Re:Right tool for the job
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 1
Meanwhile, in the real world, it is fanatical to think that, say, using BitKeeper will have long-term effects on society.
Come on.
He lets his ideals get in the way of results. Even when there is a better tool to accomplish the job, he will refuse to use it on the grounds that it doesn't coincide with his view of what things should be. Someone who is constantly thinking about the future of the free world and the effects of society when choosing a simple software program to do some arcane project is a fanatic. He wants everything else to conform to his narrow definition of freedom.
Wow. This is getting pretty amusing. You just don't get it still. You have no grasp of the law do you?
Cleary, I do.
Stealing profits would be either embezzlement or theft.
Correct.
But guess what? You're talking about potential profits. They're not real.
Your obtaining of the music means you have obtained music you would have otherewise paid for. It is real that you did not pay those profits.
They're all in your head. Unfortuately for you, something has to actually exist first for you to steal it.
You need to research the law. Also, common sense and morality. By illegally taking music, the amount of money it would have taken for you to obtain that music now belongs to the owner of the music. The money you are withholding from them is very real.
I was really serious. You should work on your reading comprehension skills.
I am obviously striking a nerve with you.
Let's see if you can comprehend the concept of potential vs. actual profits. My hopes aren't very high.
The money you are withholding is very real. If you download a CD without paying for it, $18 is sitting in your wallet that belongs to the owner.
It's also pretty funny how much space you waste calling be a theif. Since I pointed out the criminal actions of the RIAA's members, I must be a criminal myself right?
What criminal actions did you point out? What do they have to do with the illegality of stealing music? As usual, Slashbots bring up unrelated arguments in a desperate attempt to "win" when they are losing the discussion.
At this point I'm just wondering how far out into never never land your half-assed logic will get you. I wonder if you'll start saying copyright infringement is murder because profits are being "killed".
Another tact of the intellectually weak and desperate. Make absurdities that have nothing to do with the argument at hand. Of course I wouldn't argue copyright infringement is murder. My position is based in actual fact.
Or maybe it's assault on profits? Rape maybe? Abortion of profits?
Keep digging.
Oh shit! I got it.....it's terrorism!
There. You've reached the bottom.
I tell you what, you get bonus "what planet is this guy from points" if you'll explain to me why copyright infringement is ursury.
"Ursury?"
Yet another tact of the desperate is to try to steer the argument away from their weak position. Not gonna happen. You and I both know I am right.
A definition-nazi. "Decimation" means precisely 10% destruction. Hopefully an A-Bomb will be stronger than that.
The game never tells. I am, as usual, still correct.
Re:Let's put this argument to rest once and for al
on
Catching up with Wine
·
· Score: 1
Copying is not stealing it is copyright infringement.
It is also theft of profits. You are witholding money owed to them. You are essentially making off with their money.
Here is a little thought experiment: Do you think that if everyone on slashdot that runs a windows operation system makes copies of their windows DLLs and then deletes them, that Microsoft loses money? What if i run a batch script in the background that constantly copies the DLLs and deletes them? I should pass the program out over the internet, and become the hero of the linux movement by bankrupting Microsoft.
"[O]peration system?"
What does copying and deleting DLLs have to do with obtaining music without paying for it? You are obviously so desperate with such a weak position that you make up an unrelated scenario that proves nothing, except that you are even more foolish than I previously knew.
No, it's right. In fact, I used the definition you gave to clobber your point. Next.
Just because you like to conceptualize something as theft, doesn't make it theft.
Actually, it's more like simply because you refuse to admit you were wrong and that you are a thief for stealing music, doesn't mean it's not true.
Obviously, dumbass. What it is not, is theft. You loose. It's copyright infringement, not theft. Are you really so incapable of understanding this?
Apparently, you are incapable of the simple concept of stealing profits. Next.
Let me reiterate one more time: Downloading MP3s is copyright infringement, not theft.
It is copyright infringement and theft. You are stealing profits. You are withholding payment. When you obtain their music, the money you owe them becomes their money legally. You refuse to give it to them. You are stealing.
I'm right, you're wrong. illegal!=stealing What's so damned hard about this concept?
I didn't say illegal equated to stealing. Nice straw man.
