Your personal experience, along with some guy's blog post, are hardly representative of an entire state population.
Re:Install a fix not from Apple? Fat Chance
on
Month of Apple Fixes
·
· Score: 1
Worst possible response. Are you suggesting that all Apple users become professional software developers?
Talk about an exaggerated response. Nobody's telling your girlfriend to look at source code or become a professional software developer. Source code is available for those smart enough to understand it, and if anything bad is in it, the community would be warned.
No offense, but Jon Stewart is a registered Democrat. All anyone has to do is pull up Clinton's finger-wagging "sexual relations" denial. If you're in the public eye and everything you say gets recorded, I guarantee you will say things that eventually contradict something you once said before for whatever reasons. Especially if you're a business where industry trends come and go and you have to adapt to market changes. Holding Bill Gates to a letter he wrote in 1976 is just being anal.
Given that stem cells haven't provided any positive results at all, I doubt these glowing pigs will do a damn thing. Adult and cord cells are where all the research, and all the investors, are at which is why stem cell advocates are always wanting federal funding--they can't get any private backers due to lack of results. Not that the mainstream media will bother doing any investigative reporting and tell you that.
Prepare to be censored by global warming propagandaists who will mod you down for the crime of not following the holy word of politician Al Gore. Remember, environmentalists want you to feel guilty and ashamed for even existing on this planet. Facts don't count; it's all about what you feel is true. Ever notice how the media now asks people how they "feel" about something rather than what they "think?" It's part of our emotion-over-reason society of today, caused mostly by a predominantly liberal media that is more interested in "storylines" rather than truth. Global warming fits into their emotional, self-loathing storyline of mankind destroying Eden. Hence, the overblown alarmism of today that compares to the global cooling scare of the 1970s.
A common complaint I've seen is that it's not a true RPG, and it's "dumbed down" (fast travelling, first person action combat etc). That's just die-hard RPG fans for you though. Marking a game down because it doesn't follow some unwritten set of rules on the genre it resembles closest seems pretty wayward to me.
The problem is that it's all Oblivion offered--first-person slashing. Everything else was indeed dumbed down or removed. There weren't any consequences to anything. You can easily be the head guy of two or more guilds, and it doesn't even matter, and nobody cares. In Morrowind, for example, there were warring factions, and choosing sides would close quest possibilities in the opposing guilds. You couldn't just join everything. You had to stick with the kind of character you made and the choices you made in-game. In Oblivion, there's no specialization, no replayability, and no variety. You can easily do anything at all without any consequences to the world, and NPCs don't respond to your actions beyond a very basic fame/infamy number that merely affects how they greet you and how much you have to bribe them for information (the persuasion system was completely, utterly stupid and worthless).
The game was just designed to be a pretty first-person slasher with RPG stats, and the graphics ended up not being that pretty at all (I'd hardly call them "breath taking"). It felt very much like a console arcade game and lacked the rich, dynamic worlds of the Elder Scrolls games before it.
The fact that it is completely pointless and utterly boring? Here's a list:
1.) Shitty voice acting. 2.) Dumbed-down conversation system. 3.) Ridiculously mindless AI. 4.) Magic compass marker that somehow knows where everyone is at, turning quests into a point-and-run affair. 5.) Leveling system that removes the whole point of leveling up. 6.) Boring, boring, boring game world that all looks the same. 7.) Bland, generic, McMedieval graphics. Everyone was talking about how great the graphics were, as if they had never seen normal-mapping or bloom lighting before. 8.) Boring, generic dungeons. Did you ever play Morrowind? It had multiple kinds. 9.) The turning of a once-great RPG franchise into a hackneyed action-slasher with RPG-lite stats. 10.) The fact nothing had any consequences, even the main storyline. Demons are supposedly taking over, but you never feel like the world is in any tense danger. You can join any guild at all without any consequences (in Morrowind, you would become an enemy to opposing guilds), and you can easily become any character class, which removes the point of specialization in a character as well and removes replayability. It's a flat environment that's just designed for hack-slashing rats in dungeons.
