100 hours per game? That's pretty crazy. I've only bought two games in the last five years that took me 100 hours to finish, and before that, I don't think I ever took more than 60 hours (Final Fantasy VII was my longest investment before Morrowind came out, and that was about 60).
I'd say a good average would be closer to 30. A lot of games only take around 20 hours to finish. 50 hours is long by most genre standards, and quite respectable for RPGs. 60 hours is a long RPG.
The two games I've ever spent over 100 hours on a single play through are Morrowind and Star Ocean III, and a good 20 hours of Star Ocean (which took in all maybe 90 to 100 hours to finish) and probably 50 of Morrowind (which probably ate close to 250 hours, but that included a lot of treasure hunting, faction quests, and even a couple plugins) were spent pacing back and forth on the same area trying to figure out what stupid thing I missed that was preventing me from progressing. Very few other games even took me 40 hours. I only have one game that looks like it might compare in time investment, and that's Neverwinter Nights, but that'll only be due to the amount of downloadable content available for it, like with Morrowind.
They think with tunnel vision because they're thinking of harnessable energy. Right now, the most effective way we can harness the solar powered organic activity of the planet is burning it. Coal, oild, wood, whatever.
Of course, they aren't entirely tunneled vision. There are organic solar cells. They're currently much less efficient than silicon cells, but they're dirt cheap, and improving constantly.
The IRS actually covers what to do with illegal income. It depends on how you got it (bribes, kickbacks, theft, or sale of illegal merchandise).
In the case of Al Capone, they could prove that he had the money (He was spending it, and had not debts), and that he didn't pay taxes on it. They couldn't prove where it came from, however. So he got away with stealing it, and instead got hit for not paying taxes on it.
Probably the best thing is that since you're compelled to fill out your taxes, they can't be used against you in court. If the only thing the government has to show you robbed ab ank is "Bank robbery - $25,204.37" on line 21 of your 1040, they can't arrest you.
There are other cases. Brothels that get shut down not for prostitution, but for not having worker's comp insurance for their girls. It may sound fucked up, but it's true.
True enough, but if they're not using it for what they're doing now (i.e. crime), then you can't really expect them to use it for much else, now, can you?
It all comes back to the old axiom: If you rob a bank, make damn sure you pay your taxes.
The basic idea is, if you break the law, you cover every hole you can think of, no matter how trivial. Just like Al Capone should have paid his taxes, criminals (and everybody else for that matter) today need to start using better passwords.
Evolution doesn't neccessarily need competition. In nature, animals compete because there are finite resources, but much less finite organisms (far more born possible that can possibly be supported).
With any sort or robot or program, it's hard to have them compete for finite resources in most cases. What you do is introduce a sort of artificial selection. That's how livestock evolves. Domestic cows have almost no competition. They usually have enough grass that they can all eat. The males don't compete for mates, the farmer picks which one(s) will breed and with which females. They're protected from predators and disease as much as possible, and which ones live and die is more under control of humans than natural forces. In the case of cows, they may be selected based on size, milk, reproduction rate, or even color and the length of their horns. In this case, the code is artificially selected based on how good its or gate is.
I think they'd have a better case against Microsoft on that one. I like my Xbox and all, but the first thing I noticed was the ABXY buttons in the same configuration as the SNES ABXY buttons. Maybe I just think too much about this, but when the SNES came out with those, I wondered, "Why not ABCD?" The X and Y just seemed arbitrary, which also makes it less than coincidence in my eyes that another console maker would also do that.
Well, if you name your films after major ones, then, maybe. It'd be like the makers of Xfile getting in trouble because the automailer identified it as X-Files episodes.
If you have unique titles, though, that won't happen. Those bots that search for people sharing movies search by title, not just if it's a movie or not. The MPAA may have more power than it should, but it doesn't have enough power to stop you from distributing something that's not owned by somebody they represent. Even a commercial movie not produced by an MPAA member company, the MPAA can't do anything about.
The only risk to you distributing your own files via ptp is that a major lawsuit will take down the service you're distributing through, but in that case you could safely move to another service.
Somebody asked me that once and I said no. But then the next week they came up and parodied something I'd never even thought of, so I won't be answering that question again.