Let me break it down very simply: Murder is illegal. Theft is illegal. Copyright infringement is illegal. Murder, theft and copyright infringment are all different crimes.
I didn't say otherwise. Nice straw man.
Get it now?
You are obviously a disgruntled mp3 thief attempting to justify your actions.
You can try and say murder is theft because it's "taking" someone's life, but you'll just be wrong.
To be honest, I hadn't even thought of that, but you are right. Murder is also theft in a much more heinous form.
Just because you can make an analogy between two things, does not mean they're equivalent.
I'm not making analogies. You are stealing their profits. Next.
Try to work on your reading comprehension skills a little.
Nice, a baseless insult out of left-field. Your argument is even more diminished.
I never said that copyright infringement wasn't illegal, only that it wasn't theft.
You and I both know it is theft.
Information wants to beat you with a cluestick.
To cap off your stupidity, you use the tired "cluestick" phrase. Next.
Yes, it does. You've just been hanging too long around your IRC Undernet buddies who've grown up with mp3s being freely available and convenient.
Give me five dollars.
By your logic, your refusal to give me money is stealing.
No. It is not illegal for me to refuse to pay you five dollars.
It is illegal to obtain a product without paying for it without consent of the creator. This is insanely simple; do try to keep up, okay?
You see, you can't just decide to just ignore the rest of the definiton and use the one word from it that you can twist to make it say what you want.
I twisted nothing. You're just upset I devoured your argument with your own words.
You should note the prescence of the words taking and removal. These are part of the definition.
Someone downloading music without paying for it is taking potential payment. I'm amazed you are unable to conceptualize this.
You can't just ignore them at will, unless you're planning to ignore the meaning of the word theft, and therefore be wrong. If someone downloads an MP3 off the internet, nothing the record company owns disappears.
Again, you are depriving them of payment you are legally supposed to be giving them. Therefore, you are stealing their sales.
Shoplifting is an offense because you take merchandise without paying for it. Not because you're taking merchandise. It's the non-payment that is the operative point. As is the case here--you are obtaining music you should be legally paying for, but you aren't. Therefore, you are stealing. The medium for reproduction of the merchandise doesn't matter. You are obtaining the product and not giving them the money they are owed, and are therefore stealing from them.
Here's that defintion again: The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Let me make this absurdly clear for a simple-minded Slashbot cronie like yourself who believes information should be free if you can't afford it.
When you grab music you are normally supposed to pay for, that changes the balance so that you now have something they made which must be paid for. It has value. You are depriving them of compensation for this value. Because of this, they are not being paid the money they are owed; in fact, you are withholding it from them. You are stealing from them because you are not giving them what you legally owe them, which in this case is payment for the music you obtained.
You can quote dictionary.com all day, but it will never change the fact that you are wrong and refuse to admit it. Next.
One question that you avoided, possibly because there's no good answer: Why does it make any sense for US soldiers to massacre US civilians, especially once they've been menaced by a real enemy and scattered away from their chain of command?
I avoided nothing.
It doesn't make any sense for US soldiers to massacre US civilians. That's why the Briefcase Guy is so evil. It's part of the story. They want everyone silenced and absolutely nothing to get out about it. It's a fictional story; it doesn't matter what real GI soldiers would or would not think about such orders.
I feel odd having to explain this to you.
No, it's not a "great storyline". It's an excellent implementation of a "fun premise".
It's okay to admit you're wrong. You don't have to play around with semantics and dance around the point.
It's a great storyline.
The reason people claim to like the storyline is because they don't know a convenient word to use to summarize all those elements of single-player game design aside from "gameplay" and "artwork".
I love armchair psychologists.
The reason people claim to like the storyline is because they like the storyline as they played the game.
"Premise" is too vague to serve well. The equivalent for films is "cinematography". Prehaps someday videogames will get a word for this too.
Maybe when you stop being pretentious about a videogame.
The players don't really like the story, they like the implementation.
The implementation is part of the story. Next.
If the prelude events were told with a single page of uppercase text (as it was in Doom) they wouldn't be remembered as anything special. Instead we got a subtly gorgeous facility level that was both spacious and yet packed with lively human detail, culminating in a spectacular lightshow.
