Ok, here comes the part where I get myself on the FBI watch list...
My grand father and great grandfather were involved in a "family business" in Detroit from prohibition through the 60's. I've picked up some interesting knowledge from them, but I'm a big chicken, so I've never thought to try any of it.
For example: If you sell somebody booze in a dry county, then mug them and steal the booze back and sell it again, they can't complain.
The important one in this case is that if you're going to move illegal money around, you do it in a country with crappy/lax banking laws (or no banking laws), and with a bank that doesn't ask questions, and lastly, in a country that doesn't give a fuck about some American police asking for a search warrant.
Just about any major money-laundering country would be an ideal spot for the front-end bank account in a scam like this (Belize, assorted other Central/South American countries, etc). From there, you can bounce it around three or four banks on different continents (all of which meet the criteria listed above), and the cost of tracking it become considerably more than the amount of money being moved.
'Religion is ignored in gaming, or if it is portrayed, it's wildly caricatured.'"
Not entirely. Although, frankly, the people who try to use games to promote religion do an even worse job of portraying it than the rest. Anybody played Catecumen? Since I assume you all have eyes, I'll assume not. It made a fairly successful bid for the worst FPS game ever, but it couldn't even do THAT well. It was an attempt to portray the persecution of early Christians by Roman soldiers to young modern Christians. It does this by having you run around an assortment of architecture (the developers never quite get the distinction down between Roman, Gothic, Victorian, and Japanese buildings) and shoot people with a sword.
Then I know of two games with variations on the title "Noah's Ark." One is the worst FPS game on the SNES (and considering how bad most of them were for that system, that's saying a lot) and the other looked like a half-assed hack of SimFarm.
Frankly, I think the average treatment of religion would increase substantially if those people who want religion treated "fairly" in video games stopped developing them (by "fairly," I use their own definition of fair, in that the games serve as a conduit to spread their message). They're hardly setting an example for the rest of us.
I did that for a while, but eventually it wasn't worth it. I'd usually kick nearly everybody out of the game, and it would be me and a guy who lives a block away hoping somebody would come in and not announce to the world how high he was, how big of a dump he'd just taken, or how big his penis was. We decided to stop spending money on Xbox Live and just go back to having lan parties.
Playstation has online play too, and it's a big selling point. It has better onilne games, more online players. Even if its not quite as accessible, it's still usable enough for the average home idiot to use. If the PS2 didn't have online, then your point would hold more weight.
Easy, yes. But personally, I don't find it much fun. Penny-Arcade hit the nail on the head when they said that the people you meet on Xbox Live are complete and utter cockmongers.
It's no better on any of the online PC games I play online, but the microphone makes it ten times worse. Give an idiot a microphone, and they invent entirely new ways to be stupid.
Where do you get Japan being zenophobic from? I'm going to have to quote the ambassador who spoke at my university:
The Japanese culture is considerably more open than American. American clothes, TV shows, movies, video games, electronics, and any number of other brand-names are popular. In fact, he could list about a dozen very popular TV shows produced in the US and Canada that were even more popular in Japan than they were here.
They've picked up forign sports. Not many native sports in Japan are still popular, but Baseball is huge, and they have soccer, football, and all the others.
Their biggest restaraunt chain? McDonalds. I'm sure you've heard the joke about the Japanese child who came to the US for vacation and excitedly told his mother, "Look, they have McDonalds here, too!"
The only area he came up with under questioning from the audience where the native products are considerably more popular than foriegn imports was cars. He didn't really know why, but the explanation is pretty obvious and very much not zenophobia. Many Japanese cars aren't exported. They actually build them in the regions they're being sold in and by the people they're being sold to. There's a Mitzubishi plant not far from where I live, and it picked up a good chunk of laid off GM and Ford workers last year. This lets them avoid the cost markup on importing (much cheaper to import 5000 crates of parts than 5000 cars) and sell for effectively the same price the domestic sellers do. It also reduces production cost, since land is so much more expensive in Japan, and most of its already taken up by something.
However, in Japan, most European and American cars are imported, adding a cost markup. They're on an even keel with Japanese cars here. Throw in a markup of several thousand dollars, and they're in trouble.
They've done surveys on that before, but questionaires aren't going to cut it. I was skeptical of them before (very easy to lie, and good incentive to), but even moreso now.
The RIAA has played dirty tricks enough that I know I'll never put a check mark next to, "Do you use peer-to-peer file sharing software?" let alone next to "Do you use peer-to-peer file sharing software for illegal purposes?"
