Actually, you know, it's sorta funny to hear people ranting and raving about how 32 bit killed 3dfx or lack of T&L killed 3dfx, without having even the faintest clue what actually happened to 3dfx.
In a nutshell:
1. 3dfx at one point decided to buy a graphics card manufacturer, just so, you know, they'd make more money by also manufacturing their own cards.
2. They missed a cycle, because whatever software they were using to design their chips had a brain-fart and produced a non-functional chip design. So they spent 6 months rearranging the Voodoo 5 by hand.
The Voodoo 5 wasn't supposed to go head to head with the GeForce 2. It was supposed to, at most, go head to head with the GF256 SDR, not even the DDR flavour. And it would have done well enough there, especially since at the time there was pretty much no software that did T&L anyway.
But a 6 month delay was fatal. For all that time they had nothing better than a Voodoo 3 to compete with the GF256, and, frankly, it was outdated at that time. With or without 32 bit, it was a card that was the same generation as the TNT, so it just couldn't keep up. Worse yet, by the time the Voodoo 5 finally came out, it had to go head to head with the GF2, and it sucked there. It wasn't just the lack of T&L, it could barely keep up in terms of fill rate and lacked some features too. E.g., it couldn't even do trilinear and FSAA at the same time.
Worse yet, see problem #1 I mentioned. The dip in sales meant they suddenly had a shitload of factory space that just sat idle and cost them money. And they just had no plan what to do with that capacity. They had no other cards they could manufacture there. (The tv tuner they tried to make, came too late and sold too little to save them.) Basically while poor sales alone would have just meant less money, this one actually bled them money hand over fist. And that was maybe the most important factor that sunk them.
Add to that such mis-haps like,
3. The Voodoo 5 screenshot fuck-up. While the final image did look nice and did have 22 bit precision at 16 bit speeds, each of the 4 samples that went into it was a dithered 16 bit mess. There was no final combined image as such, there were 4 component images and the screen refresh circuitry combined them on the fly. And taking a screenshot in any game would get you the first of the 4 component images, so it looked a lot worse than what you'd see on the screen.
Now it probably was a lot less important than #1 and #2 for sinking 3dfx, but it was a piece of bad press they could have done without. While the big review sites did soon figure out "wtf, there's something wrong with these screenshots", the fucked up images were already in the wild. And people who had never seen the original image were using them all over the place as final "proof" that 3dfx sucks and that 22 bit accuracy is a myth.
Actually, it makes me wonder. Bear in mind that I'm taking wild guesses here, though.
For a start there was this other piece of research some time ago about how playing games even makes people somewhat forget about pain. As in, the physical pain kind. I don't know, it sounds fairly useful to me.
Second, for the kind of people who'd _need_ a brain interface, I'm guessing they can't use their hands either. Maybe it's ADHD speaking, but it sounds completely fucking boring. You can't even read a book, or change TV channels or call a friend. You can't even drive a wheelchair to talk to the neighbour, so basically you don't even have any kind of social life, not even the posting-to-slashdot or pretending-to-be-the-populer-jock-warrior-in-a-gui ld kind.
Basically it sounds to me like it's a hell of a lot worse than whether you have sex or not. You're seven levels deeper in hell than that. You don't even have the pre-requisites to even think of sex, like being able to actually have a social life of any kind and meet someone who'd be even remotely interested in you.
Plus, while sex is nice, it's... what? Maybe you can make a whole hour out of it, foreplay included. If they had hands for foreplay anyway. That still leaves 15 hours awake of not being able to do anything. So from a simple maths point of view, between (A) being able to do _something_ the whole day, and (B) having sex once a day followed by 15 hours of watching the walls... I dunno, the former doesn't seem that horrible an alternative.
Plus, how would you realistically solve their sex problem anyway? Pay a small army of prostitutes? Because if all someone can do is lay in bed, they're not going to be that attractive to many women anyway, and they won't have the opportunity to meet many women anyway. At least if they can do something online, they might have some small chance of actually talking to one. Or if all else fails, it gives them something to do instead of spending 16 hours a day fantasizing about sex.
Basically, "yeah, but they'd need sex more" seems to be akin to giving a chocolate bar once a week to starving kids in Africa. Sure, chocolate is nice, but I'm guessing they'd still be happier with having bread and clean water 3 times a day instead. The next step would be maybe some vegetables too. And so on. There's a long list of stuff they need more than chocolate. Necessities before luxuries, and all that.
RFID are "passive" devices, in that they're powered by the reader's electromagnetic field. Think like a transformer (the kind with coils, not the robots;), sorta, and the reader has one half while the RFID chip has the other half.
Well, there are active ones too, but you wouldn't want to operate that guy every year to change the batteries.