Exactly. It was excellent storytelling.
Do I really need to explain the basic concept of storytelling to you?
The content was not as important as the presentation.
What was it presenting? Oh, that's right.
If I'm misguided, then it's a very popular [gamespot.com] misconception (You sound like you've heard this opinion a lot before. Wonder why?).
It doesn't matter if it's a popular decision.
The design for the end of Half Life was simply a mistake. It was targeted as a mass-market game for a large, non-hardcore audience. Those legions of players were allowed to advance all the way through to the Lambda Complex by the combination of choosing the lowest difficulty level and facing fairly logical puzzles that were rooted in real-world physics or had obvious next steps.
But once the mass of players had jump-packs installed on their suits, it's game over. The "Easy" mode doesn't serve to make the instant-death jumping puzzles any more forgiving, so low-agility players who solidered through the rest of the game with methodical thinking are out of luck. They mostly just gave up, rather than enlisting a thirteen-year-old to finish for them.
My response is always that I never had problems with Xen. I must be the better gamer.
Of course, with the lameness of the ending, it may have been better like that.
You clearly don't like Half-Life. Why do you continue with this?
If you mean a nuculear bomb went off, it would do much more than decimate a facility. It had already gone far past the point of "decimation" into "devastation" and beyond.
What a bizarre argument. You're going to argue with me the effects of a "nuculear" bomb as if I don't know? What kind of troll are you? Decimation was just a choice of terms.
However OPFOR was a letdown overall. It continued with more of the same elements that made Half Life great, of course, and it finally let your sidekicks have bigger guns. But the 3d models for the new aliens, human guards, melee weapons, and facilit
As if they had ever been friendly? Every time you saw them throughout the game they were enemies. They moved, they weren't Barney or Doc, so they had to be killed.
They weren't your enemies until later in the game. Until that point, you were led to believe they were attempting to rescue you. Next.
"Government turns on you" barely qualifies as storyline.
I can easily summarize any of your favorite games or movies into digestable tidbits which I can mock and claim "barely qualifies as storyline."
Although if you decide to grant it that description, it's still not a good storyline. This is evidenced by the fact that from the point-of-view of a GI infantryman, murdering scientists on sight doesn't make any sense. In the follow-on HalfLife: OpFor, they had to retcon [astrian.net] that part of the story, because it was silly.
It's a great storyline. There's a reason people like the story. Because it's good.
A virtue of Half-Life is that it was not a series of missions. It was a continuous environment you moved through, and your only objective was to move (or overcome short-range obstacles to such movement).
And in that continuous environment, you were given a serious of missions. This included, say, rescue a certain scientist, or reach a certain area, or escape a crusher room. NPCs gave you goals and objectives as you played. Did you, in fact, play it?
There was no use or mention of nuculear weapons in Half-Life. Prehaps you're thinking of a follow-up.
Obviously I'm talking about the ending of Opposing Force in which the facilities are decimated. I assumed you'd be logical enough to include it in this discussion.
That was exactly when the game started to get really, really bad.
Ah, one of those misguided fellows who thinks it had too much jumping in Xen.
Xen was the best part of the game. The bizarre, abstract levels were unlike any seen before.
So I don't call it "good". And again, I'd still barely call that a story. He's continuing to kill things that threaten him.
Like most any character in any storyline. Again, I could bring down any plot you'd consider "good" and make it look silly and trite.
No, I'm just pointing out that Half-Life had the same puny storyline as the most popular FPS (Quake and Doom): "scientists unleash monsters".
That wasn't the storyline. You're mistakenly confusing storyline and premise. Yes, the premise was the same.
The story was presented better than in Doom- the pacing, acting, scenary, props, and makeup were all superior. But it's the same story.
No, it's not. Next.
Is that a static storyline? Yes, absolutely. Simply by scaling the threat level of the monsters up or down, the missions from the game could be rearranged in any order with hardly any confusion.
Wrong. There are twists and turns in the plot, from you apparently dying and escaping with merely a crowbar to you being thrust into alien factories. You mentioned a "continuous environment" and yet claim the levels could be rearranged with little problem. You're obviously misinformed and conflicted.