Something I'd pointed out before when a case like this came up: In my state, there was a school shooting in 1980 or 81. It made Columbine look like Sesame Street On Ice. Something like 90 people were hospitalized, and it came down to a gunfight with the police. The shooters (there were six of them, all social outcasts as if I had to point that out) were more organized than any of the ones on the news here. They positioned themselves so that there was no line-of-sight from outside to them, and blockaded themselves into a hallway.
All the crimes that get blamed on video games have one thing in common: They have no special identifying characteristics. Had those six gunmen in 1980 been dressed in red and yelled, "Death to the Amerikanski!" they would have been called Communists and Russia would have been blamed. As it happened, they had long hair and thusly drugs were blamed.
This guy was sick, in more ways than one. Look at his MSN profile. That's not the result of somebody playing too many video games, it's a product of a very deeply disturbed mind.
Actually, poisoning a watersupply is not more effective in this case...
Remember, the point of a rampage is not just to kill people, it's to make a big scene and get your name on TV whilst doing so. If the point were just to kill people, then this guy had easy access to the means and cause of doing so much more effectively.
Poison will kill people, but not make a scene. It may even be a while before anybody realizes it was intentional and not just Dow Chemical dumping dioxins in the water supply again.
A bomb will kill people and make a scene, but it won't be immediately connected to you, and in the end you'll just be called a terrorist of some sort. People will ask what could have been done, but in the end, it'll be a relatively limited scene.
A shooting rampage will accomplish all three goals. You'll be on TV, lots of people will point fingers all over the place, there'll be a very big scene. The whole effect will be much more gruesome, there will be wounded survivors who will also get on TV and talk about you. And inevitably, when the finger pointing starts, a lot of people will get dragged into the scene who had nothing to do with it in the first place.
Game connection or not, this shooting was clearly the work of a deranged mind. The Smoking Gun covered how he frequented Neo-Nazi websites where he frequently inquired as to how he could best make a big scene killing people. He made a series of flash animations showing him killing stick men and then committing suicide. He drew pictures of guns in his school books.
This entire article ignores one, very key question: Did the shooter even OWN any of these games?
Re:PSP and DS not comparable
on
PSP Launch Coverage
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· Score: 3, Insightful
That's pretty much it. They are in completely different leagues, but they're still playing against each other.
I do think the fallout will be pretty minimal, though. The PSP is going to be big, oviously. It looks like it'll be bigger than the DS by far, and challenge the GBA.
But, something that people have largely stopped pointing out is that Nintendo and Sony target different groups for the most part. Nintendo targets younger gamers more than older ones. Yes, they sell to older gamers, like me, but Sony's games and systems have appealed to me more for a long time.
Sony doesn't have the "kids" games that I've seen. Nintendo doesn't have the "grownup" games. Both of them will be able to have solid places in the market without wiping each other out.
Having seen it in action first hand finally, it's a game system. The price you pay is for the gaming abilities.
The DS does other stuff too, chat being one of the big ones they talk about. The GBA and DS also do video, but I've never heard of anything longer than 30 minutes being stuffed into the cartridges, and it's all animated. But the DS is a gaming system. You're buying a gaming system to play games. Sure, it can chat, but chat isn't worth the price.
The GameGear could tune TV stations with an addon. For that matter, the N-Gage can play video games.
You're paying for a video game system. You're paying for games. That's pretty much it. It's a strong system, it's got strong titles behind it from the early looks, and it's got an upcomming release list that puts the DS's to shame.
It costs more, but that extra cost isn't for movies or music by any means.
Re:Because it's never been done is not a reason...
on
PSP Launch Coverage
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· Score: 1
Why not? Because right now, that's just about all it does. The equivalent would have been the GBA launching with a few tech demos, Super Mario Advance and Pokemon, and then marketed itself on the fact that it can do the job of the GBC.
Re:Because it's never been done is not a reason...
on
PSP Launch Coverage
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· Score: 1
Yes, they have. Not explicitly, but they've put all their marketing behind it. They've plastered it all over their site, replaced all their GBA ads with it. Heck, they took out what was basically a 24 hour ad on G4 on launch day. They've put so much energy behind it, and so little behind the GBA. It's pretty clear which system is their handheld centerpiece. The fact that the system Nintendo is pushing most is called a gimick even by fans of Nintendo bodes ill for their future.