This limits range drastically, since both EM fields power is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. Basically, if you wanted to scan from a mile away to see where your sex offender is, be prepared to fry everything that moves in that area. You'd have to not only have a beam powerful enough to power a normal RFID from a mile, but still be powerful enough that the RFID can broadcast enough power to be sensed from a mile.
The army is an even pickier customer, since while you may want, for example, to know how many gas masks or shells are still in a crate, you don't want the enemy to know that from a mile away anyway. You don't want the enemy's radar stations to say, "guys, I'm sensing a big ammo dump at these coordinates, aim all artillery that way and fire at will."
That said, "sex offenders" is:
1. a broad enough category. It can mean just as well someone who was drunk off their ass and peed in public, or whatever. It doesn't have to mean convicted rapist.
2. something which should be the courts' domain, but instead ends up a public hysteria issue, as you illustrate in proposing to perform mandatory surgery on them.
I'm sorry, but there's a fine difference between "rule of the law" and "mob rule", even for sex offenders. It's up to the courts to determine if they're still guilty/dangerous enough to be kept behind bars, or served their sentence and can probably rent a flat and get a job like everyone else. It's not up to neighbourhood mobs to require everyone scanned, or up to random gas station owners to decide "youse can't tank here, 'cuz we don't deal with your type", which is what would happen with a RFID implant.
Plus, the courts and police have enough rules and safeguards (and still occasionally send an innocent to jail) which evolved out of thousands of years of discovering how to apply the law _fairly_. We've already had city-state mayors passing arbitrary decrees and applying their own uneven justice. We've already had mob rule plenty of times and its dispensing arbitrary justice by whims, populism and mass hysterias. (E.g., the democracy of ancient Greece also produced such excesses as Athens executing its fleet admirals because they failed to save some sailors in a _storm_, or as Socrates being sentenced to death for just being the unpopular guys.) And it took us a lot of time and some bloody revolutions to get rid of that crap. In the meantime we've discovered that it's better to apply the law fairly and uniformly, and we wrote the rules and passed the laws to see to it that it happens that way.
Mob rule just doesn't have any of those safeguards, and it already had thousands of years to show how much harm it can do.
So even for convicted offenders (sex or otherwise), I'd rather have the courts deal with them, than have them scanned by neighbourhood posses and judged summarily by every newspaper stand owner.
In other words, there's a reason we don't just tattoo it on their forehead. If we wanted those people victimized for the rest of their life, we wouldn't have had to wait for RFID, it would be cheaper to do just that. But the whole idea is that it's not supposed to work that way. Unless you're a judge and it happens in court, it's just not your job to decide extra punishment, including where that guy can go or can't go.
Yes, IQ is _one_ measure of _one_ kind of intelligence. So far, so good.
(And a very flawed one, since it seems to reflect education and past reflexes a lot more than what it claims to measure. But let's ignore that for now.)
The problem becomes when people start acting like it's the one single measure of intelligence, and obviously the one number by which you can measure that human on the whole. That is what some of us are railing about.
It's like proclaiming that everyone's fitness and physical prowess can be squeezed in one single number. Let's say, how fast they run the 100m sprint. Obviously, the shorter the time, in better physical condition someone is, and the better they'll perform in sports. Right?
Well, wrong. Some people have instead very high endurance: a sprinter won't typically win the marathon, and viceversa. Some people have great eye-to-hand coordination: a sprinter won't necessarily be a good tennis player. Some people have great raw strength and can lift impressive weights. Some people can make split-second assessments of a chaotic situation, and take the right decision in that split second: see, most team sports. Etc.
It would be pure stupidity to claim that all those unrelated skills and talents can be squeezed into a single number, and that you can neatly assess and order every single human by that one criterion.
And that's just the mistake that is done with IQ: everyone acts as if there's only one kind of intelligence, and IQ measures it objectively. If you even look at the title of this thread, it doesn't say "first born have higher IQ", it says outright, "first born gets the brains". _That_ is the problem. In the mind of whoever wrote that, there was no room for other kinds of intelligence or other ways to measure it. For him, IQ = Brains, it's that simple.
More importantly, the excuse that some extremely successful people didn't finish university is used as a "so what if I'm not bothering to learn anything?" or "it's good to be an underachiever" excuse. What such people miss is the fact that those guys worked hard and learned on their own anyway.
E.g., while it's true that, say, Steve Jobs decided to drop out, then he hung around and took the courses that interested him. He learned a lot in that time.
Or I do personally know some people who are well paid software architects, consultants and the like, and who did drop out of college and went on to just do what they liked the most. (And in retrospect, I should have probably done the same thing.) But the thing is: we're not talking people who spent their time getting drunk off their ass. We're talking people who had a passion for computers, and spent most of their waking hours learning and getting some practical experience. That's a freakin' huge difference.