The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Then copying is stealing, because you're intentionally depriving them of money.
What the sample was, where it came from, why they wanted the hole punched, how long they knew about Xen...should I go on?
Let's put this argument to rest once and for all
on
Catching up with Wine
·
· Score: 1
God, how many times do we have to hear *this* stupid argument again?
Copying is stealing.
You are obtaining their works without paying them for it. Yes, that is stealing.
When you steal a CD from a store, are they upset because you obtained a physical object from their store? No. They're upset because you didn't pay them for it. Likewise, obtaining music, even if there is no loss of a physical object, equates to a loss of payment they would have otherwise received. How can so many Slashbots miss this simple concept?
How about when the government turned on you and decided to nuke the facilities? Or when the scientists decided you were to go to Xen?
Just because it's a linear storyline doesn't mean it's not a storyline. You're trying to lie and say Half-Life had a static storyline all the way through when it was really a series of missions and objectives given to you mostly by NPCs you spoke to. There was an observable plot. Clearly you have not played the game.
If not, HL2 will sell about as well as WinXP would if it couldn't run Win98 apps.
No it won't. Just because your 16-year old IRC buddies only have Half-Life installed for their Counter Strike cheats doesn't mean the rest of the world doesn't remember the huge phenomena that was the original Half-Life. It revolutionized single player gaming at the time. I have yet to play against enemies that were as intelligent as Half-Life's.
All the "mods" were just a side effect of the hugeness of Half-Life. Half-Life 2 will sell.
Where were you when Half-Life came out and rejuvenated single player, and all the game magazines gave it game of the year and wouldn't stop raving about it? Half-Life revolutionized gaming when everyone was going multiplayer-only with Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament. How could you have missed this game? It was only the hugest freaking thing for years. The fact a bunch of popular mods came out for it is just a mere side effect. Half-Life made a lot of gaming companies go back to the drawing board (id Software included).
Yep, it's even a better game than Counter Strike. Counter Strike is overhyped and overrated, a breeding ground for high schoolers with broadband and a handful of cheats. Counter Strike will never freak me out like, say, Half-Life's giant tentacle creature tapping at the metal, or the helicopters dropping troops to take you down, or the bizarre alien factories and weirdness of Xen and the final battle at the end ("The truth you will never know"...I'm hoping the sequel really explains what the hell exactly happened at Black Mesa). Enemies even used scent to track you and battled using herd behavior. Human troops would scatter and run for cover if you tossed them a grenade.
I've never seen better designed aliens or creepier labs or weirder alien dimensions than in Half-Life. The game just got better and better as I played it. Go back to your multiplayer mods.
Here's a hint, if I shoplift a CD, the store doesn't have it anymore, if I use Napster, no one is deprived of anything. They're so completely different, not only are they in different ballparks, they're playing a different game.
Here's a hint: Why do you think shoplifting is considered stealing? Is it because you're taking a CD? No, the store didn't make the CD. They don't care about the actual merchandise. It's because you're taking a CD and not paying them for it.
So guess what? Downloading music, without paying for it, it still stealing. Your silly "ballpark" nonsense doesn't fly. Honestly, the fact that so many Slashbots miss this simple concept really amazes me, but because downloading pretty much anything they want has been so convenient for so many years, they've all justified it in their minds.
Interesting that the parent was +5 but you're just +3, though clearly your post was the voice of reason. Clearly a result of crackhead moderators who have grown up with the convenience of downloading whatever they want, and so have morally justified it in their minds to avoid feeling guilt, and so are avoiding modding you up.
Yes, downloading with paying is stealing. You nailed it.
Yeah, it rocks working on something and not getting paid for it. I'm glad it worked out this way. Who needs copyright? People are entitled to download and steal whatever they want because it's there and it's convenient.
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile, in the real world, it is fanatical to think that, say, using BitKeeper will have long-term effects on society.
Come on.
He lets his ideals get in the way of results. Even when there is a better tool to accomplish the job, he will refuse to use it on the grounds that it doesn't coincide with his view of what things should be. Someone who is constantly thinking about the future of the free world and the effects of society when choosing a simple software program to do some arcane project is a fanatic. He wants everything else to conform to his narrow definition of freedom.