The operators are most likely just go-betweens. I'd be very suprised if all these AIs could interface with each other cleanly, so what they would do is have each operator manually input the moves made by the other computer.
I made a chess program in my freshman year. Horribly programmed, I have to admit, so probably doesn't relate well to these computers (and these aren't 486's either). When it's in a good position, it would usually find more good moves to make, and took less time to make a move. If it was in a bad position, most of the moves it would test turn out to be pretty bad, so it has to test more moves. All the moves it tested were stored. I only had a meg of RAM to draw on, and once in a while (usually when it was in a position where any move either resulted in stalemate or checkmate), it would run out of memory and freeze. Gave it a definite "sore loser" feel.
Doesn't really do much, unless the scammers are morons. Most banks in which fraud is taking place openly like that don't much care about it. Either they're in a place where regulations can't touch them (a country that doesn't expedite and has very weak banking laws of its own), or they're getting kickbacks off the scams.
They don't know who the scammers are. They probably don't even know that's why they're banned. They get mad at the dumbasses who are banning them for no apparent reason. It's just like all the innocent people who get on blacklists for spamming. They're not mad at the spammers, they're mad at the people who wrongly blacklisted them.
My DSL company did something simmilar to me, although it was pure dumbass, and not malice on anybody's part. I'm on a dynamic IP system, so every time I disconnect and then reconnect, I have a different IP. Never causes much problem, since I don't do anything at home that would require me to have a static IP.
Anyway, the local police made a big bust on a guy selling child pornography on a webserver in the back room of his office (the guy's a pediatrician). The police got a good couple hundred IP addresses from logs. Most of them were out of their jurisdiction, so they sent them on to somebody else. But a half-dozen or so were right here in town.
They go to the ISPs, and try to get the names of the users behind said IPs. My ISP was more than happy to cooperate on something like this, so they had somebody look up the logs and figure out who had such-and-such address at the time stated (it was something like 4 AM on a Teusday).
Anyway, it comes up with my name. I had some pretty awkward conversations with police, neighbors, parents, etc for a while until I get a call one day. The dumbass ISP must have entered the wrong search query or something, because as it turned out, that was my IP at 4AM on a Teusday - just a month earlier.
Could have been a user patch. Did you join House Hlaalu, though? So long as you don't join House Hlaalu (or at least don't progress far enough in it to start his quests), he talks semi-normally in the mainquest segments. A bit eccentric, but not at all freakish.
Actually, they would have if there was anything worth taking. At the height of Arab and Chinese culture, either region could have steamrolled Europe with no problem. Zheng He's mercahnt fleet was strong enough to crush the combined navies and armies of Europe, and its primary purpose wasn't military, but economic. Europe was too fragmented to put up a fight against an empire. Small local lords were too embroiled in their own feuds and hatreds to unite against a common foe when they did present themselves, and even if they did, they were outmatched numerically and technologically.
Europe just didn't have anything worth conquering. Very little precious metals, mediocre farm and grazing land at best (and quite unsuitable for the crops and livestock both the Arabs and Chinese subsisted on), and it was more prone to disease and famine than the areas they did conquer. The only resource it had that was of use at the time was lumber, and that was in vast abundance much closer to where it was needed.
It wasn't until Europe started its own conquest that it gained access to those materials that would make it worth conquering, and by then, the Arab and Chinese empires were well into their decline, and couldn't do much about it. Indeed, most of the Arab and Chinese empires ended up fueling European advance.
As somebody who dispises the same, so do I. I don't at all doubt he got such a letter, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on that. And, granting he got the letter, I won't dispute that it had Bush's name and signature rubber stamped on it. I've gotten the same sort of letters from two presidents. But it most certainly wasn't Bush himself wrote the letter, or even read it. Just like I doubt very much Bill Clinton gave a flying fuck what I thought about the DMCA, and even if he did, I doubt he cared enough to write his own personal letter to me about it. Some lacky in downstairs cubicle wrote it, passed it to some other lacky upstairs who stamped them. Best case scenario, Bush saw the stack of papers including that letter.
Who says Bethesda is named after the town? There was a teacher at my highschool named Patrick Bethesda. I've never assumed his name had anything to do with either the town or the company.
You have to make the distinction between 3D graphics and a 3D game.
