Back in the 1980's, some dumbass driving a particular brand of car in the United States put her foot on the gas pedal instead of the brake pedal and lived to sue a major car company. Hundreds of other dumbasses, knowing a good thing when they see it, also sued the major car company. The media latched onto those reports, and dubbed the incidents "SUAs" or "Sudden Unintended Accelerations." A particular brand of car mentioned in the media report had NO mentions of the defect before the report aired - within a month, it had hundreds of mentions. An investigation was launched by various government agencies - they somehow found it impossible to replicate, being physically impossible, and released a report blaming "pedal misapplication." To this day a cabal of conspiracy theorists believe that the auto industry and the government are covering this problem up. SUAs my ass - more like "Sudden Unintelligence Accidents."
How does this relate to the current story? Well, it goes to show how much personal responsibility goes in today's society. The government can't tell people that they'd have to be imbeciles to buy their three-year-olds copies of GTA, so naturally they have to "look out for the public." Naturally, the media, knowing a good thing when it sees it, runs stories every time some dumbass with a copy of FF7 burns down a 7-11 or some goth with doom shoots up a high school in Hell's Asshole, Suburbia.
How do we stop this influx of idiocy?
A. Vote. Too many old people do it and not enough young people do. The reason that medicare and social security are going to bankrupt this country is that the politicos are too afraid of pissing off the old people and losing their votes to make any substantial changes to those horrible, horrible systems. At the very least, vote out of office everyone that supports stupid bullshit laws that'd regulate video games. Perhaps you don't support any candidate - but you can still use your vote as a weapon against the particularly dumbassed ones.
B. Get your news from the internet. Don't watch the news, ever, even idly. Read, or do something else with your time. Face it, wouldn't you rather you didn't know who Ashton Kutcher or Britney Spears or Madonna were, or who they were sleeping with? Every single fucking time I've been involved with something before it got media attention, I noticed grave factual inaccuracies and general dumbassedness - the media is a big fat pile of sad.
C. Take some personal responsibility. Now, remember, "responsibility" is a direct synonym for "blame." When you fuck up, take the blame. Don't tell yourself that you didn't do well in high school because "only 10% of people do well in that type of environment" - tell yourself that you screwed up because you suck at life.
D. Make the lives of idiots living hells. Don't suffer fools gladly. Be sure to use sarcasm to belittle them, and lower their "self-esteem." Hopefully, they'll fail to attract mates, and then eventually the suck will be bred out of humanity.
A story about self-esteem: At my HIGH school, there was recently a seminar called "Words can really hurt." On this, students were invited to get up to share their experiences of being picked on, which was supposedly supposed to get us to realize our HURTFUL WAYS. One child got up and told about how people would make fun of him for being diabetic. Now, this child had a fucking insulin pump attached to his body. He was so diabetic that he actually had a computer that would monitor his blood sugar in real time. But he LOVED candy. So, he'd go on these binges, eat a fuck-ton of candy, and compensate by pumping himself full of insulin. Naturally, every time we did this, we'd tell him "Jimmy, you're going to fucking die, you stupid diabetic!"
This is our future. Remember kiddies - even though voting gives you the illusion of control, and probably matters less to you each individual time than the amount of taxes you pay to register, you can't bitch about the government if you didn't even try to play by their rules.
Well, actually, that's not entirely accurate. It's really the FOURTH lowest ranked FF, but the others are lower for obvious reasons.
Final Fantasy Tactics - 85.7% [A spinoff of FF. Very complicated game, most difficult in the entire series, but has flaws that allow for major leveling up.]