Re:Because it's never been done is not a reason...
on
PSP Launch Coverage
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It's never been done before, but right now, all the parts are in place for it to happen now.
When the Genesis came out, sure it was a better system, but Nitnendo had the bigger names and more titles. Not neccessarily better titles, but more. The same thing holds true back with the NES.
When the PS1 came out, though, Nintendo was in a different position. They had aging console hardware out, new titles were slowing down, and most of those big core names they had (Metroid, Mario, Zelda) hadn't had a major, successful release two to three years.
Not only did Sony come out with new hardware, new names, new titles, but even stole some of the big Nintendo names (Squaresoft, Enix, etc).
On the same note in handhelds, the Gameboy has always had several things in its favor: It's had the major game franchises, it's had far, far more games. In some cases, it didn't even have better games, just more. It didn't have a hardware advantage. Most of the other handheld challengers have been superior hardware, but they've all lacked a solid lineup of games. (The N-gage had the extra strikes from marketing and design issues).
However, things have changed now. Nintendo does have new hardware out, but it doesn't have the titles behind it. It's got a few good games, but Sony just plain has a lot of games. One of the Gameboy's selling points was the massive library of games.
The DS is Nintendo's mistake, I think. They brought it out, they made it the focus of their handheld strategy, but they didn't (and still don't) have the games behind it that it needs. Imagine if the GBA came out and all we had were a handful of games? A lot more people would have stuck with their GBCs rather than spend $80 on new hardware to play mostly the same games. The GBA had a very strong launch list, though.
The DS didn't, and a lot of people I know (myself included) stuck with their GBAs. Have you heard much from Nintendo about the GBA lately? Seen any GBA commercials since the DS came out? I haven't. I've gotten a few new games for it, but the push is behind the DS, not the GBA.
Sony has some hardware issues, but let's face it: So did the GBA. Bad screen, annoying buttons, too big. It still did great, even before the SP came out. The hardware issues are something people should know, but did they kill the GBA? While we're at it, did they kill the PS1 or PS2? Nope. It's going to come down to the games yet again, and this time, the PSP has them.
The GBA could win it with the PSP. It's cheaper, and Nintendo can probably afford to drop the price even farther. Throw in bundled games with the hardware like they used to, make it something like Super Mario Advance or Zelda or something with more or less universal appeal. It doesn't have the graphics, but it does have the games.
But, Nintendo's pushed the DS too much. I'm afraid of it ending up like the Visual Boy. At this point in the game, that would be far worse for Nintendo than the Visual Boy was - at the time, the Gameboy wasn't up against any serious competition. Now it is.
Birds can see nonmoving objects just fine. They can hit perches at pretty high speeds, and the perches generally don't move much if at all. Many birds eat fruit and nuts, which have a habit of holding very still.
Birds other than owls vision issue is that they have relatively little overlap between the two eyes, so most of their field of vision is only visible from one eye. Some non-raptors have only a tiny sliver of stereoscopic view (Some have eyes so widely set that they have stereoscopic vision behind them). That's why birds jerk their heads around a lot. They look at an object through both eyes alternately to try to guage distance.
It's also why birds tend to hit windows. Birds of prey very rarely hit windows, and I've never heard of an owl hitting one. Glass can play tricks with the eyes. Not only is it hard to see to begin with, it can be hard to tell how far away it is. Anybody ever walked into full-height windows before? Or tried to go through a storm door and not realized it was closed? People learn how to deal with glass at a young age. You consider the wall or the windowframe, not the window itself to guage distance or tell if its open.
Without depth perception, it's even harder for birds to guague distance to glass, and they don't have our intelligence to know that a window is an extension of the wall around it. Some of them probably learn after they try to fly through one, but that's a pretty bad lesson, and a lot of birds don't survive it.
That was ME you insensitive clod!
(Ok, not, my name's Jeff, I live in Michigan, and they never pantsed me. I did spend most of middle and high school stuffed in trash cans and lockers, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I said "Gamestop," but the link is Gamespot. Dunno how I missed that one, too.
