The GP did say _hit_ game. Halo 2 was a hit on the XBox, not on Vista. I think this might be something of a chicken and egg problem, though: not enough users of Vista to make it a hit to get people using Vista...
How are they supposed to enforce that anyways? By asking kids their ID?
Yes. Exactly like that. You mention it as if it was something unthinkable. If a minor wants to get an M-rated or 17+ rated game, tough luck. Let him bring his parents to buy it.
If he's an adult, well, he can go back home and get some ID, can't he?
How do you actually know what you say you already know? I like some lies^Wdamn lies^W^W^Wstatistics to confirm or deny what seems evident. Plus, the study could have found that stores _didn't_ sell to minors.
I know that with enough statistics, you can prove any point you want. Still, it's nice not to rely on common sense for once.
You would be right if these were only finished products, but many of them will only be available in the next year or further. Which makes me ask "Exactly how are these 2007's best inventions?". Again.
I don't think they pay him to beta-test the Windows FTP functionality. I wouldn't use it anymore either, especially since you can get better ftp packages for free.
How does "incredibly rare" compare against the number of virus molecules? I haven't a clue of the relative value.
After all, idiots who buy the "enlarge your johnson" pills they are spammed about are also incredibly rare, yet it still seems to turn profits for the salesmen.
The concepts of "speculation", "imagination" and "foresight" seem lost on you. You also seem a bit narrow-minded, taking into account that the problems I mentioned aren't specific to the USA at all. All airports today are vulnerable to the attacks I imagined, not only the American ones. I did talk about _European_ airports, the ones I've been in.
Aren't you sad now about having lost a great opportunity to keep your mouth shut? Ponder about this for a while.
Because blowing up lots of people and chunks of a major airport like LAX, La Guardia, Heathrow, De Gaulle, etc. isn't spectacular enough?
The idiots from ETA, the basque terrorists, left a rigged van outside Madrid Barajas airport, blew up, didn't kill anyone because of bad timing/location/whatever, and was on the news for several days.
It's weird to me that no-one seems to have realised yet that you could mass-murder much more people, and in a much easier fashion, just coordinating directly in an airport, in the checkin queues. No one has checked your bag at all yet, and you can blow yourself to smithereens just for the price of not looking too suspicious. At least in cheap European flights like Easyjet or Ryanair, the queues sometimes amount to two or three planes full of passengers. Do it simultaneously, in a few airports, and we wouldn't be able to fly anymore due to fear.
Basically, the problem of getting the bomb to the useful place has just changed the place: it used to be the plane. Now it can be the airport check in queues. Next would be the airport entrances. There will always be a mass of people checking in somewhere, at least until the damn flying cars are finally here.
They only produce Microsoft OSes. They could hardly say anything else. Any means "any". Your reading comprehension leaves a lot to be desired. The sentence reads "The software we produce is more secure than any other OS produced before it", not "The software we produce is more secure than any other of our OSes produced before it".
If you reduce it to that, it's not a great story, evidently. If you managed to tell a great story with Space Invaders, it wouldn't still be Space Invaders, it'd be something else.
Many games tell a story not exactly through what the main character does (which, in every case, could be reduced to what the interface allows us to do), but through what you call "back-story". Most role-playing games try to make you believe that you're really unfurling the story, while what you really are doing, if we get to it, is battling, grinding, running, piloting airships, etc. On other games, you go through the story battling Klompa (Prince of Persia), Boo, Lakitu (Mario) or Nihilanth (Half-Life), breeding Chocobos (FF VII), and racing against cheetah (Soleil). The story is told, nevertheless. Would you ask that a novel told exclusively the story of the main character to be great? Lord of the Rings doesn't, for one. Neither do Solaris, I, Robot, the Neverending Story, and many other great novels.
Some games are centred on what the main character does, amongst them, I agree the best example that comes to mind is Planescape:Torment. But it tells a story, just like the other ones do. I don't believe that the method of telling the story is so significant. You do.
I find your separation of "story" and "back-story" a bit artificial. The "back-stories" you speak of are the stories those games tell, be it by shooting guys, hacking through them, or persuading them.