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance - 87.6% [I hate this game and I don't know why everyone loves it]
Final Fantasy Anthology - 87.5% [FFA consists of Final Fantasy 5, which was never released in the US, and Final Fantasy 6 (III in the United States), which was. It was plagued with horrible loading times, and featured no graphical improvements over the original SNES games]
Final Fantasy Chronicals - 85.0% [FFC consists of translations of Final Fantasy 4(II in the US) and Chrono Trigger (which isn't a Final Fantasy game, despite the incredible similarities)]
Final Fantasy Origins - 78.8% [PSX update of the NES Final Fantasies 1+2. Final Fantasy 2 for the NES is one of the worst NES games of all time, probably even worse than Hylide and Heroes of The Lance, but it never got the recognition for its suckiness that it deserved. Seriously, try reading the faqs for it, it's utterly insane]
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest - 64.2% [This isn't really a Final Fantasy game - it's a Saga game that Square slapped the FF logo on so that people would buy it based solely on the FF name. It's not THAT bad a game, but it's no Final Fantasy.] Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicals - 80.6% [hasn't been released in America yet]
Final Fantasy II - 87.8% Final Fantasy III - 91.6% Final Fantasy VII - 89.6% Final Fantasy VIII - 88.9% Final Fantasy IX - 92.3% Final Fantasy X - 91.2% Final Fantasy XI - 88.5%...
Final Fantasy X-2 - 83.4%
I'm still buying FFX-2, and I've heard good things about it, but I don't think I'm going to be blown away.
Note on the numberings: Square released Final Fantasy 1 relatively late in the US, and elected not to release 2 and 3 for the NES in America, skipping straight to 4. But they relabeled four as II, and six as III (they skipped 5) when they released those games in America; however, they released 7 as VII, for reasons that I honestly have trouble comprehending. Consistancy is not Square's strong suit.
What do the LOTR movies and the Matrix have in common? They both suck! You know what the difference between the Matrix and the LOTR movies is? The first Matrix movie was good!
Even though a PDA a. Can carry multiple games b. Display more colors at a time c. Use emulators to play regular gameboy games d. Has hundreds of good, free games e. Actually has backlighting, unlike all gameboys but an SP f. Can be snuck into classrooms and meetings because it actually has uses other than for games,
it's still worse for gaming, for one simple reason:
The GBA's controls don't suck. It was designed for gaming - all the buttons are the right size and in the right places. The buttons are just too damn tiny on all those pdas. I mean, it's fine if you're playing chess or something, but god help you if you play a top-down shooter on a PDA - it's painful. PDAs also tend to have latency issues with the buttons - they weren't designed for instantaneous response, so even if you hook up a keyboard or something, there's always going to be a little lag. Control means more to me than anything else in a game barring gameplay, which is why I stick with a Gameboy, even taking into account all the above advantages (a, c, d, and e are non-issues if you have the right equipment anyway)
I'm even worse.
I can actually see florescent lights discretely flicker if there's only one in a room.
I can tell the difference between 100hz and 120hz and prefer the latter.
The NES is *NOT* a console. You can connect a keyboard and do word processing, programming, midi editing, and even connect a robot to it. Nintendo itself even says it's not a game console - it's called the "Nintendo Computer Entertainment System."
You could argue that an Apple II is a console because you just put the floppy in, turn the machine on - and start playing the game. The only differences between consoles and computers are those of marketing and ease-of-use.
I'd actually argue that a lightbulb's more likely to cause cancer than a WiFi hub, anyway. We should ban those. And how about the sun too, while we're at it. That causes cancer.
The reason for this is that women have two X chromosomes. So they have redundant copies of all their genes - which reduces the frequency of DNA wonkiness. Y-chromosomes are shorter than X-chromosomes, so in all males, there's a whole section of DNA that won't "match up" with the other side. That's why there's a higher incidence of retardation in males.
FYI - It's called "backyard baseball"
It's p.o.s. kiddy software that features no real players, lots of cartoony graphics, and shitty, shitty gameplay. It's like negative fun. You'll never buy another game made by that company ever again (I didn't, little brother got it as a christmas gift when he was 9)
"A buffer overflow occurs when a program or process tries to store more data in a buffer (temporary data storage area) than it was intended to hold. Since buffers are created to contain a finite amount of data, the extra information - which has to go somewhere - can overflow into adjacent buffers, corrupting or overwriting the valid data held in them. Although it may occur accidentally through programming error, buffer overflow is an increasingly common type of security attack on data integrity. In buffer overflow attacks, the extra data may contain codes designed to trigger specific actions, in effect sending new instructions to the attacked computer that could, for example, damage the user's files, change data, or disclose confidential information. Buffer overflow attacks are said to have arisen because the C programming language supplied the framework, and poor programming practices supplied the vulnerability."