Doesn't sound like "freedom" to me.
They're still doing the effects shots and putting it together.
Plus they're kind of busy with another movie due out in December at the moment. Slows them down.
Do you know what a troll is?
Do you know what a troll is?
Wow. This is getting pretty amusing. You just don't get it still. You have no grasp of the law do you?
Cleary, I do.
Stealing profits would be either embezzlement or theft.
Correct.
But guess what? You're talking about potential profits. They're not real.
Your obtaining of the music means you have obtained music you would have otherewise paid for. It is real that you did not pay those profits.
They're all in your head. Unfortuately for you, something has to actually exist first for you to steal it.
You need to research the law. Also, common sense and morality. By illegally taking music, the amount of money it would have taken for you to obtain that music now belongs to the owner of the music. The money you are withholding from them is very real.
I was really serious. You should work on your reading comprehension skills.
I am obviously striking a nerve with you.
Let's see if you can comprehend the concept of potential vs. actual profits. My hopes aren't very high.
The money you are withholding is very real. If you download a CD without paying for it, $18 is sitting in your wallet that belongs to the owner.
It's also pretty funny how much space you waste calling be a theif. Since I pointed out the criminal actions of the RIAA's members, I must be a criminal myself right?
What criminal actions did you point out? What do they have to do with the illegality of stealing music? As usual, Slashbots bring up unrelated arguments in a desperate attempt to "win" when they are losing the discussion.
At this point I'm just wondering how far out into never never land your half-assed logic will get you. I wonder if you'll start saying copyright infringement is murder because profits are being "killed".
Another tact of the intellectually weak and desperate. Make absurdities that have nothing to do with the argument at hand. Of course I wouldn't argue copyright infringement is murder. My position is based in actual fact.
Or maybe it's assault on profits? Rape maybe? Abortion of profits?
Keep digging.
Oh shit! I got it.....it's terrorism!
There. You've reached the bottom.
I tell you what, you get bonus "what planet is this guy from points" if you'll explain to me why copyright infringement is ursury.
"Ursury?"
Yet another tact of the desperate is to try to steer the argument away from their weak position. Not gonna happen. You and I both know I am right.
Next.
Did I strike a nerve?
A definition-nazi. "Decimation" means precisely 10% destruction. Hopefully an A-Bomb will be stronger than that.
The game never tells. I am, as usual, still correct.
Copying is not stealing it is copyright infringement.
It is also theft of profits. You are witholding money owed to them. You are essentially making off with their money.
Here is a little thought experiment: Do you think that if everyone on slashdot that runs a windows operation system makes copies of their windows DLLs and then deletes them, that Microsoft loses money? What if i run a batch script in the background that constantly copies the DLLs and deletes them? I should pass the program out over the internet, and become the hero of the linux movement by bankrupting Microsoft.
"[O]peration system?"
What does copying and deleting DLLs have to do with obtaining music without paying for it? You are obviously so desperate with such a weak position that you make up an unrelated scenario that proves nothing, except that you are even more foolish than I previously knew.
Next.
And I suppose dictionary.com is wrong too?
No, it's right. In fact, I used the definition you gave to clobber your point. Next.
Just because you like to conceptualize something as theft, doesn't make it theft.
Actually, it's more like simply because you refuse to admit you were wrong and that you are a thief for stealing music, doesn't mean it's not true.
Obviously, dumbass. What it is not, is theft. You loose. It's copyright infringement, not theft. Are you really so incapable of understanding this?
Apparently, you are incapable of the simple concept of stealing profits. Next.
Let me reiterate one more time:
Downloading MP3s is copyright infringement, not theft.
It is copyright infringement and theft. You are stealing profits. You are withholding payment. When you obtain their music, the money you owe them becomes their money legally. You refuse to give it to them. You are stealing.
I'm right, you're wrong. illegal!=stealing
What's so damned hard about this concept?
I didn't say illegal equated to stealing. Nice straw man.
Let me break it down very simply:
Murder is illegal.
Theft is illegal.
Copyright infringement is illegal.
Murder, theft and copyright infringment are all different crimes.