For example, Warcraft III has 3D graphics, but it's a 2D game. Same thing with games like Viewtiful Joe. 3D graphics, 2D game (just the other two dimentions - Warcraft III is top-down, Viewtiful Joe is sidescrolling). A game doesn't have to have 2D graphics to be a 2D game.
Much as I like the game, I'd have to say I'm more worried it'd turn out as buggy as Morrowind. With Morrowind, if you're computer doesn't fit a rather narrow set of specifications, you'll need to really screw around in the.ini files to get it to run without constantly crashing to the desktop. I've only had Fallout crash on me once in all the years I played it.
I really wanted to see someboyd like Obsidian get their hands on Fallout III, since they already had a lot of the talent from Black Isles.
I'm not going to get too excited with Bethesda behind the wheel. They've never disappointed me (in fact, they've uusally exceeded my expectations) in the Elderscrolls series, but I don't know how well they can shift from that to Fallout.
Morrowind had great story behind it, and the open-endedness was above and beyond either of the Fallout games. I hope they can keep that level of depth, but fit it into the coarser feel of Fallout.
Then the gameplay... When Black Isle had talked about making Fallout 3 real-time, a lot of people on the messageboards were upset, and wanted them to keep a system simmilar to the first two Fallout games. Especially after Brotherhood of Steel, I don't see many fans -myself included- of the series being very open to a shift to first-person like Morrowind. Especially with the sort of weapons that Fallout is based on, it'd be a very fine line between RPG and FPS.
What version do you happen to be playing? I've had the same thing happen with and without the patches, and eventually went into the editor and changed the dialog myself to fix it (got a bit tired of Uncle Crassius calling me "sweetie pie" every time I did a quest). I don't have the GotY edition, so maybe its fixed in that, but I do have Tribunal, Bloodmoon, and the latests patches, and I've gotten the wrong dialog tree ever since the game came out.
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Ok, here comes the part where I get myself on the FBI watch list...
My grand father and great grandfather were involved in a "family business" in Detroit from prohibition through the 60's. I've picked up some interesting knowledge from them, but I'm a big chicken, so I've never thought to try any of it.
For example: If you sell somebody booze in a dry county, then mug them and steal the booze back and sell it again, they can't complain.
The important one in this case is that if you're going to move illegal money around, you do it in a country with crappy/lax banking laws (or no banking laws), and with a bank that doesn't ask questions, and lastly, in a country that doesn't give a fuck about some American police asking for a search warrant.
Just about any major money-laundering country would be an ideal spot for the front-end bank account in a scam like this (Belize, assorted other Central/South American countries, etc). From there, you can bounce it around three or four banks on different continents (all of which meet the criteria listed above), and the cost of tracking it become considerably more than the amount of money being moved.
'Religion is ignored in gaming, or if it is portrayed, it's wildly caricatured.'"
Not entirely. Although, frankly, the people who try to use games to promote religion do an even worse job of portraying it than the rest. Anybody played Catecumen? Since I assume you all have eyes, I'll assume not. It made a fairly successful bid for the worst FPS game ever, but it couldn't even do THAT well. It was an attempt to portray the persecution of early Christians by Roman soldiers to young modern Christians. It does this by having you run around an assortment of architecture (the developers never quite get the distinction down between Roman, Gothic, Victorian, and Japanese buildings) and shoot people with a sword.
Then I know of two games with variations on the title "Noah's Ark." One is the worst FPS game on the SNES (and considering how bad most of them were for that system, that's saying a lot) and the other looked like a half-assed hack of SimFarm.
Frankly, I think the average treatment of religion would increase substantially if those people who want religion treated "fairly" in video games stopped developing them (by "fairly," I use their own definition of fair, in that the games serve as a conduit to spread their message). They're hardly setting an example for the rest of us.
on an xbox or PS2 you need to hold the joystick for an hour, just to turn around to shoot the guy behind you
I think your stick is broken. If you mess with the sensitivity, the response is just as fast as a mouse. Not as accurate, granted, but just as fast.
I did that for a while, but eventually it wasn't worth it. I'd usually kick nearly everybody out of the game, and it would be me and a guy who lives a block away hoping somebody would come in and not announce to the world how high he was, how big of a dump he'd just taken, or how big his penis was. We decided to stop spending money on Xbox Live and just go back to having lan parties.
Playstation has online play too, and it's a big selling point. It has better onilne games, more online players. Even if its not quite as accessible, it's still usable enough for the average home idiot to use. If the PS2 didn't have online, then your point would hold more weight.