Or since the GP post was about the NBA, I'd wager that there too we're talking about people who spent a lot of their own time training, or just playing the game. It may not be the most intellectual or school-grade-driven job, but it involved some talent, dedication and plain-old hard work anyway.
Basically, yes, it's possible to be successful and well paid without a school, but the rub is: it takes a lot of effort anyway. Those who were just underachievers, are those you see behind the counter at McDonalds.
Yes, because obviously plate tectonics are totally caused by global warming, and we didn't have earthquakes or volcanoes before the 19'th century industrialization. Heck, seein' as the current theory is that plate tectonics are a very important part of the Earth's dynamo, we probably didn't even have a magnetic field before and solar radiation blew all hydrogen into space like on Venus. Plus, it makes me respect the age of exploration sailors a lot more if they managed to use a compass without a magnetic field;)
If it only were one lost letter, I'd probably even think it's a typo. I tend to occasionally lose a letter or two too.
My biggest gripes are with (1) l33t, and (2) words mangled for no other reason than mangling them.
I mean, take the following example taken verbatim from a COH group chat: "soz m8 g2g gt skewl 2moz" No, literally.
Where shall I even start on that abhomination:
1. "skewl" I mean, what the _bloody_ fuck? It's only one letter shorter than "school", but the "o" in "school" is double, so you don't even need to move your fingers much to type it. And _especially_ for one finger typists (since often the excuse for such monstrosities is "I can't type fast enough"), "skewl" actually involves moving your finger around more.
It's a word mangled by retards just to sound "kewl". Fucktards.
2. "soz", "2moz" and other such use of "z" for half the word endings in the fucking dictionary. I mean, wtf? "Z" doesn't even remotely sound like anything with a "r" in it. And which ending _is_ is supposed to be, anyway? "rry" and "rrow" are very different bits of word.
3. "m8", "2moz" and other such l33t use of digits. Here's a thought for those smackards: not everyone is a native English speaker, so their reflex reading of a digit will be in their mother tongue, not in English. So is it "macht"? (8 = Acht in German. "Macht" = power, or the Force.) Mocho? Mhuit? Or what? You're forcing someone to effectively translate it back and forth, piece by piece, just to discover what it means.
You know, everyone seems to be focused on the V2 and on "what if the Germans put an A bomb on one?" scenarios. And there's nothing wrong with that, as such, it's indeed valid points by themselves. But IMHO it still misses the more direct refutal of such "innovation didn't ever do much" luddite whines: what about the innovations that _did_ make a huge difference to the war? E.g.,
1. Gyro Gunsights. It's something that most people don't even know existed, because it wasn't hyped much. Everyone knows about the atom bomb or about the Norden sights (also an analog computer, btw) but this thing may have done more than the atom bomb and the V2 combined. By the end of the WW2 it gave the Allies a _massive_ advantage in air combat. It was mounted not only on fighters, but on bomber turrets too, and helped seal the fate of the Luftwaffe in a major way.
Basically it's an analog computer that shows you where to shoot to hit a moving target with uncanny accuracy. The fact is, estimating lead is very difficult even for veteran pilots, and this thing let even a moderately trained newbie shoot better than some of the aces.
And BTW, another analog computer was used by anti-aircraft artillery units, and helped shoot down a hell of a lot of V-1's.
2. The Colossus computer used by the UK to break the German codes. Frankly, knowing where the Germans are and what they're up to, might have been _the_ one factor that affected the war the most.
3. In the same vein: RADAR. The "Battle Of Britain" was massively influenced by the fact that the British had early warning of the incoming planes. A lot more German pilots and later V-1 bombs were shot down because they got detected early by RADAR, than if everyone were to rely on the chance of spotting them from another airplane.
It also claimed a lot of German submarines, as they tended to surface at night to recharge their batteries or move around. An airplane equipped with radar and a spotlight (the Leigh Light) would close in by radar, light the spotlight, then bomb the submarine to pieces. So efficient was the combination, that by the end of 42 most submarines actually preferred to surface by day, so they can at least see the aircraft and maybe fight back.
4. SONAR. Without it, everyone would have been literally blind against submarines. To illustrate how important it was, even a short interval of blindness, as the destroyer passed over the submarine to launch the depth charges, often allowed the submarine to change direction and escape unharmed. That's why such weapons as the Hedgehog and Squid were developped: so you can shoot at the submarine before it enters your blind spot.
5. Want something that would have changed the face of the war even more radically, if it didn't come too late? R4M AA rockets. Germans eventually packed batteries of 24 55mm AA rockets on their airplanes, that could tear a bomber apart from 600m to 1km distance. Safely beyond the range of the machineguns on those bombers.