I didn't say otherwise. Nice straw man.
Get it now?
You are obviously a disgruntled mp3 thief attempting to justify your actions.
You can try and say murder is theft because it's "taking" someone's life, but you'll just be wrong.
To be honest, I hadn't even thought of that, but you are right. Murder is also theft in a much more heinous form.
Just because you can make an analogy between two things, does not mean they're equivalent.
I'm not making analogies. You are stealing their profits. Next.
Try to work on your reading comprehension skills a little.
Nice, a baseless insult out of left-field. Your argument is even more diminished.
I never said that copyright infringement wasn't illegal, only that it wasn't theft.
You and I both know it is theft.
Information wants to beat you with a cluestick.
To cap off your stupidity, you use the tired "cluestick" phrase. Next.
Nope, that doesn't work.
Yes, it does. You've just been hanging too long around your IRC Undernet buddies who've grown up with mp3s being freely available and convenient.
Give me five dollars.
By your logic, your refusal to give me money is stealing.
No. It is not illegal for me to refuse to pay you five dollars.
It is illegal to obtain a product without paying for it without consent of the creator. This is insanely simple; do try to keep up, okay?
You see, you can't just decide to just ignore the rest of the definiton and use the one word from it that you can twist to make it say what you want.
I twisted nothing. You're just upset I devoured your argument with your own words.
You should note the prescence of the words taking and removal. These are part of the definition.
Someone downloading music without paying for it is taking potential payment. I'm amazed you are unable to conceptualize this.
You can't just ignore them at will, unless you're planning to ignore the meaning of the word theft, and therefore be wrong. If someone downloads an MP3 off the internet, nothing the record company owns disappears.
Again, you are depriving them of payment you are legally supposed to be giving them. Therefore, you are stealing their sales.
Shoplifting is an offense because you take merchandise without paying for it. Not because you're taking merchandise. It's the non-payment that is the operative point. As is the case here--you are obtaining music you should be legally paying for, but you aren't. Therefore, you are stealing. The medium for reproduction of the merchandise doesn't matter. You are obtaining the product and not giving them the money they are owed, and are therefore stealing from them.
Here's that defintion again:
The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Let me make this absurdly clear for a simple-minded Slashbot cronie like yourself who believes information should be free if you can't afford it.
When you grab music you are normally supposed to pay for, that changes the balance so that you now have something they made which must be paid for. It has value. You are depriving them of compensation for this value. Because of this, they are not being paid the money they are owed; in fact, you are withholding it from them. You are stealing from them because you are not giving them what you legally owe them, which in this case is payment for the music you obtained.
You can quote dictionary.com all day, but it will never change the fact that you are wrong and refuse to admit it. Next.
One question that you avoided, possibly because there's no good answer: Why does it make any sense for US soldiers to massacre US civilians, especially once they've been menaced by a real enemy and scattered away from their chain of command?
I avoided nothing.
It doesn't make any sense for US soldiers to massacre US civilians. That's why the Briefcase Guy is so evil. It's part of the story. They want everyone silenced and absolutely nothing to get out about it. It's a fictional story; it doesn't matter what real GI soldiers would or would not think about such orders.
I feel odd having to explain this to you.
No, it's not a "great storyline". It's an excellent implementation of a "fun premise".
It's okay to admit you're wrong. You don't have to play around with semantics and dance around the point.
It's a great storyline.
The reason people claim to like the storyline is because they don't know a convenient word to use to summarize all those elements of single-player game design aside from "gameplay" and "artwork".
I love armchair psychologists.
The reason people claim to like the storyline is because they like the storyline as they played the game.
"Premise" is too vague to serve well. The equivalent for films is "cinematography". Prehaps someday videogames will get a word for this too.
Maybe when you stop being pretentious about a videogame.
The players don't really like the story, they like the implementation.
The implementation is part of the story. Next.
If the prelude events were told with a single page of uppercase text (as it was in Doom) they wouldn't be remembered as anything special. Instead we got a subtly gorgeous facility level that was both spacious and yet packed with lively human detail, culminating in a spectacular lightshow.
Exactly. It was excellent storytelling.
Do I really need to explain the basic concept of storytelling to you?