Games that tell a good story, like you intend, are the Monkey Island series, Grim Fandango, Day of the tentacle, and the rest of the lucasarts adventure games. KotOR does, too. You decide if they're great or not. But again, I enjoy a good game story, even if the main character has to slug its way through it. It has to be fun slugging, though.
On the other hand, I agree with you in regard to Final Fantasy: the stories are usually cast from the same mold.
I _am_ Argentine. I can understand Mexican Spanish perfectly well, unless they start using very heavy slang (and this would be the equivalent of an English speaker who didn't understand slang "fo' sheezy", and the like; or of one that didn't understand Australian English phrases). Same for the other Spanish variations, although they do not show as much derive as the Mexican, as far as I know.
Actually, the difference between the UK, American and Australian variations of English is very much like the one between all of the Spanish variations.
They're not that different in this particular issue. Estadounidense is a word understood by most all to mean "someone from the USA". The different Spanish variations are not too separated, they mostly diverge in nuances, and accents.
Sorry, but that reading "wanted to add flash and js to a whitelist system" isn't evident at all, not to me at least, unless you mean "...to keep them blocked and blacklisted", which was what I understood, and the reason of my original response. Since useful sites employ javascript and flash, you can't ban the technologies altogether; though, if you wanted to, you can already do this, by not installing flash and by disabling js in the browser. Viceversa, since other sites abuse them, you can't fully whitelist them either.
See, what I thought was that the OP was using sarcasm. You took the post at face value.
Noscript and other better solutions to the problem indeed exist, but that's not what I understood from the OP, at all.
Slashdot Mirror
The GP did say _hit_ game. Halo 2 was a hit on the XBox, not on Vista. I think this might be something of a chicken and egg problem, though: not enough users of Vista to make it a hit to get people using Vista...
Furthermore, nobody's asking that every single minor carry ID, only that the people who want to be acknowledged as adults prove they are.
If he's an adult, well, he can go back home and get some ID, can't he?
And if he's not an adult?
... He shouldn't be sold the game? Are you doing this on purpose?Yes. Exactly like that. You mention it as if it was something unthinkable. If a minor wants to get an M-rated or 17+ rated game, tough luck. Let him bring his parents to buy it.
If he's an adult, well, he can go back home and get some ID, can't he?
How do you actually know what you say you already know? I like some lies^Wdamn lies^W^W^Wstatistics to confirm or deny what seems evident. Plus, the study could have found that stores _didn't_ sell to minors.
I know that with enough statistics, you can prove any point you want. Still, it's nice not to rely on common sense for once.
Reflections are all wrong. Definitely photoshopped.
You would be right if these were only finished products, but many of them will only be available in the next year or further. Which makes me ask "Exactly how are these 2007's best inventions?". Again.
I don't think they pay him to beta-test the Windows FTP functionality. I wouldn't use it anymore either, especially since you can get better ftp packages for free.
How does "incredibly rare" compare against the number of virus molecules? I haven't a clue of the relative value.
After all, idiots who buy the "enlarge your johnson" pills they are spammed about are also incredibly rare, yet it still seems to turn profits for the salesmen.
The concepts of "speculation", "imagination" and "foresight" seem lost on you. You also seem a bit narrow-minded, taking into account that the problems I mentioned aren't specific to the USA at all. All airports today are vulnerable to the attacks I imagined, not only the American ones. I did talk about _European_ airports, the ones I've been in.
Aren't you sad now about having lost a great opportunity to keep your mouth shut? Ponder about this for a while.
Because blowing up lots of people and chunks of a major airport like LAX, La Guardia, Heathrow, De Gaulle, etc. isn't spectacular enough?
The idiots from ETA, the basque terrorists, left a rigged van outside Madrid Barajas airport, blew up, didn't kill anyone because of bad timing/location/whatever, and was on the news for several days.
Right on all accounts.
It wouldn't be on purpose, the viruses that resonated in tune with the blood would survive and infect, the others wouldn't.