They didn't need any guidance, btw, since the idea was to _saturate_ the zone with a salvo of rockets. The simple natural spread of the salvo ensured that at least 2-3 would hit the bomber you're aiming at, and the 55mm warhead was more powerful than any gun you could put on an airplane.
An anti-tank version was also designed.
It also was the basis for the US FFAR pods.
Etc, etc, etc.
Briefly whoever can honestly think that innovation and technology were overrated in winning WW2... well, they can ask the Chinese how well their spearmen fared against Japanese tanks. (Not all Chinese divisions were that badly equipped, but, yes, some were still equipped literally to medieval stan
Parents want to protect their children (based on religious imposed morality).
Heh. Trust me, religion for a change has nothing to do with it. It makes for some popular bullshit rhetoric in some circles to blame everything on religion, but it's rarely that simple.
Let me say it loud and clear: fear of violence has _nothing_ to do with religion, and wanting to protect your kids has _nothing_ to do with religion. If you think society fears murder and murderers only because of some arbitrary commandment in the bible, then, sad to say, you may be a psychopath. No, seriously, medically speaking. Ditto if you think that it's only some arbitrary religious commandment that makes people try to protect their kids.
Now whether censoring games actually helps with either, that's not clear indeed. But a religious thing it isn't.
Talks about how "they" wanted to ban it, "they" found a back door, etc, are good and fine until you realize who "they" are. _Again_, it's not some government organization that gave that AO rating: the ESRB is the gaming industry's own voluntary asociation. It answers to noone else.
So who are "they"? You're trying to tell me that the rest of the game producers were conspiring against Take Two? Or what?
Bullshit. While I enjoy a good emotional appeal like McCarthyism as much as the next guy, in this case it's just bull.
1. During the McCarthy era the government actually sent letters to businesses and otherwise bullied them into toeing the party line. In this case I don't think it's the ESRB who's telling Nintendo and Sony to not publish AO games. You know, what with both being Japanese companies and all.
2. McCartyism made sure that you'll never work again, while this at worst means not publishing a game. For extra points: a game they should have had a good idea from the start that it'll get an AO rating. I'm sorry but there's a freakin' massive difference between the two.
And incidentally: no, you don't have a sacred right to make a profit at all cost. There's a difference between freedom of speech, which is what the McCarthy era was infringing on, and the right to make a profit by selling ultra-violent games to kids. I mean, what next? The right to open a cocaine stand in a school?
3. Sorry to dawn some reality upon your self-righteous parrade, but the ESRB is the gaming industry's own organizations. It's not like that AO rating came from some oppressive congressional comission. It's the gaming industry's own organization, and it uses people who are unaffiliated with either the government or the devs to judge a game's suitability for kids. So basically it's some people like you and me who judged that, nope, a game where extreme violence is the _whole_ game is unsuitable to kids.
And let me say that again: I'm a gamer too, but I _don't_ think it sounds like a game I'd buy for my kids.
And finally, lemme say another thing: I'm sick and tired of the whole retarded hypocrisy. Whenever someone complains about kids and violent games, what's the standard retort? "Yeah, but it wasn't for kids, most gamers are adults, adults have a right to buy a violent game if they want to, blah, blah, blah." Then the game gets an Adults Only rating, and what happens? "Auugh, censorship! McCarthyism! The government is trying to stop me from selling the game at WalMart! We'll be ruined without them selling our game!"
Well, the industry should freakin' make up its mind already. Either A or B, not both. Either you're genuinely making games for adults, in which case freakin' learn to live with a rating that says just that: "Adults Only." Or you want to sell those games to kids, in which case freakin' learn to live with what's considered apropriate for kids. Neither is wrong by itself, but choose _one_. One or the other, not both.
Because the distinct impression I'm left with, is that they want to both make a "duh, it was for adults game" _and_ then sell it to kids anyway.
It's worse actually. If you actually try to keep the buzz up for several years straight, pretty much by making an even more over-the-top claim periodically, you end up with one (or both of):
1. guaranteed disappointment, as the game can't possibly match the increasingly outrageous claims. See, B&W.
2. backlash, as people get fed up with the hype and pretty much start developping an allergy to it. See, Daikatana.
Well, it sorta does in an indirect way, at the very least.
Imagine that you're talking to a guy that looks like Rambo, but has a squeaky eunuch voice. (Well, at least an adult would have to be an eunuch to sound like that.) I'm guessing you'd be trying real hard to not burst into fits of laughter. I'm also guessing that it would make it a lot harder to take him seriously as a bad-ass tough guy, or at least you'd get funny ideas what he's really compensating for.