The content was not as important as the presentation.
What was it presenting? Oh, that's right.
If I'm misguided, then it's a very popular [gamespot.com] misconception (You sound like you've heard this opinion a lot before. Wonder why?).
It doesn't matter if it's a popular decision.
The design for the end of Half Life was simply a mistake. It was targeted as a mass-market game for a large, non-hardcore audience. Those legions of players were allowed to advance all the way through to the Lambda Complex by the combination of choosing the lowest difficulty level and facing fairly logical puzzles that were rooted in real-world physics or had obvious next steps.
But once the mass of players had jump-packs installed on their suits, it's game over. The "Easy" mode doesn't serve to make the instant-death jumping puzzles any more forgiving, so low-agility players who solidered through the rest of the game with methodical thinking are out of luck. They mostly just gave up, rather than enlisting a thirteen-year-old to finish for them.
My response is always that I never had problems with Xen. I must be the better gamer.
Of course, with the lameness of the ending, it may have been better like that.
You clearly don't like Half-Life. Why do you continue with this?
If you mean a nuculear bomb went off, it would do much more than decimate a facility. It had already gone far past the point of "decimation" into "devastation" and beyond.
What a bizarre argument. You're going to argue with me the effects of a "nuculear" bomb as if I don't know? What kind of troll are you? Decimation was just a choice of terms.
However OPFOR was a letdown overall. It continued with more of the same elements that made Half Life great, of course, and it finally let your sidekicks have bigger guns. But the 3d models for the new aliens, human guards, melee weapons, and facilit
As if they had ever been friendly? Every time you saw them throughout the game they were enemies. They moved, they weren't Barney or Doc, so they had to be killed.
They weren't your enemies until later in the game. Until that point, you were led to believe they were attempting to rescue you. Next.
"Government turns on you" barely qualifies as storyline.
I can easily summarize any of your favorite games or movies into digestable tidbits which I can mock and claim "barely qualifies as storyline."
Although if you decide to grant it that description, it's still not a good storyline. This is evidenced by the fact that from the point-of-view of a GI infantryman, murdering scientists on sight doesn't make any sense. In the follow-on HalfLife: OpFor, they had to retcon [astrian.net] that part of the story, because it was silly.
It's a great storyline. There's a reason people like the story. Because it's good.
A virtue of Half-Life is that it was not a series of missions. It was a continuous environment you moved through, and your only objective was to move (or overcome short-range obstacles to such movement).
And in that continuous environment, you were given a serious of missions. This included, say, rescue a certain scientist, or reach a certain area, or escape a crusher room. NPCs gave you goals and objectives as you played. Did you, in fact, play it?
There was no use or mention of nuculear weapons in Half-Life. Prehaps you're thinking of a follow-up.
Obviously I'm talking about the ending of Opposing Force in which the facilities are decimated. I assumed you'd be logical enough to include it in this discussion.
That was exactly when the game started to get really, really bad.
Ah, one of those misguided fellows who thinks it had too much jumping in Xen.
Xen was the best part of the game. The bizarre, abstract levels were unlike any seen before.
So I don't call it "good". And again, I'd still barely call that a story. He's continuing to kill things that threaten him.
Like most any character in any storyline. Again, I could bring down any plot you'd consider "good" and make it look silly and trite.
No, I'm just pointing out that Half-Life had the same puny storyline as the most popular FPS (Quake and Doom): "scientists unleash monsters".
That wasn't the storyline. You're mistakenly confusing storyline and premise. Yes, the premise was the same.
The story was presented better than in Doom- the pacing, acting, scenary, props, and makeup were all superior. But it's the same story.
No, it's not. Next.
Is that a static storyline? Yes, absolutely. Simply by scaling the threat level of the monsters up or down, the missions from the game could be rearranged in any order with hardly any confusion.
Wrong. There are twists and turns in the plot, from you apparently dying and escaping with merely a crowbar to you being thrust into alien factories. You mentioned a "continuous environment" and yet claim the levels could be rearranged with little problem. You're obviously misinformed and conflicted.
Next.
Hence I said that.
Don't have to agree with the laws?
If Microsoft had been caught using GPL code without telling anyone, all of Slashdot would be up in a furious rage.