Easy, yes. But personally, I don't find it much fun. Penny-Arcade hit the nail on the head when they said that the people you meet on Xbox Live are complete and utter cockmongers.
It's no better on any of the online PC games I play online, but the microphone makes it ten times worse. Give an idiot a microphone, and they invent entirely new ways to be stupid.
Where do you get Japan being zenophobic from? I'm going to have to quote the ambassador who spoke at my university:
The Japanese culture is considerably more open than American. American clothes, TV shows, movies, video games, electronics, and any number of other brand-names are popular. In fact, he could list about a dozen very popular TV shows produced in the US and Canada that were even more popular in Japan than they were here.
They've picked up forign sports. Not many native sports in Japan are still popular, but Baseball is huge, and they have soccer, football, and all the others.
Their biggest restaraunt chain? McDonalds. I'm sure you've heard the joke about the Japanese child who came to the US for vacation and excitedly told his mother, "Look, they have McDonalds here, too!"
The only area he came up with under questioning from the audience where the native products are considerably more popular than foriegn imports was cars. He didn't really know why, but the explanation is pretty obvious and very much not zenophobia. Many Japanese cars aren't exported. They actually build them in the regions they're being sold in and by the people they're being sold to. There's a Mitzubishi plant not far from where I live, and it picked up a good chunk of laid off GM and Ford workers last year. This lets them avoid the cost markup on importing (much cheaper to import 5000 crates of parts than 5000 cars) and sell for effectively the same price the domestic sellers do. It also reduces production cost, since land is so much more expensive in Japan, and most of its already taken up by something.
However, in Japan, most European and American cars are imported, adding a cost markup. They're on an even keel with Japanese cars here. Throw in a markup of several thousand dollars, and they're in trouble.
He said it CAN take Sony. He didn't say anything about WILL take Sony.
The next version of Windows CAN be bugless. It won't, but until it comes out, they can say it CAN be a lot of things.
They've done surveys on that before, but questionaires aren't going to cut it. I was skeptical of them before (very easy to lie, and good incentive to), but even moreso now.
The RIAA has played dirty tricks enough that I know I'll never put a check mark next to, "Do you use peer-to-peer file sharing software?" let alone next to "Do you use peer-to-peer file sharing software for illegal purposes?"
Oops, small typo. Should read getting off.
No, that's why their traffic jumps during the winter. He was referring to why it drops in the summer.
The operators are most likely just go-betweens. I'd be very suprised if all these AIs could interface with each other cleanly, so what they would do is have each operator manually input the moves made by the other computer.
I made a chess program in my freshman year. Horribly programmed, I have to admit, so probably doesn't relate well to these computers (and these aren't 486's either). When it's in a good position, it would usually find more good moves to make, and took less time to make a move. If it was in a bad position, most of the moves it would test turn out to be pretty bad, so it has to test more moves. All the moves it tested were stored. I only had a meg of RAM to draw on, and once in a while (usually when it was in a position where any move either resulted in stalemate or checkmate), it would run out of memory and freeze. Gave it a definite "sore loser" feel.
Doesn't really do much, unless the scammers are morons. Most banks in which fraud is taking place openly like that don't much care about it. Either they're in a place where regulations can't touch them (a country that doesn't expedite and has very weak banking laws of its own), or they're getting kickbacks off the scams.
They don't know who the scammers are. They probably don't even know that's why they're banned. They get mad at the dumbasses who are banning them for no apparent reason. It's just like all the innocent people who get on blacklists for spamming. They're not mad at the spammers, they're mad at the people who wrongly blacklisted them.
$80 is nothing to them. It's the birthday card that really got them.
My DSL company did something simmilar to me, although it was pure dumbass, and not malice on anybody's part. I'm on a dynamic IP system, so every time I disconnect and then reconnect, I have a different IP. Never causes much problem, since I don't do anything at home that would require me to have a static IP. Anyway, the local police made a big bust on a guy selling child pornography on a webserver in the back room of his office (the guy's a pediatrician). The police got a good couple hundred IP addresses from logs. Most of them were out of their jurisdiction, so they sent them on to somebody else. But a half-dozen or so were right here in town. They go to the ISPs, and try to get the names of the users behind said IPs. My ISP was more than happy to cooperate on something like this, so they had somebody look up the logs and figure out who had such-and-such address at the time stated (it was something like 4 AM on a Teusday). Anyway, it comes up with my name. I had some pretty awkward conversations with police, neighbors, parents, etc for a while until I get a call one day. The dumbass ISP must have entered the wrong search query or something, because as it turned out, that was my IP at 4AM on a Teusday - just a month earlier.