That's the thing. Regardless of 11 years or not, most voices just don't match that character. It may not necessarily be age or gender discrimination as such, but a character kind of is a _whole_. If the parts are mismatched, it starts to trip suspension of disbelief. Think "uncanny valley" if it makes the point easier to swallow. (Although I don't actually believe the uncanny valley hypothesis as such.)
Basically a big burly male orc with a 11 year old girl's voice, is just as weird as the same orc with hooves or floppy ears. It makes one think "wth is wrong with that guy?"
Thing thing is, as long as you don't know something about a character, you're free to imagine the details it in a way that makes sense for you. Having the wrong details shoved down your throat can trip suspension of disbelief in a major way.
And the more time you've had to imagine it in your own way, the more it will feel wrong when you get something that doesn't match. See how fans of some, say, novel or comic end up arguing to hell and back in which ways it was the wrong choice of actors.
So basically, if I understand it right, it could have been a great game if only:
1. it had been better tested, _and_
2. they had fixed the bugs and gameplay problems, _and_
3. they had judged their market better, _and_
4. had better marketting.
I'm sorry, but, by the same token, any game ever could have been great if only they did those 4 steps. Daikatana would have been a great hit if it did all 4 of those.
Heck, especially #4 was what created the massive anti-Daikatana backlash. ("John Romero will make you his bitch.")
Ah, don't take it too seriously. These days everyone has to throw together some smack talking "top X worst Y", just to show that they're hip and irreverent like that, and you better believe them that when, by contrast, they give 95% to EA's latest game they really mean it.
There are a ton of games who were worse, or did worse for other reasons. Daikatana, ET, etc.
The reasoning starts to get dubious right on the first page linked from the summary. So a console fighting game is bad because by the 90's everyone was sick and tired of fighting game clones? Well, gee, I guess they never heard that fighting games _still_ sell on consoles, a decade later.
Second page... from what I understand, so that game was bad because it was a button-mashing Diablo clone. Well, gee, someone tell that to the people _still_ selling button-mashing Diablo clones.
Etc.
As I was saying, just another "top X worst Y", and not even well thought out at that.
1. I'm sorry, but that's still no excuse for fraud and deceit. If you think someone's ideas or books are crap, then just offer less for them in the first place. Hiding money via generous transfers to daughter companies and bogus overhead rates, isn't the honest solution any way you want to slice it.
I mean, picture I offer you a generous 20% royalties if you let me make a movie based on your novel. Then somehow the movie actually does surprisingly well, but I come and say, "oh, sorry, we actually made a loss. See, Moraelin Film Marketting Inc. took 50% of the gross, and Moraelin Film Distributions Corp. took 30%, and Moraelin Props Inc took 15% for the sets, and the remaining 5% doesn't even cover the filming expenses. Those dastardly daughter companies made a tidy profit, but I made a loss, so I don't have to pay you anything." Regardless of whether it was a good novel or a bad novel, it's still dishonest. (Even if technically it might not be illegal.) I promised you some money, and did some siphoning to my other companies just to avoid paying it.
2. And the problem isn't just Forrest Gump, they do the same to better authors too. They even do it to other guys: e.g., at the bottom of it, that's why Peter Jackson isn't directing The Hobbit. They shafted him too. (And the actors too for merchandise rights, btw.) According to the studios, the LOTR movies actually made a big loss, somehow, so they don't have to pay any royalties.
He is not trying to push the fascist state image or to spin a conspiracy theory. The primary goal of all of Moore's documentaries is to expose the cozy relationship between the corporate America and the government.
Unfortunately that _is_ a fascist state image. When the government is _that_ extremely cosy with the military-industrial complex (to the extreme he describes it), plus an aggressive imperialist international stance, banner waving, _and_ routinely silencing dissenting opinions (see how someone is _always_ trying to suppress his books and movies)... well, that's almost literally how Mussolini's Italy worked.
The bottom line: Moore's movies make the average Joe feel even more average - small, insignificant and, eventually, seriously pissed off.
And that's just one thing I have a problem with. Decisions taken in anger tend to be the worst possible decisions, and often cutting one's nose to spite one's face.
I don't want Joe Average to be pissed off, I'd rather have Joe Average make an _informed_ choice. I don't want Joe Average voting on, say, health care reform just to show the middle finger to Bush and his rich buddies, I want Joe Average to actually understand what he's getting and, most importantly, what the trade off is.
Now I'm not saying you should (necessarily) keep the existing system. If another one exists that works better, ok, change the system. But I want Joe to actually understand the choice, not to just be manipulated into being angry against just the right party.
I don't think Moore ever called America a "facist oligarchy" - that must be your exaggerated representation of his perspective. A little hyperbolic, don't you think?