100 hours per game? That's pretty crazy. I've only bought two games in the last five years that took me 100 hours to finish, and before that, I don't think I ever took more than 60 hours (Final Fantasy VII was my longest investment before Morrowind came out, and that was about 60).
I'd say a good average would be closer to 30. A lot of games only take around 20 hours to finish. 50 hours is long by most genre standards, and quite respectable for RPGs. 60 hours is a long RPG.
The two games I've ever spent over 100 hours on a single play through are Morrowind and Star Ocean III, and a good 20 hours of Star Ocean (which took in all maybe 90 to 100 hours to finish) and probably 50 of Morrowind (which probably ate close to 250 hours, but that included a lot of treasure hunting, faction quests, and even a couple plugins) were spent pacing back and forth on the same area trying to figure out what stupid thing I missed that was preventing me from progressing. Very few other games even took me 40 hours. I only have one game that looks like it might compare in time investment, and that's Neverwinter Nights, but that'll only be due to the amount of downloadable content available for it, like with Morrowind.
That's what he just said. Duh.
They think with tunnel vision because they're thinking of harnessable energy. Right now, the most effective way we can harness the solar powered organic activity of the planet is burning it. Coal, oild, wood, whatever. Of course, they aren't entirely tunneled vision. There are organic solar cells. They're currently much less efficient than silicon cells, but they're dirt cheap, and improving constantly.
It was happening long before that, as well. The Old Testament covers some of the holy wars of Israel's early history.
As long as there have been two human males on the planet, they've been trying to kill one another over land, food, sex, or just because.
http://www.irs.gov/publications/p17/ch13.html
The IRS actually covers what to do with illegal income. It depends on how you got it (bribes, kickbacks, theft, or sale of illegal merchandise).
In the case of Al Capone, they could prove that he had the money (He was spending it, and had not debts), and that he didn't pay taxes on it. They couldn't prove where it came from, however. So he got away with stealing it, and instead got hit for not paying taxes on it.
Probably the best thing is that since you're compelled to fill out your taxes, they can't be used against you in court. If the only thing the government has to show you robbed ab ank is "Bank robbery - $25,204.37" on line 21 of your 1040, they can't arrest you.
There are other cases. Brothels that get shut down not for prostitution, but for not having worker's comp insurance for their girls. It may sound fucked up, but it's true.
Also, the ones smart enough to have noticed this article are smart enough that they're already protecting their data better.
The ones who aren't smart enough to do so also aren't reading this article.
True enough, but if they're not using it for what they're doing now (i.e. crime), then you can't really expect them to use it for much else, now, can you?
I just changed it for you. They'll never guess this time. Neither will you, I'm afraid, but doesn't that make it even more secure, in a way?
It all comes back to the old axiom: If you rob a bank, make damn sure you pay your taxes.
The basic idea is, if you break the law, you cover every hole you can think of, no matter how trivial. Just like Al Capone should have paid his taxes, criminals (and everybody else for that matter) today need to start using better passwords.
Evolution doesn't neccessarily need competition. In nature, animals compete because there are finite resources, but much less finite organisms (far more born possible that can possibly be supported). With any sort or robot or program, it's hard to have them compete for finite resources in most cases. What you do is introduce a sort of artificial selection. That's how livestock evolves. Domestic cows have almost no competition. They usually have enough grass that they can all eat. The males don't compete for mates, the farmer picks which one(s) will breed and with which females. They're protected from predators and disease as much as possible, and which ones live and die is more under control of humans than natural forces. In the case of cows, they may be selected based on size, milk, reproduction rate, or even color and the length of their horns. In this case, the code is artificially selected based on how good its or gate is.
I think they'd have a better case against Microsoft on that one. I like my Xbox and all, but the first thing I noticed was the ABXY buttons in the same configuration as the SNES ABXY buttons. Maybe I just think too much about this, but when the SNES came out with those, I wondered, "Why not ABCD?" The X and Y just seemed arbitrary, which also makes it less than coincidence in my eyes that another console maker would also do that.
here I posted it above, but it goes to the same effect.