You're asking how this could not be the game of the year. I ask you, what makes it the game of the year? Absolutely nothing in it advanced RPGs forward at all. All that talk of it being a "next-gen RPG," and it was actually a dumbed-down Morrowind with a ton of features removed. Turns out the next-gen part just referred to the bland graphics. You actually get a richer world in Morrowind from 2001, and you get a ton more to do in it. Nothing in Oblivion makes it the game of the year.
I've lost all faith in Elder Scrolls after Oblivion. They're not interested in making RPGs like Daggerfall anymore. They want to make top 10 Happy Meal RPG-lite games where you just run around slashing at giant rats all day. The ONLY reason this game got so much hype is because of XBox 360 fanboys who thought it had the greatest graphics ever. That's it. And those visuals turned out to be ugly and bland. I saw more beautiful outdoor environments in Far Cry several years ago.
Oblivion was one of the worst RPGs I've ever played. Utterly boring and lacking any life or character, particularly thanks to the enemy leveling that removes the whole point of leveling up as well as the poor A.I. It's just an action-slasher game with RPG stats in it that can easily be gamed. The character acting in particular was ridiculous, especially when they changed accents in the middle of the dumbed-down conversations. The big Imperial City was like a ghost town with a few folks wandering around randomly, and the rest of the game world was the same repeated hills and trees with the only variation being the snowy area up north and the shore down south. The dungeons were all the same.
I was so bored with the game after a few weeks that I never touched it again. The game world has no consequences, you can join any guild, and you can become any character class. It struck me as a highly pointless game--unless you like action-slasher games. That is what Oblivion is.
When I played Twilight Princess, it struck me how full of life the world was, and I realized I want an Elder Scrolls game with the kind of culture and spice that a Zelda game has. Sadly, Oblivion was a big seller (before the online backlash), so chances are we'll get the same old generic medieval crap next time around. More giant rats to fight in the sewers--YAWN.
If Google gets a defacto monopoly on searches (which it hasn't got yet), then manipulating the search results to promote it's own non-search related products would be a clear anti-trust violation.
Not really, if the "manipulated" results are marked as special offers from Google. If Google was actively demoting other results or somehow preventing them from appearing in their search results, then you'd have a case.
The bloggers can return the laptops to Microsoft when they're done. However, your belief that companies don't give out free hardware is naive. It happens often.
Nice dodge of all the points I raised in my post. Again, when you tell someone to fuck off and die--no matter if you think they're a "sock puppet account" or not--I will call you on it. Always.
That's simply not feasible on a reviewer's salary. It only smells funny if the reviewer allows freebies to cloud their opinions. At some point, however, you have to accept that the people who work for, say, IGN or Gamestop, get game consoles and videogames sent to them for free so they have something to write about on release date. Roger Ebert gets to go to special press screenings of films before they're released to the public. These companies want their products to get written about, and they consider it a promotional expense to send these out to people. Well-known reviewers will even complain publicly that the company didn't send them a pre-release unit for them to write about, which is bad press. For example, when movie studios don't give press screenings to reviewers, it comes off looking like the studio doesn't want negative reviews of the film, which generates negative press.
Game companies will not only fly reviewers out to their studio to play their games, but they will have them play it in a special game room with a giant plasma TV and 5.1 surround sound so that the reviewer can see the full experience they are providing (for example, many reviewers played Half-Life 2 on a high-end PC at Valve Software's building). Movie studios fly reviewers out to special film screenings. And on and on.
It'd be like record labels sending journalists a free 80 gig iPod and stereo speakers with every new song they're promoting.
Well, record labels will send free CDs, t-shirts, and other materials. Movie studios will fly reviewers out to special reviewer-only screenings of their films in a high-end theater. Microsoft wants Vista to be run on the best possible hardware for it, so they'll send out laptops with Vista preloaded. Apparently, Slashdotters are just now realizing how the industry has worked for decades. It's in the best interests of the companies for reviewers to have access to their products for review, because all this stuff is expensive and can be hard to find.
You do realize they can send the laptop back to Microsoft when they're done reviewing Vista on it, right?
I'm not american, but I could watch CNN/Fox from canada and frankly I see that in spite what you say democrats won the last election
Actually, conservative pro-gun, anti-abortion Democrats won the last election. The wealthy, condescending liberals like Ned Lamont are the ones who lost!
