact: it's possible to have close friends on the internet. Better, it's possible to talk about important things to people on the internet. In fact, it's often easier. Anonymity can help you to open up. Finding a crowd of people with similar interests/issues can help too, and that's more likely to happen online.
And now for the unresolved plot lines of Futurama, all of which I am hoping to see picked up in the new series:
-Fry loves Leela
The most obvious over-arching story during the series was Fry's adoration of Leela and Leela's continuous indifference to Fry. Obviously this IS something which is meant to work out with a happy ending. Episodes such as "Parasites Lost", "The Farnsworth Parabox", "Time Keeps On Slippin'" and the series finale, "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings" make this pretty clear.
The question is how they'll eventually get together. Leela keeps rejecting Fry because he doesn't have a lot to offer. He's a dumb, dropout delivery-geek - she's a smart, attractive spaceship pilot. Alternate/previous Frys have managed to get close to Leela with romantic gestures: a diamond scrunchie, a holophonor serenade, a love message written in stars. There's another key point, and that's Leela's oft-mentioned but never-seen ex, Sean. In "Devil's Hands", she describes Sean as pasty, unambitious individual whose redeeming feature was his skill as a jazz saxophonist. So it seems like creativity, specifically musical creativity, is the key. The problem is, even though he works hard at it, Fry doesn't even have musical skill. Not as far as his hands are concerned, at any rate. Nor can he sing. Or draw. And he won't artificially enhance his skills if this distorts his personality - "Parasites Lost" makes this clear.
The solution? Either Fry will come up with some other amazing romantic gesture, or he'll find a musical instrument he CAN play well. Or perhaps he'll find some other, more successful creative outlet.
-Fry is the single most important person in the universe
This arc was intended to occur from the very beginning of Futurama's production. "Space Pilot 3000", act three of "Anthology Of Interest", "The Day The Earth Stood Stupid", "Roswell That Ends Well" and "The Why Of Fry" are the relevant episodes. Thanks to his being his own grandfather, Fry is the only person in history to lack the delta brainwave, making him the only person able to fight the evil brainspawn on behalf of the Nibblonians. Fry has twice defeated the brains, but as Nibbler wiped his memory of the events of "The Why Of Fry", he doesn't remember the second time and possibly not the first either.
At the end of said episode, Fry remarks, "If you ever need a saviour again, just ask." Nibbler replies, "Oh, we will. We will." Presumably Fry will need to fight the brains at least once more. And obviously it must be the brains that he fights: against any other foe, Fry is all but useless.
Earlier in that same episode, Fry mentions Leela and Nibbler remarks, "Ah. She must be the other. You must not give up on her..." and promises to help Fry make things work with her. This suggests not only that Leela has some critical part to play in saving the universe next time around, but also that much more hangs on Fry and Leela getting together than just Fry's happiness. These two arcs are obviously strongly linked together.
Side note: while "Anthology Of Interest" is mostly non-canon, the spacetime warp which tears open as a result of Fry failing to be frozen is very important. During "The Why Of Fry" the enormous brain explains: "There is a nexus point between universes at the space-time where you entered the cryogenic tube." Here's why: if Fry fails to enter the tube, he fails to go to the future. If he does that, he isn't present at the supernova and doesn't go back in time, where he doesn't sleep with his grandmother, meaning Yancy Fry is never born and so Fry himself is never born either. The result is a paradox which, as seen in the "Anthology Of Interest" story, destroys the whole universe.
How Fry and Leela's fates are linked, and what shape the next (final?) brainspawn threat will take, remains to be seen.
-Morbo
Newsmonster Morbo is an extremely poorly-disguised spy for his (unnamed) home planet. His race is plotting to take over the Earth. Will they ever do it? Will
Lisa states that "West Springfield" is three times the size of Texas. It appears to be roughly the same shape too. All this does is constrain Springfield's location towards the east of the USA - nobody said West Springfield was all in the same state.
(You have to know these things when you maintain the Where Is Springfield? file.)
What I want to know is, will they maintain the real time thing? I heard they planned to actually have people get older as the series went on. Certainly the years advanced as far as 3004 by the end of the first series, and Professor Farnsworth advanced from 158 to 161 years old. So will it be 3006/7 in the new series? If so, will any of the characters have visibly aged (Cubert and Dwight in particular)? And what will have happened in the intervening years?
ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD
Fine. Millions of years ago, the Earth was a great, molten mass, called Fintlewoodlewix.
please not have jumped the shark please not have jumped the shark please not have jumped the shark
When you're using a regular controller you soon get to the point where you just aren't paying attention to the actual process of pressing buttons with your thumbs. Your field of vision compresses so it just includes the television screen. The controller essentially vanishes from the equation.
Whereas with the wiimote you are waving your arms about. You will have to pay attention to the controller all the time - and, if you aren't in a massive open space - your surroundings, so you don't collide with things. Unless your television screen is six feet wide, it will comprise a very small part of the area in which the game is actually taking place. It will comprise a relatively small part of the game.
The interactivity factor is way, way up there, as is the intuitiveness factor. But yes, I can understand why this would give less immersion. Immersion needs you to close off the parts of your senses which aren't directly experiencing the game, and that's not going to be easy here.