The buffer overflows exploited in Windows are mostly problems that are inherent in either the operating system, or common microsoft-specific apps. The HL2 source code was stolen using a buffer overflow in Outlook Express. Learn how to program. (BTW, I'm 8 years old. If I'm wrong about this, you sure should be proud.)
What are you talking about? PPC chips have buffer overflows too. Hell, there was a bug in Mac OS X where you could actually cause a buffer overrun just by entering too much text in the login window of a screensaver.
Out of purely intellectual curiosity, would sniffing the network for a couple of days yield the IP addresses of the machines running the program yield IP addresses that could be used to create a firewall rule rejecting all incoming packets from the program? Or would a firewall rule like that break your network access?
I don't attend University of Florida, I'm just wondering.
You're confusing Tactics with 8.
Tactics, though the translation sucked, probably had overall the best story I've ever played through in an RPG, and probably the most haunting ending. Delita strikes me as one of the most all time fleshed-out characters in an RPG.
Final Fantasy 1 wasn't hard - it was just boring because mindless leveling up was essentially required. None of the bosses, not even Warmech, have enough HP to stand up against a party with an average level of 25. Towards the end, once you had your entire party decked out with pro-rings and other status-effect negating nonsense the game actually turned out to be pretty easy - it's just getting to that point that's a pain. And with the exception of the final temple, none of the levels really were that large. You can be in and out of the marsh cave in under a minute if you don't get into a random battle. And for healing - just buy 99 potions. White mages suck anyway.
Final Fantasy 4 was a better kind of hard - the boss battles were actually fun to play through, there was no uber-cheap way of blazing through the game, you could tell how strong weapons were before you bought them, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the 1980's, some dumbass driving a particular brand of car in the United States put her foot on the gas pedal instead of the brake pedal and lived to sue a major car company. Hundreds of other dumbasses, knowing a good thing when they see it, also sued the major car company. The media latched onto those reports, and dubbed the incidents "SUAs" or "Sudden Unintended Accelerations." A particular brand of car mentioned in the media report had NO mentions of the defect before the report aired - within a month, it had hundreds of mentions. An investigation was launched by various government agencies - they somehow found it impossible to replicate, being physically impossible, and released a report blaming "pedal misapplication." To this day a cabal of conspiracy theorists believe that the auto industry and the government are covering this problem up. SUAs my ass - more like "Sudden Unintelligence Accidents."
How does this relate to the current story? Well, it goes to show how much personal responsibility goes in today's society. The government can't tell people that they'd have to be imbeciles to buy their three-year-olds copies of GTA, so naturally they have to "look out for the public." Naturally, the media, knowing a good thing when it sees it, runs stories every time some dumbass with a copy of FF7 burns down a 7-11 or some goth with doom shoots up a high school in Hell's Asshole, Suburbia.
How do we stop this influx of idiocy?
A. Vote. Too many old people do it and not enough young people do. The reason that medicare and social security are going to bankrupt this country is that the politicos are too afraid of pissing off the old people and losing their votes to make any substantial changes to those horrible, horrible systems. At the very least, vote out of office everyone that supports stupid bullshit laws that'd regulate video games. Perhaps you don't support any candidate - but you can still use your vote as a weapon against the particularly dumbassed ones.
B. Get your news from the internet. Don't watch the news, ever, even idly. Read, or do something else with your time. Face it, wouldn't you rather you didn't know who Ashton Kutcher or Britney Spears or Madonna were, or who they were sleeping with? Every single fucking time I've been involved with something before it got media attention, I noticed grave factual inaccuracies and general dumbassedness - the media is a big fat pile of sad.
C. Take some personal responsibility. Now, remember, "responsibility" is a direct synonym for "blame." When you fuck up, take the blame. Don't tell yourself that you didn't do well in high school because "only 10% of people do well in that type of environment" - tell yourself that you screwed up because you suck at life.
D. Make the lives of idiots living hells. Don't suffer fools gladly. Be sure to use sarcasm to belittle them, and lower their "self-esteem." Hopefully, they'll fail to attract mates, and then eventually the suck will be bred out of humanity.