But it's clearly okay to steal movies, music, and whatever else you want because you are "pro-consumer" and "corporations are bad."
I love double standards because they destroy themselves with their own faulty logic.
The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Then copying is stealing, because you're intentionally depriving them of money.
Any other brain-busters?
What the sample was, where it came from, why they wanted the hole punched, how long they knew about Xen...should I go on?
God, how many times do we have to hear *this* stupid argument again?
Copying is stealing.
You are obtaining their works without paying them for it. Yes, that is stealing.
When you steal a CD from a store, are they upset because you obtained a physical object from their store? No. They're upset because you didn't pay them for it. Likewise, obtaining music, even if there is no loss of a physical object, equates to a loss of payment they would have otherwise received. How can so many Slashbots miss this simple concept?
Accept it, deal with it, get over it. Next.
To be a story it must change at least once.
How about when the government turned on you and decided to nuke the facilities? Or when the scientists decided you were to go to Xen?
Just because it's a linear storyline doesn't mean it's not a storyline. You're trying to lie and say Half-Life had a static storyline all the way through when it was really a series of missions and objectives given to you mostly by NPCs you spoke to. There was an observable plot. Clearly you have not played the game.
If not, HL2 will sell about as well as WinXP would if it couldn't run Win98 apps.
No it won't. Just because your 16-year old IRC buddies only have Half-Life installed for their Counter Strike cheats doesn't mean the rest of the world doesn't remember the huge phenomena that was the original Half-Life. It revolutionized single player gaming at the time. I have yet to play against enemies that were as intelligent as Half-Life's.
All the "mods" were just a side effect of the hugeness of Half-Life. Half-Life 2 will sell.
Support costs.
Where did all these ignorant fruits come from?
Where were you when Half-Life came out and rejuvenated single player, and all the game magazines gave it game of the year and wouldn't stop raving about it? Half-Life revolutionized gaming when everyone was going multiplayer-only with Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament. How could you have missed this game? It was only the hugest freaking thing for years. The fact a bunch of popular mods came out for it is just a mere side effect. Half-Life made a lot of gaming companies go back to the drawing board (id Software included).
Yep, it's even a better game than Counter Strike. Counter Strike is overhyped and overrated, a breeding ground for high schoolers with broadband and a handful of cheats. Counter Strike will never freak me out like, say, Half-Life's giant tentacle creature tapping at the metal, or the helicopters dropping troops to take you down, or the bizarre alien factories and weirdness of Xen and the final battle at the end ("The truth you will never know"...I'm hoping the sequel really explains what the hell exactly happened at Black Mesa). Enemies even used scent to track you and battled using herd behavior. Human troops would scatter and run for cover if you tossed them a grenade.
I've never seen better designed aliens or creepier labs or weirder alien dimensions than in Half-Life. The game just got better and better as I played it. Go back to your multiplayer mods.
Here's a hint, if I shoplift a CD, the store doesn't have it anymore, if I use Napster, no one is deprived of anything. They're so completely different, not only are they in different ballparks, they're playing a different game.
Here's a hint: Why do you think shoplifting is considered stealing? Is it because you're taking a CD? No, the store didn't make the CD. They don't care about the actual merchandise. It's because you're taking a CD and not paying them for it.
So guess what? Downloading music, without paying for it, it still stealing. Your silly "ballpark" nonsense doesn't fly. Honestly, the fact that so many Slashbots miss this simple concept really amazes me, but because downloading pretty much anything they want has been so convenient for so many years, they've all justified it in their minds.
Next.
Interesting that the parent was +5 but you're just +3, though clearly your post was the voice of reason. Clearly a result of crackhead moderators who have grown up with the convenience of downloading whatever they want, and so have morally justified it in their minds to avoid feeling guilt, and so are avoiding modding you up.
Yes, downloading with paying is stealing. You nailed it.
There was a story here a few weeks ago (post link for cheap Karma) about how they'd released GTA2 as a free download.
No, there wasn't.
Yeah, it rocks working on something and not getting paid for it. I'm glad it worked out this way. Who needs copyright? People are entitled to download and steal whatever they want because it's there and it's convenient.