Maybe one or two out of that number don't write straight-down-the-line praises of microsoft products. Most, however, find their enthusiasm for Microsoft somewhat re-enforced by the arrival of a beautiful, beautiful machine.
Okay, this is getting ridiculous. By your logic, no company can ever send review units to any reviewer in any industry. This is obviously to promote Vista and get tech people reviewing it. Everybody does this, from movie studios to record labels to software publishers.
It looks like Microsoft is trying to promote Vista and would like prominent bloggers to have access to it in order to write about it on their websites. No different from record labels sending promos to music journalists, or game companies sending software to reviewers.
It amuses me just as much when Democrats have people like Al Franken and Keith Olbermann on their side spewing venom, and when called on it they claim it was only satire...but when conservatives fight back with the same kind of lowbrow sarcasm, you accuse them of being mean-spirited or "known trolls."
Not only is it illogical to reference Ann Coulter, who has nothing to do with the conversation, as some justification for telling someone to fuck off and die, but it also weakens your position. Comments like yours are the reason a lot of people see liberals as bitter and mean-spirited. You guys are supposed to be compassionate and tolerant, yet if someone espouses a viewpoint you don't like, you attack them and call them Nazis or fascists or idiots or whatever. I'm sure you've visited sites like Daily "Screw Them" Kos or Democratic Underground and seen the hardcore hatred on display over there, and I'm sure you heard of the tongue-in-cheek term Bush Derangement Syndrome.
I'm not sure what high moral standing you think you have when you use terms like "Repugs" or how you think it emboldens your argument (the "Repuglican" party you hate so much was formed to fight the policies of the pro-slavery Democratic Party in the south, who passed all the Jim Crow laws after the Civil War...a history the Democratic Party would rather you forget), but this new breed of aggressively intolerant and insulting liberals only make the movement come off as flakey and extremist. It's like it's impossible for you guys to accept any differing opinion on anything, and when it's pointed out that you're guilty of every single thing you criticize conservatives of being guilty of, you freak out and tell people to fuck off and die, paint Hitler mustaches on posters, hold naked rallies, etc. You come off as crazy and irrational.
So, yeah, when you tell someone to fuck off and die, I'm going to call you on it. As a libertarian, I admit it's funny watching you and your party tear itself apart, divided between blue dog moderates and ultra-left-wingers. I'll be shocked if you guys last the next two years with all those special interest caucuses you have to cater to. But that doesn't mean I have to stand by and let you threaten people because they utilized their First Amendment right to make a WarGames joke.
Let's see--a company providing live, unedited footage as it happens, or a Congress that often starts its speeches with a call for the ability to edit the record later before it's released to the public ("at the expense of the freedoms of the people"). Apparently, you are 100% for the latter.
They are absolutely hiding stuff. Congress edits its record all the time before it's released. C-SPAN messes that all up, and Nancy Pelosi ain't gonna have that happening in her "most open and ethical Congress in history."
Before election: "Republicans are evil! The Democrats will provide the most open and ethical Congress in history! Just you wait, even C-SPAN will be allowed to broadcast live (so that congressman can't edit and revise the record as they already do before it's made public)!"
After election: "Those poor Democrats! They're being bullied by another evil corporation who wants to restrict something that's oh-so-open-and-free! Who cares about live, unedited coverage of house proceedings? We want the edited tablescraps that Congress decides we're worthy enough to view. When members of Congress start their speeches asking for unanimous support to revise the record later, that's a-okay because Nancy Pelosi is super-terrific!"
I know you want to defend the decision of the Democrats (this is Slashdot, after all), but the record is often edited after the fact before it is given to the public. C-SPAN would have provided full, live coverage for the public to watch during proceedings.
That house leadership being Nancy Pelosi. Now, what happened to all those pre-election promises about "the most open and ethical Congress in history?" After Murtha and other corrupt Democrats, now we find another promise broken. What a lame-duck House Speaker.
It will be interesting to see if all the anti-Bush Slashdotters who rattled on and on about the evil Republicans and their closed access will turn those criticisms onto the new Democratic Congress which is already divided between old-school liberals like Pelosi and these new conservative pro-gun, anti-abortion Democrats who won last November and voted against the corrupt Murtha.