It's weird to me that no-one seems to have realised yet that you could mass-murder much more people, and in a much easier fashion, just coordinating directly in an airport, in the checkin queues. No one has checked your bag at all yet, and you can blow yourself to smithereens just for the price of not looking too suspicious. At least in cheap European flights like Easyjet or Ryanair, the queues sometimes amount to two or three planes full of passengers. Do it simultaneously, in a few airports, and we wouldn't be able to fly anymore due to fear.
Basically, the problem of getting the bomb to the useful place has just changed the place: it used to be the plane. Now it can be the airport check in queues. Next would be the airport entrances. There will always be a mass of people checking in somewhere, at least until the damn flying cars are finally here.
They only produce Microsoft OSes. They could hardly say anything else. Any means "any". Your reading comprehension leaves a lot to be desired. The sentence reads "The software we produce is more secure than any other OS produced before it", not "The software we produce is more secure than any other of our OSes produced before it".
Ultimately, though, this is petty nitpicking.
"Any" doesn't mean "any other MS", it means "any OS". The restriction to MS OSes is made earlier in the paragraph, but not there.
I'd love to read Theo's response to this. I'm always good for a laugh.
Nitpick: expletive, not explicative. Now you know :)
If you reduce it to that, it's not a great story, evidently. If you managed to tell a great story with Space Invaders, it wouldn't still be Space Invaders, it'd be something else.
Many games tell a story not exactly through what the main character does (which, in every case, could be reduced to what the interface allows us to do), but through what you call "back-story". Most role-playing games try to make you believe that you're really unfurling the story, while what you really are doing, if we get to it, is battling, grinding, running, piloting airships, etc. On other games, you go through the story battling Klompa (Prince of Persia), Boo, Lakitu (Mario) or Nihilanth (Half-Life), breeding Chocobos (FF VII), and racing against cheetah (Soleil). The story is told, nevertheless. Would you ask that a novel told exclusively the story of the main character to be great? Lord of the Rings doesn't, for one. Neither do Solaris, I, Robot, the Neverending Story, and many other great novels.
Some games are centred on what the main character does, amongst them, I agree the best example that comes to mind is Planescape:Torment. But it tells a story, just like the other ones do. I don't believe that the method of telling the story is so significant. You do.
I find your separation of "story" and "back-story" a bit artificial. The "back-stories" you speak of are the stories those games tell, be it by shooting guys, hacking through them, or persuading them.
Games that tell a good story, like you intend, are the Monkey Island series, Grim Fandango, Day of the tentacle, and the rest of the lucasarts adventure games. KotOR does, too. You decide if they're great or not. But again, I enjoy a good game story, even if the main character has to slug its way through it. It has to be fun slugging, though.
On the other hand, I agree with you in regard to Final Fantasy: the stories are usually cast from the same mold.
If only grandmothers could be kept well away from computers... What do they even need email for?
I _am_ Argentine. I can understand Mexican Spanish perfectly well, unless they start using very heavy slang (and this would be the equivalent of an English speaker who didn't understand slang "fo' sheezy", and the like; or of one that didn't understand Australian English phrases). Same for the other Spanish variations, although they do not show as much derive as the Mexican, as far as I know.
Actually, the difference between the UK, American and Australian variations of English is very much like the one between all of the Spanish variations.
They're not that different in this particular issue. Estadounidense is a word understood by most all to mean "someone from the USA". The different Spanish variations are not too separated, they mostly diverge in nuances, and accents.
Sorry, but that reading "wanted to add flash and js to a whitelist system" isn't evident at all, not to me at least, unless you mean "...to keep them blocked and blacklisted", which was what I understood, and the reason of my original response. Since useful sites employ javascript and flash, you can't ban the technologies altogether; though, if you wanted to, you can already do this, by not installing flash and by disabling js in the browser. Viceversa, since other sites abuse them, you can't fully whitelist them either.
See, what I thought was that the OP was using sarcasm. You took the post at face value.
Noscript and other better solutions to the problem indeed exist, but that's not what I understood from the OP, at all.
Not adding flash and javascript to the whitelists, as the OP suggested, is not exactly "whitelisting" sites.
You can disable those in your browser, you know? You don't even have to install Flash.
Or is this a *WOOSH* moment?