A story about self-esteem: At my HIGH school, there was recently a seminar called "Words can really hurt." On this, students were invited to get up to share their experiences of being picked on, which was supposedly supposed to get us to realize our HURTFUL WAYS. One child got up and told about how people would make fun of him for being diabetic. Now, this child had a fucking insulin pump attached to his body. He was so diabetic that he actually had a computer that would monitor his blood sugar in real time. But he LOVED candy. So, he'd go on these binges, eat a fuck-ton of candy, and compensate by pumping himself full of insulin. Naturally, every time we did this, we'd tell him "Jimmy, you're going to fucking die, you stupid diabetic!"
This is our future. Remember kiddies - even though voting gives you the illusion of control, and probably matters less to you each individual time than the amount of taxes you pay to register, you can't bitch about the government if you didn't even try to play by their rules.
I know, honestly, if he just took the definite integrals of some random polynomial it'd look SO much more convincing.
Source: www.gamerankings.com
...
Well, actually, that's not entirely accurate. It's really the FOURTH lowest ranked FF, but the others are lower for obvious reasons.
Final Fantasy Tactics - 85.7%
[A spinoff of FF. Very complicated game, most difficult in the entire series, but has flaws that allow for major leveling up.]
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance - 87.6%
[I hate this game and I don't know why everyone loves it]
Final Fantasy Anthology - 87.5%
[FFA consists of Final Fantasy 5, which was never released in the US, and Final Fantasy 6 (III in the United States), which was. It was plagued with horrible loading times, and featured no graphical improvements over the original SNES games]
Final Fantasy Chronicals - 85.0%
[FFC consists of translations of Final Fantasy 4(II in the US) and Chrono Trigger (which isn't a Final Fantasy game, despite the incredible similarities)]
Final Fantasy Origins - 78.8% [PSX update of the NES Final Fantasies 1+2. Final Fantasy 2 for the NES is one of the worst NES games of all time, probably even worse than Hylide and Heroes of The Lance, but it never got the recognition for its suckiness that it deserved. Seriously, try reading the faqs for it, it's utterly insane]
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest - 64.2%
[This isn't really a Final Fantasy game - it's a Saga game that Square slapped the FF logo on so that people would buy it based solely on the FF name. It's not THAT bad a game, but it's no Final Fantasy.]
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicals - 80.6% [hasn't been released in America yet]
Final Fantasy II - 87.8%
Final Fantasy III - 91.6%
Final Fantasy VII - 89.6%
Final Fantasy VIII - 88.9%
Final Fantasy IX - 92.3%
Final Fantasy X - 91.2%
Final Fantasy XI - 88.5%
Final Fantasy X-2 - 83.4%
I'm still buying FFX-2, and I've heard good things about it, but I don't think I'm going to be blown away.
Note on the numberings:
Square released Final Fantasy 1 relatively late in the US, and elected not to release 2 and 3 for the NES in America, skipping straight to 4. But they relabeled four as II, and six as III (they skipped 5) when they released those games in America; however, they released 7 as VII, for reasons that I honestly have trouble comprehending. Consistancy is not Square's strong suit.
We'll conveniently have a copy of the article text, right on slashdot, which was slashdotted... Brilliant. /mod parent down
What do the LOTR movies and the Matrix have in common? They both suck! You know what the difference between the Matrix and the LOTR movies is? The first Matrix movie was good!
I run OS X.2.7 on a Beige G3. Those came out BEFORE the iMacs...
Even though a PDA
a. Can carry multiple games
b. Display more colors at a time
c. Use emulators to play regular gameboy games
d. Has hundreds of good, free games
e. Actually has backlighting, unlike all gameboys but an SP
f. Can be snuck into classrooms and meetings because it actually has uses other than for games,
it's still worse for gaming, for one simple reason:
The GBA's controls don't suck. It was designed for gaming - all the buttons are the right size and in the right places. The buttons are just too damn tiny on all those pdas. I mean, it's fine if you're playing chess or something, but god help you if you play a top-down shooter on a PDA - it's painful. PDAs also tend to have latency issues with the buttons - they weren't designed for instantaneous response, so even if you hook up a keyboard or something, there's always going to be a little lag. Control means more to me than anything else in a game barring gameplay, which is why I stick with a Gameboy, even taking into account all the above advantages (a, c, d, and e are non-issues if you have the right equipment anyway)
Hey, that's my IP address too! xD
Off your meds today?