Then again, this is the party with Sandy Berger, who can steal documents and hide them under a trailer and nobody bats an eye nor questions the claim that the 9/11 Commission already had copies. But if he was a Republican working for the Bush administration...
Welcome to why most Americans hate liberals and think they're condescending pricks who want a big, expensive nanny state to regulate everything that might offend them. You don't have the right to not be offended, kiddo.
Slashdot Mirror
Your personal experience, along with some guy's blog post, are hardly representative of an entire state population.
Talk about an exaggerated response. Nobody's telling your girlfriend to look at source code or become a professional software developer. Source code is available for those smart enough to understand it, and if anything bad is in it, the community would be warned.
No offense, but Jon Stewart is a registered Democrat. All anyone has to do is pull up Clinton's finger-wagging "sexual relations" denial. If you're in the public eye and everything you say gets recorded, I guarantee you will say things that eventually contradict something you once said before for whatever reasons. Especially if you're a business where industry trends come and go and you have to adapt to market changes. Holding Bill Gates to a letter he wrote in 1976 is just being anal.
Given that stem cells haven't provided any positive results at all, I doubt these glowing pigs will do a damn thing. Adult and cord cells are where all the research, and all the investors, are at which is why stem cell advocates are always wanting federal funding--they can't get any private backers due to lack of results. Not that the mainstream media will bother doing any investigative reporting and tell you that.
That's not what Al Gore says, you petrol-funded bastard!
Prepare to be censored by global warming propagandaists who will mod you down for the crime of not following the holy word of politician Al Gore. Remember, environmentalists want you to feel guilty and ashamed for even existing on this planet. Facts don't count; it's all about what you feel is true. Ever notice how the media now asks people how they "feel" about something rather than what they "think?" It's part of our emotion-over-reason society of today, caused mostly by a predominantly liberal media that is more interested in "storylines" rather than truth. Global warming fits into their emotional, self-loathing storyline of mankind destroying Eden. Hence, the overblown alarmism of today that compares to the global cooling scare of the 1970s.
The problem is that it's all Oblivion offered--first-person slashing. Everything else was indeed dumbed down or removed. There weren't any consequences to anything. You can easily be the head guy of two or more guilds, and it doesn't even matter, and nobody cares. In Morrowind, for example, there were warring factions, and choosing sides would close quest possibilities in the opposing guilds. You couldn't just join everything. You had to stick with the kind of character you made and the choices you made in-game. In Oblivion, there's no specialization, no replayability, and no variety. You can easily do anything at all without any consequences to the world, and NPCs don't respond to your actions beyond a very basic fame/infamy number that merely affects how they greet you and how much you have to bribe them for information (the persuasion system was completely, utterly stupid and worthless).
The game was just designed to be a pretty first-person slasher with RPG stats, and the graphics ended up not being that pretty at all (I'd hardly call them "breath taking"). It felt very much like a console arcade game and lacked the rich, dynamic worlds of the Elder Scrolls games before it.
The fact that it is completely pointless and utterly boring? Here's a list:
1.) Shitty voice acting.
2.) Dumbed-down conversation system.
3.) Ridiculously mindless AI.
4.) Magic compass marker that somehow knows where everyone is at, turning quests into a point-and-run affair.
5.) Leveling system that removes the whole point of leveling up.
6.) Boring, boring, boring game world that all looks the same.
7.) Bland, generic, McMedieval graphics. Everyone was talking about how great the graphics were, as if they had never seen normal-mapping or bloom lighting before.
8.) Boring, generic dungeons. Did you ever play Morrowind? It had multiple kinds.
9.) The turning of a once-great RPG franchise into a hackneyed action-slasher with RPG-lite stats.
10.) The fact nothing had any consequences, even the main storyline. Demons are supposedly taking over, but you never feel like the world is in any tense danger. You can join any guild at all without any consequences (in Morrowind, you would become an enemy to opposing guilds), and you can easily become any character class, which removes the point of specialization in a character as well and removes replayability. It's a flat environment that's just designed for hack-slashing rats in dungeons.