No. I've yet to see at least one book or movie of his where he doesn't play the conspiracy card that the FBI/CIA/neocons/whatever are trying to silence him and steal/block/whatever his book or movie. E.g., ooer, this time he had to hide a copy of the movie in Canada so the FBI doesn't confiscate it.
I'm sorry, but the only states where that kind of things happened, were either fascist or communist totalitarian regimes. If you live in a state where the government routinely confiscates and outlaws movies just because they're conflicting with the ruling party's ideology, then you _are_ already screwed.
It doesn't matter if you actually use the exact words "fascist dictatorship" literally, at that point, you've just described one. And he's hammering on an image of America that's fitting that image to the letter. Whatever you want to call it, that's what he describes.
Again, I can't recall Moore expressing any concern about the Gestapo or the SS doing these things. Perhaps you just brought up Nazis and book-burning as a sort of over-the-top caricature of the concerns Moore does express?
You mean unlike TFA, where he claims stuff like having to hide his movie abroad so the government can't confiscate and suppress it? Or unlike the times he claimed that some government/big-oil/neocon conspiracy got the publishers to avoid his book, and it only got miraculously saved by, for example, some librarian protest? (It must not have been a too powerful pressure after all, if a couple of librarians are all it takes to change the publisher's mind.) I'm sorry, but what he describes there is closer to a totalitarian secret police than to anything resembling even America. Whether you actually call them "Gestapo" or "NKVD" or nothing whatsoever, that's what he describes.
But seeing how strongly you oppose hyperbole and exaggeration, I can see you'd never resort to such tactics.
1. I'm not opposed to hyperbole as such, I'm opposed to over-using it. As I was saying, figures of speech are like condiments in food. A little is good for taste, but when it's the main ingredient it's bad.
2. Hey, I never said _I_ was any good at using hyperbole:P I'm just saying I don't find it fun to read, and doesn't help with "suspension of disbelief", so to speak, either. Same as I can't cook worth crap either, but I know when a food has more salt than everything else combined anyway.
In a nutshell, they calculate a shitload of costs (and often actually give that money to their daughter companies and such) as percentages of the income. E.g., marketting for the movie might be calculated as, say, 25% of the income, so even if your film sells a billion copies, that expense just increases accordingly. Often to the point where the movie _will_ look like it made them a loss, even if it became the greatest success of all time and sold a billion copies.
And since there is no time when you can say "ok, it's over", you can't even really call the bluff. There is no date when you can say "ok, it's over, let's divide the loot." There's always the DVD version, the Blue Ray version, the remastered edition, the "han shot third" edition, etc, so they can just say they earmarked those funds for marketting those. So, see, it's still not a profit, it's money your movie cost them.
It's not a joke, such movies as Forrest Gump or the LOTR movies, according to Hollywood, actually made a loss. Mind-boggling as that sounds.
_Why_ they do it, is so they can shaft you on royalties. Any contract where they promise you x% of the profit, is almost guaranteed to be x% of zero, since they'll massage it into looking like it made a loss.
Frankly, Marvel already made a damn good deal if they made anything at all.
Which also tells you why they'd rather take the risks. Because it beats getting shafted. Someone probably woke up to the reality that they got shafted again, and trying to get a better contract is like tilting at the windmills. So they're trying to avoid Hollywood, if they can.
Wouldn't even be the only one. The author of Forrest Gump, IIRC, also refused to sell them the rights to the sequel, after being shafted on the first (and thus only) movie. Since they said the first one made them a loss, he said something like that he can't in good conscience let any more money be wasted on a failure.
Marvel, on the other hand, obviously doesn't want to just give up on movies completely, like that guy did. So they're trying to do it themselves.
It's not that simple. If a nuke goes off right above you, the fallout will be substantial, and a lot of the dust and ashes will become radioactive just because of the radiation bombardment. (A lot of previously stable atoms can absorb a neutron and become a radioactive isotope, for example.) The dust from the bomb itself contains a lot of unstable isotopes, and a lot of vaporized enriched uranium that didn't get a chance to fission. (You never get 100% of the uranium mass to blow up, no matter how you build the bomb.) When it cools off, you'll have some kilos of uranium oxide around. Even leaving aside the radiation problem, uranium is a heavy metal and thus toxic.
The blast may have also breached tanks full of chemicals at a local factory, vaporized some building isolated with asbestos, or burned God knows what.
So basically a bunker that isn't water proof might well be less useful than you think.