All three statements aren't true.
If you're on ice and flooring the accelerator, and not moving, does your speedometer say that you're travelling at 100 mph? Mine doesn't.
I'm even worse. I can actually see florescent lights discretely flicker if there's only one in a room. I can tell the difference between 100hz and 120hz and prefer the latter.
One paragraph states "The product is a powder made from blood that has been stored for more than six weeks and can not be used for transfusion."
Horribly ambigious sentence, I know.
Mmm... Self-parody.
The NES is *NOT* a console. You can connect a keyboard and do word processing, programming, midi editing, and even connect a robot to it. Nintendo itself even says it's not a game console - it's called the "Nintendo Computer Entertainment System."
You could argue that an Apple II is a console because you just put the floppy in, turn the machine on - and start playing the game. The only differences between consoles and computers are those of marketing and ease-of-use.
I, personally, am glad that I cannot see Tubgirl in her full 3d glory, thanks to POVERTY(tm)
I'd actually argue that a lightbulb's more likely to cause cancer than a WiFi hub, anyway. We should ban those. And how about the sun too, while we're at it. That causes cancer.
The reason for this is that women have two X chromosomes. So they have redundant copies of all their genes - which reduces the frequency of DNA wonkiness. Y-chromosomes are shorter than X-chromosomes, so in all males, there's a whole section of DNA that won't "match up" with the other side. That's why there's a higher incidence of retardation in males.
FYI - It's called "backyard baseball" It's p.o.s. kiddy software that features no real players, lots of cartoony graphics, and shitty, shitty gameplay. It's like negative fun. You'll never buy another game made by that company ever again (I didn't, little brother got it as a christmas gift when he was 9)
"A buffer overflow occurs when a program or process tries to store more data in a buffer (temporary data storage area) than it was intended to hold. Since buffers are created to contain a finite amount of data, the extra information - which has to go somewhere - can overflow into adjacent buffers, corrupting or overwriting the valid data held in them. Although it may occur accidentally through programming error, buffer overflow is an increasingly common type of security attack on data integrity. In buffer overflow attacks, the extra data may contain codes designed to trigger specific actions, in effect sending new instructions to the attacked computer that could, for example, damage the user's files, change data, or disclose confidential information. Buffer overflow attacks are said to have arisen because the C programming language supplied the framework, and poor programming practices supplied the vulnerability." The buffer overflows exploited in Windows are mostly problems that are inherent in either the operating system, or common microsoft-specific apps. The HL2 source code was stolen using a buffer overflow in Outlook Express. Learn how to program. (BTW, I'm 8 years old. If I'm wrong about this, you sure should be proud.)
What are you talking about? PPC chips have buffer overflows too. Hell, there was a bug in Mac OS X where you could actually cause a buffer overrun just by entering too much text in the login window of a screensaver.
Out of purely intellectual curiosity, would sniffing the network for a couple of days yield the IP addresses of the machines running the program yield IP addresses that could be used to create a firewall rule rejecting all incoming packets from the program? Or would a firewall rule like that break your network access?
I don't attend University of Florida, I'm just wondering.
You're confusing Tactics with 8. Tactics, though the translation sucked, probably had overall the best story I've ever played through in an RPG, and probably the most haunting ending. Delita strikes me as one of the most all time fleshed-out characters in an RPG.
Final Fantasy 1 wasn't hard - it was just boring because mindless leveling up was essentially required. None of the bosses, not even Warmech, have enough HP to stand up against a party with an average level of 25. Towards the end, once you had your entire party decked out with pro-rings and other status-effect negating nonsense the game actually turned out to be pretty easy - it's just getting to that point that's a pain. And with the exception of the final temple, none of the levels really were that large. You can be in and out of the marsh cave in under a minute if you don't get into a random battle. And for healing - just buy 99 potions. White mages suck anyway. Final Fantasy 4 was a better kind of hard - the boss battles were actually fun to play through, there was no uber-cheap way of blazing through the game, you could tell how strong weapons were before you bought them, etc.
... And you neglect to mention that a good flash-linker costs approximately $100.