You're asking how this could not be the game of the year. I ask you, what makes it the game of the year? Absolutely nothing in it advanced RPGs forward at all. All that talk of it being a "next-gen RPG," and it was actually a dumbed-down Morrowind with a ton of features removed. Turns out the next-gen part just referred to the bland graphics. You actually get a richer world in Morrowind from 2001, and you get a ton more to do in it. Nothing in Oblivion makes it the game of the year.
I've lost all faith in Elder Scrolls after Oblivion. They're not interested in making RPGs like Daggerfall anymore. They want to make top 10 Happy Meal RPG-lite games where you just run around slashing at giant rats all day. The ONLY reason this game got so much hype is because of XBox 360 fanboys who thought it had the greatest graphics ever. That's it. And those visuals turned out to be ugly and bland. I saw more beautiful outdoor environments in Far Cry several years ago.
Oblivion was one of the worst RPGs I've ever played. Utterly boring and lacking any life or character, particularly thanks to the enemy leveling that removes the whole point of leveling up as well as the poor A.I. It's just an action-slasher game with RPG stats in it that can easily be gamed. The character acting in particular was ridiculous, especially when they changed accents in the middle of the dumbed-down conversations. The big Imperial City was like a ghost town with a few folks wandering around randomly, and the rest of the game world was the same repeated hills and trees with the only variation being the snowy area up north and the shore down south. The dungeons were all the same.
I was so bored with the game after a few weeks that I never touched it again. The game world has no consequences, you can join any guild, and you can become any character class. It struck me as a highly pointless game--unless you like action-slasher games. That is what Oblivion is.
When I played Twilight Princess, it struck me how full of life the world was, and I realized I want an Elder Scrolls game with the kind of culture and spice that a Zelda game has. Sadly, Oblivion was a big seller (before the online backlash), so chances are we'll get the same old generic medieval crap next time around. More giant rats to fight in the sewers--YAWN.
Not really, if the "manipulated" results are marked as special offers from Google. If Google was actively demoting other results or somehow preventing them from appearing in their search results, then you'd have a case.
The bloggers can return the laptops to Microsoft when they're done. However, your belief that companies don't give out free hardware is naive. It happens often.
Nice dodge of all the points I raised in my post. Again, when you tell someone to fuck off and die--no matter if you think they're a "sock puppet account" or not--I will call you on it. Always.
That's simply not feasible on a reviewer's salary. It only smells funny if the reviewer allows freebies to cloud their opinions. At some point, however, you have to accept that the people who work for, say, IGN or Gamestop, get game consoles and videogames sent to them for free so they have something to write about on release date. Roger Ebert gets to go to special press screenings of films before they're released to the public. These companies want their products to get written about, and they consider it a promotional expense to send these out to people. Well-known reviewers will even complain publicly that the company didn't send them a pre-release unit for them to write about, which is bad press. For example, when movie studios don't give press screenings to reviewers, it comes off looking like the studio doesn't want negative reviews of the film, which generates negative press.
Game companies will not only fly reviewers out to their studio to play their games, but they will have them play it in a special game room with a giant plasma TV and 5.1 surround sound so that the reviewer can see the full experience they are providing (for example, many reviewers played Half-Life 2 on a high-end PC at Valve Software's building). Movie studios fly reviewers out to special film screenings. And on and on.
Well, record labels will send free CDs, t-shirts, and other materials. Movie studios will fly reviewers out to special reviewer-only screenings of their films in a high-end theater. Microsoft wants Vista to be run on the best possible hardware for it, so they'll send out laptops with Vista preloaded. Apparently, Slashdotters are just now realizing how the industry has worked for decades. It's in the best interests of the companies for reviewers to have access to their products for review, because all this stuff is expensive and can be hard to find.
You do realize they can send the laptop back to Microsoft when they're done reviewing Vista on it, right?
Actually, conservative pro-gun, anti-abortion Democrats won the last election. The wealthy, condescending liberals like Ned Lamont are the ones who lost!
Okay, this is getting ridiculous. By your logic, no company can ever send review units to any reviewer in any industry. This is obviously to promote Vista and get tech people reviewing it. Everybody does this, from movie studios to record labels to software publishers.