Look, I'm actually more to the left than he is, as usually is the case in Europe. What by US standards counts as "conservative" and "liberal", in most of continental Europe would pass for "ultra-conservative" and "conservative". Yeah, we're a bunch of commie mutant traitors like that;)
I even agree with some of his points. Well, dunno about this particular movie, but I ended up buying a couple of his books because the back cover said they were "hilarious." (Ooer. Americans must be quite a cheerful and fun loving folk, if even that kind of bitter whine counts as "hilarious".)
That said, his endless "auugh, the government is out to get me" is starting to look stupid already, for a start. Look, if the government wanted to silence him, he'd be silent already. If America was the kind of fascist oligarchy that he always describes, he probably wouldn't even be alive at this point, or at least someone would have framed him for something already and sent him to a maximum security jail.
This is just yet another such publicity stunt, for conspiracy theorists. How about waiting until the government actually does something about it, before "leaking" the movie? Or if he wants to distribute it via P2P, fine, that's a mighty fine way to distribute your works, really. But it's just a choice of distribution, not some great act of resistance against fascism.
Hyperbole (like metaphors, similes, and everything else) is like a condiment in food. If half your dish is salt or pepper, you probably overdid it. Same here. Not only it makes his bitter whine sound even more bitter, it doesn't even serve his purposes that well, since you never know what's a genuine assessment and what's another of his over-the-top hyperboles. It's like the boy who cried wolf: by the time you've described something as a totalitarian plot for the 1000'th time, noone (sane) takes it seriously any more.
Such ego-stroking stunts are just that kind of bad hyperbole. Yes, probably some people above would dislike his point, but some might even agree with him. Either way, he's _not_ going to end up with the Gestapo on his doorstep and with the SS burning his movies and book, either.
More importantly, there are always two sides to each issues. There's rarely a free meal: to get X you give up some Y, or viceversa. And neither extreme is an utopia, so you have to figure out your own least crappy compromise among all possible crappy compromises. Which is why there's a political debate and more than one party and platform. One thinks that it's totally worth giving up X to get more Y, one thinks the opposite, one thinks the balance is good enough as it is, one wants to give up both X and Y to gain Z, and yet another one runs around with pencils up its nose and thinks it's an airplane.
The reason why the government does X instead of Y, may not always be the best, may not always even be honest, but aren't always "let's oppress someone for the fun of it either" either. Whether it's about health care or letting the Bin Laden family fly away after 9/11, there are real issues ranging from costs to international relations to ideology behind those choices. And by ideology I mean "what we think is best for the economy", not just "let's be neo-conservative because the conspiracy told us to". Those ideas might well be wrong (everyone can't be right at the same time, or you wouldn't need more than one party), but painting one side with the broad brush of "auugh, they're all bought by their industrialist friends and trying to silence me" is just an ad-hominem.
Stances basically saying "my version is by definition perfect, and everyone else is a fascist peddling crooked crap solutions" aren't really doing anyone any good.
Or at least I hope it's hyperbole, because otherwise he'd have to be paranoid schizophrenic to actually believe all that. But I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. It's probably hyperbole.
Well, here's one less technological reason: time and economic motivation.
Let's say we actually discover some hideously cheap and massive source of energy, let's say we build hideously powerful and efficient engines, let's say we even transcend to some society where 200 people in a generation ship don't just kill each other in 420 years, etc. Take your pick of magic wands except FTL, no other restrictions. Mix and match from your favourite SF authors, or come up with an even more magic-like technology. As far as tech goes, anything goes.
Permissive enough a setup, I would think. OK?
Well, what's the motivation to invest some massive money into creating a colony? No, ideological reasons don't make good reasons for that kind of a huge investment. Societies which blew huge chunks into ideological tours-de-force tended to go bankrupt. See the USSR, see North Korea, etc.
No, the actually successful colonization efforts have been driven by (A) economic reasons, or (B) overpopulation. As an example of A you can see the success of the British East India Company in, well, India, and as an example of B you can see for example the colonization of America by the British.
Well, overpopulation too is becoming extinct. It used to be that you need to make 3-4 kids just so 1 would survive, so you made 10 just in case. But as more and more countries get sanitation and medical care, and experience long times without wars, there is first a boom and then they actually start to breed a lot less. (Though they might still get some minimal population growth via immigration.) The same pattern has applied almost everywhere so far. Once people finally figure out that 1 kid is more than enough to pass the genes, they actually start to stop after 1 or 2 kids. And they tend to start later too. So, no, overpopulation won't be the driving reason for star colonization.
That leaves economic reasons. We could get uranium and all sorts of other useful stuff from our colonies. Right?
Well, wrong. Think: how long does it take to actually ship those materials, and to notify the colony of demand changes. Let's say, 20 light years away, travel at an average 10% of the speed of light. (Which actually means accelerating gradually to 20% at the middle of the distance, and decelerating the last half. It's already waaay future tech.)