Could have been a user patch. Did you join House Hlaalu, though? So long as you don't join House Hlaalu (or at least don't progress far enough in it to start his quests), he talks semi-normally in the mainquest segments. A bit eccentric, but not at all freakish.
Actually, they would have if there was anything worth taking. At the height of Arab and Chinese culture, either region could have steamrolled Europe with no problem. Zheng He's mercahnt fleet was strong enough to crush the combined navies and armies of Europe, and its primary purpose wasn't military, but economic. Europe was too fragmented to put up a fight against an empire. Small local lords were too embroiled in their own feuds and hatreds to unite against a common foe when they did present themselves, and even if they did, they were outmatched numerically and technologically. Europe just didn't have anything worth conquering. Very little precious metals, mediocre farm and grazing land at best (and quite unsuitable for the crops and livestock both the Arabs and Chinese subsisted on), and it was more prone to disease and famine than the areas they did conquer. The only resource it had that was of use at the time was lumber, and that was in vast abundance much closer to where it was needed. It wasn't until Europe started its own conquest that it gained access to those materials that would make it worth conquering, and by then, the Arab and Chinese empires were well into their decline, and couldn't do much about it. Indeed, most of the Arab and Chinese empires ended up fueling European advance.
As somebody who dispises the same, so do I. I don't at all doubt he got such a letter, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on that. And, granting he got the letter, I won't dispute that it had Bush's name and signature rubber stamped on it. I've gotten the same sort of letters from two presidents. But it most certainly wasn't Bush himself wrote the letter, or even read it. Just like I doubt very much Bill Clinton gave a flying fuck what I thought about the DMCA, and even if he did, I doubt he cared enough to write his own personal letter to me about it. Some lacky in downstairs cubicle wrote it, passed it to some other lacky upstairs who stamped them. Best case scenario, Bush saw the stack of papers including that letter.
Who says Bethesda is named after the town? There was a teacher at my highschool named Patrick Bethesda. I've never assumed his name had anything to do with either the town or the company.
You have to make the distinction between 3D graphics and a 3D game. For example, Warcraft III has 3D graphics, but it's a 2D game. Same thing with games like Viewtiful Joe. 3D graphics, 2D game (just the other two dimentions - Warcraft III is top-down, Viewtiful Joe is sidescrolling). A game doesn't have to have 2D graphics to be a 2D game.
Much as I like the game, I'd have to say I'm more worried it'd turn out as buggy as Morrowind. With Morrowind, if you're computer doesn't fit a rather narrow set of specifications, you'll need to really screw around in the .ini files to get it to run without constantly crashing to the desktop. I've only had Fallout crash on me once in all the years I played it.
I really wanted to see someboyd like Obsidian get their hands on Fallout III, since they already had a lot of the talent from Black Isles. I'm not going to get too excited with Bethesda behind the wheel. They've never disappointed me (in fact, they've uusally exceeded my expectations) in the Elderscrolls series, but I don't know how well they can shift from that to Fallout. Morrowind had great story behind it, and the open-endedness was above and beyond either of the Fallout games. I hope they can keep that level of depth, but fit it into the coarser feel of Fallout. Then the gameplay... When Black Isle had talked about making Fallout 3 real-time, a lot of people on the messageboards were upset, and wanted them to keep a system simmilar to the first two Fallout games. Especially after Brotherhood of Steel, I don't see many fans -myself included- of the series being very open to a shift to first-person like Morrowind. Especially with the sort of weapons that Fallout is based on, it'd be a very fine line between RPG and FPS.
Mario wasn't gay. He had several women over the years, most particularly Princess Toadstool and whoever that girl in Donkey Kong was.
The jury's still out on Luigi, but Toad was about as straight as Richard Simmons.
What version do you happen to be playing? I've had the same thing happen with and without the patches, and eventually went into the editor and changed the dialog myself to fix it (got a bit tired of Uncle Crassius calling me "sweetie pie" every time I did a quest). I don't have the GotY edition, so maybe its fixed in that, but I do have Tribunal, Bloodmoon, and the latests patches, and I've gotten the wrong dialog tree ever since the game came out.