It looks like Microsoft is trying to promote Vista and would like prominent bloggers to have access to it in order to write about it on their websites. No different from record labels sending promos to music journalists, or game companies sending software to reviewers.
How is this "bribing?"
It amuses me just as much when Democrats have people like Al Franken and Keith Olbermann on their side spewing venom, and when called on it they claim it was only satire...but when conservatives fight back with the same kind of lowbrow sarcasm, you accuse them of being mean-spirited or "known trolls."
Not only is it illogical to reference Ann Coulter, who has nothing to do with the conversation, as some justification for telling someone to fuck off and die, but it also weakens your position. Comments like yours are the reason a lot of people see liberals as bitter and mean-spirited. You guys are supposed to be compassionate and tolerant, yet if someone espouses a viewpoint you don't like, you attack them and call them Nazis or fascists or idiots or whatever. I'm sure you've visited sites like Daily "Screw Them" Kos or Democratic Underground and seen the hardcore hatred on display over there, and I'm sure you heard of the tongue-in-cheek term Bush Derangement Syndrome.
I'm not sure what high moral standing you think you have when you use terms like "Repugs" or how you think it emboldens your argument (the "Repuglican" party you hate so much was formed to fight the policies of the pro-slavery Democratic Party in the south, who passed all the Jim Crow laws after the Civil War...a history the Democratic Party would rather you forget), but this new breed of aggressively intolerant and insulting liberals only make the movement come off as flakey and extremist. It's like it's impossible for you guys to accept any differing opinion on anything, and when it's pointed out that you're guilty of every single thing you criticize conservatives of being guilty of, you freak out and tell people to fuck off and die, paint Hitler mustaches on posters, hold naked rallies, etc. You come off as crazy and irrational.
So, yeah, when you tell someone to fuck off and die, I'm going to call you on it. As a libertarian, I admit it's funny watching you and your party tear itself apart, divided between blue dog moderates and ultra-left-wingers. I'll be shocked if you guys last the next two years with all those special interest caucuses you have to cater to. But that doesn't mean I have to stand by and let you threaten people because they utilized their First Amendment right to make a WarGames joke.
Let's see--a company providing live, unedited footage as it happens, or a Congress that often starts its speeches with a call for the ability to edit the record later before it's released to the public ("at the expense of the freedoms of the people"). Apparently, you are 100% for the latter.
They are absolutely hiding stuff. Congress edits its record all the time before it's released. C-SPAN messes that all up, and Nancy Pelosi ain't gonna have that happening in her "most open and ethical Congress in history."
Before election: "Republicans are evil! The Democrats will provide the most open and ethical Congress in history! Just you wait, even C-SPAN will be allowed to broadcast live (so that congressman can't edit and revise the record as they already do before it's made public)!"
After election: "Those poor Democrats! They're being bullied by another evil corporation who wants to restrict something that's oh-so-open-and-free! Who cares about live, unedited coverage of house proceedings? We want the edited tablescraps that Congress decides we're worthy enough to view. When members of Congress start their speeches asking for unanimous support to revise the record later, that's a-okay because Nancy Pelosi is super-terrific!"
I know you want to defend the decision of the Democrats (this is Slashdot, after all), but the record is often edited after the fact before it is given to the public. C-SPAN would have provided full, live coverage for the public to watch during proceedings.
That house leadership being Nancy Pelosi. Now, what happened to all those pre-election promises about "the most open and ethical Congress in history?" After Murtha and other corrupt Democrats, now we find another promise broken. What a lame-duck House Speaker.
It will be interesting to see if all the anti-Bush Slashdotters who rattled on and on about the evil Republicans and their closed access will turn those criticisms onto the new Democratic Congress which is already divided between old-school liberals like Pelosi and these new conservative pro-gun, anti-abortion Democrats who won last November and voted against the corrupt Murtha.
Then again, this is the party with Sandy Berger, who can steal documents and hide them under a trailer and nobody bats an eye nor questions the claim that the 9/11 Commission already had copies. But if he was a Republican working for the Bush administration...
Welcome to why most Americans hate liberals and think they're condescending pricks who want a big, expensive nanny state to regulate everything that might offend them. You don't have the right to not be offended, kiddo.
That wasn't true until recently.