Well, if you name your films after major ones, then, maybe. It'd be like the makers of Xfile getting in trouble because the automailer identified it as X-Files episodes. If you have unique titles, though, that won't happen. Those bots that search for people sharing movies search by title, not just if it's a movie or not. The MPAA may have more power than it should, but it doesn't have enough power to stop you from distributing something that's not owned by somebody they represent. Even a commercial movie not produced by an MPAA member company, the MPAA can't do anything about. The only risk to you distributing your own files via ptp is that a major lawsuit will take down the service you're distributing through, but in that case you could safely move to another service.
Somebody asked me that once and I said no. But then the next week they came up and parodied something I'd never even thought of, so I won't be answering that question again.
Something I'd pointed out before when a case like this came up: In my state, there was a school shooting in 1980 or 81. It made Columbine look like Sesame Street On Ice. Something like 90 people were hospitalized, and it came down to a gunfight with the police. The shooters (there were six of them, all social outcasts as if I had to point that out) were more organized than any of the ones on the news here. They positioned themselves so that there was no line-of-sight from outside to them, and blockaded themselves into a hallway.
All the crimes that get blamed on video games have one thing in common: They have no special identifying characteristics. Had those six gunmen in 1980 been dressed in red and yelled, "Death to the Amerikanski!" they would have been called Communists and Russia would have been blamed. As it happened, they had long hair and thusly drugs were blamed.
This guy was sick, in more ways than one. Look at his MSN profile. That's not the result of somebody playing too many video games, it's a product of a very deeply disturbed mind.
obligatory
"Any of you guys got any shines?"
Actually, poisoning a watersupply is not more effective in this case...
Remember, the point of a rampage is not just to kill people, it's to make a big scene and get your name on TV whilst doing so. If the point were just to kill people, then this guy had easy access to the means and cause of doing so much more effectively.
Poison will kill people, but not make a scene. It may even be a while before anybody realizes it was intentional and not just Dow Chemical dumping dioxins in the water supply again.
A bomb will kill people and make a scene, but it won't be immediately connected to you, and in the end you'll just be called a terrorist of some sort. People will ask what could have been done, but in the end, it'll be a relatively limited scene.
A shooting rampage will accomplish all three goals. You'll be on TV, lots of people will point fingers all over the place, there'll be a very big scene. The whole effect will be much more gruesome, there will be wounded survivors who will also get on TV and talk about you. And inevitably, when the finger pointing starts, a lot of people will get dragged into the scene who had nothing to do with it in the first place.
Game connection or not, this shooting was clearly the work of a deranged mind. The Smoking Gun covered how he frequented Neo-Nazi websites where he frequently inquired as to how he could best make a big scene killing people. He made a series of flash animations showing him killing stick men and then committing suicide. He drew pictures of guns in his school books.
This entire article ignores one, very key question: Did the shooter even OWN any of these games?
That's pretty much it. They are in completely different leagues, but they're still playing against each other.
I do think the fallout will be pretty minimal, though. The PSP is going to be big, oviously. It looks like it'll be bigger than the DS by far, and challenge the GBA.
But, something that people have largely stopped pointing out is that Nintendo and Sony target different groups for the most part. Nintendo targets younger gamers more than older ones. Yes, they sell to older gamers, like me, but Sony's games and systems have appealed to me more for a long time.
Sony doesn't have the "kids" games that I've seen. Nintendo doesn't have the "grownup" games. Both of them will be able to have solid places in the market without wiping each other out.
Having seen it in action first hand finally, it's a game system. The price you pay is for the gaming abilities.
The DS does other stuff too, chat being one of the big ones they talk about. The GBA and DS also do video, but I've never heard of anything longer than 30 minutes being stuffed into the cartridges, and it's all animated. But the DS is a gaming system. You're buying a gaming system to play games. Sure, it can chat, but chat isn't worth the price.
The GameGear could tune TV stations with an addon. For that matter, the N-Gage can play video games.
You're paying for a video game system. You're paying for games. That's pretty much it. It's a strong system, it's got strong titles behind it from the early looks, and it's got an upcomming release list that puts the DS's to shame.
It costs more, but that extra cost isn't for movies or music by any means.
Why not? Because right now, that's just about all it does. The equivalent would have been the GBA launching with a few tech demos, Super Mario Advance and Pokemon, and then marketed itself on the fact that it can do the job of the GBC.
Yes, they have. Not explicitly, but they've put all their marketing behind it. They've plastered it all over their site, replaced all their GBA ads with it. Heck, they took out what was basically a 24 hour ad on G4 on launch day. They've put so much energy behind it, and so little behind the GBA. It's pretty clear which system is their handheld centerpiece. The fact that the system Nintendo is pushing most is called a gimick even by fans of Nintendo bodes ill for their future.
It's never been done before, but right now, all the parts are in place for it to happen now.
When the Genesis came out, sure it was a better system, but Nitnendo had the bigger names and more titles. Not neccessarily better titles, but more. The same thing holds true back with the NES.
When the PS1 came out, though, Nintendo was in a different position. They had aging console hardware out, new titles were slowing down, and most of those big core names they had (Metroid, Mario, Zelda) hadn't had a major, successful release two to three years.
Not only did Sony come out with new hardware, new names, new titles, but even stole some of the big Nintendo names (Squaresoft, Enix, etc).
On the same note in handhelds, the Gameboy has always had several things in its favor: It's had the major game franchises, it's had far, far more games. In some cases, it didn't even have better games, just more. It didn't have a hardware advantage. Most of the other handheld challengers have been superior hardware, but they've all lacked a solid lineup of games. (The N-gage had the extra strikes from marketing and design issues).
However, things have changed now. Nintendo does have new hardware out, but it doesn't have the titles behind it. It's got a few good games, but Sony just plain has a lot of games. One of the Gameboy's selling points was the massive library of games.
The DS is Nintendo's mistake, I think. They brought it out, they made it the focus of their handheld strategy, but they didn't (and still don't) have the games behind it that it needs. Imagine if the GBA came out and all we had were a handful of games? A lot more people would have stuck with their GBCs rather than spend $80 on new hardware to play mostly the same games. The GBA had a very strong launch list, though.
The DS didn't, and a lot of people I know (myself included) stuck with their GBAs. Have you heard much from Nintendo about the GBA lately? Seen any GBA commercials since the DS came out? I haven't. I've gotten a few new games for it, but the push is behind the DS, not the GBA.
Sony has some hardware issues, but let's face it: So did the GBA. Bad screen, annoying buttons, too big. It still did great, even before the SP came out. The hardware issues are something people should know, but did they kill the GBA? While we're at it, did they kill the PS1 or PS2? Nope. It's going to come down to the games yet again, and this time, the PSP has them.
The GBA could win it with the PSP. It's cheaper, and Nintendo can probably afford to drop the price even farther. Throw in bundled games with the hardware like they used to, make it something like Super Mario Advance or Zelda or something with more or less universal appeal. It doesn't have the graphics, but it does have the games.
But, Nintendo's pushed the DS too much. I'm afraid of it ending up like the Visual Boy. At this point in the game, that would be far worse for Nintendo than the Visual Boy was - at the time, the Gameboy wasn't up against any serious competition. Now it is.
Birds can see nonmoving objects just fine. They can hit perches at pretty high speeds, and the perches generally don't move much if at all. Many birds eat fruit and nuts, which have a habit of holding very still.
Birds other than owls vision issue is that they have relatively little overlap between the two eyes, so most of their field of vision is only visible from one eye. Some non-raptors have only a tiny sliver of stereoscopic view (Some have eyes so widely set that they have stereoscopic vision behind them). That's why birds jerk their heads around a lot. They look at an object through both eyes alternately to try to guage distance.
It's also why birds tend to hit windows. Birds of prey very rarely hit windows, and I've never heard of an owl hitting one. Glass can play tricks with the eyes. Not only is it hard to see to begin with, it can be hard to tell how far away it is. Anybody ever walked into full-height windows before? Or tried to go through a storm door and not realized it was closed? People learn how to deal with glass at a young age. You consider the wall or the windowframe, not the window itself to guage distance or tell if its open.
Without depth perception, it's even harder for birds to guague distance to glass, and they don't have our intelligence to know that a window is an extension of the wall around it. Some of them probably learn after they try to fly through one, but that's a pretty bad lesson, and a lot of birds don't survive it.
That was ME you insensitive clod! (Ok, not, my name's Jeff, I live in Michigan, and they never pantsed me. I did spend most of middle and high school stuffed in trash cans and lockers, though.