So now think that something changed down here. We don't need uranium any more, we need thorium. It takes 20 light years just for a radio signal to reach them, and another 200 years for the ship to get here. In the meantime, we're still getting the old cargo ships. Some 220 years after we stopped needing the previous resource, we're still not getting the new thing we need. In fact, we're probably still getting the old stuff we don't need any more, because probably noone fitted the ship with twice the fuel so they can turn around and go back.
Thing is, demand is increasingly volatile, and it's nuts to plan what you'll need in 220 years. Some 220 years ago, oil was virtually useless, now it's a big political issue. Grain and food were expensive and many a captain made a neat profit carrying grain, now we subsidize farmers to _not_ produce more of it, we just have to freaking much. Coal went from being used only for gunpowder some 220 years ago, to being a major strategic resource (all industry, railroads, and warships used coal by the end of the 19'th century), to being "meh" again. Weaving was a major money-making profession, and good hand-woven textiles were expensive trade goods, then it declined to the point where today even the janitor can afford more clothes than a _noble_ had back then. Opium went from being worth a war with China about 150 years ago, to not even being legal any more. Natural rubber went from being worthless (before the 1870's or so, noone even considered it worth bothering with in the colonies), to being a major strategic resource, to just being synthetized in industrial quantities. Etc.
And you can completely forget about importing anything manuf
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Actually, you know, it's sorta funny to hear people ranting and raving about how 32 bit killed 3dfx or lack of T&L killed 3dfx, without having even the faintest clue what actually happened to 3dfx.
In a nutshell:
1. 3dfx at one point decided to buy a graphics card manufacturer, just so, you know, they'd make more money by also manufacturing their own cards.
2. They missed a cycle, because whatever software they were using to design their chips had a brain-fart and produced a non-functional chip design. So they spent 6 months rearranging the Voodoo 5 by hand.
The Voodoo 5 wasn't supposed to go head to head with the GeForce 2. It was supposed to, at most, go head to head with the GF256 SDR, not even the DDR flavour. And it would have done well enough there, especially since at the time there was pretty much no software that did T&L anyway.
But a 6 month delay was fatal. For all that time they had nothing better than a Voodoo 3 to compete with the GF256, and, frankly, it was outdated at that time. With or without 32 bit, it was a card that was the same generation as the TNT, so it just couldn't keep up. Worse yet, by the time the Voodoo 5 finally came out, it had to go head to head with the GF2, and it sucked there. It wasn't just the lack of T&L, it could barely keep up in terms of fill rate and lacked some features too. E.g., it couldn't even do trilinear and FSAA at the same time.
Worse yet, see problem #1 I mentioned. The dip in sales meant they suddenly had a shitload of factory space that just sat idle and cost them money. And they just had no plan what to do with that capacity. They had no other cards they could manufacture there. (The tv tuner they tried to make, came too late and sold too little to save them.) Basically while poor sales alone would have just meant less money, this one actually bled them money hand over fist. And that was maybe the most important factor that sunk them.
Add to that such mis-haps like,
3. The Voodoo 5 screenshot fuck-up. While the final image did look nice and did have 22 bit precision at 16 bit speeds, each of the 4 samples that went into it was a dithered 16 bit mess. There was no final combined image as such, there were 4 component images and the screen refresh circuitry combined them on the fly. And taking a screenshot in any game would get you the first of the 4 component images, so it looked a lot worse than what you'd see on the screen.
Now it probably was a lot less important than #1 and #2 for sinking 3dfx, but it was a piece of bad press they could have done without. While the big review sites did soon figure out "wtf, there's something wrong with these screenshots", the fucked up images were already in the wild. And people who had never seen the original image were using them all over the place as final "proof" that 3dfx sucks and that 22 bit accuracy is a myth.
Actually, it makes me wonder. Bear in mind that I'm taking wild guesses here, though.
i ld kind.
For a start there was this other piece of research some time ago about how playing games even makes people somewhat forget about pain. As in, the physical pain kind. I don't know, it sounds fairly useful to me.
Second, for the kind of people who'd _need_ a brain interface, I'm guessing they can't use their hands either. Maybe it's ADHD speaking, but it sounds completely fucking boring. You can't even read a book, or change TV channels or call a friend. You can't even drive a wheelchair to talk to the neighbour, so basically you don't even have any kind of social life, not even the posting-to-slashdot or pretending-to-be-the-populer-jock-warrior-in-a-gu
Basically it sounds to me like it's a hell of a lot worse than whether you have sex or not. You're seven levels deeper in hell than that. You don't even have the pre-requisites to even think of sex, like being able to actually have a social life of any kind and meet someone who'd be even remotely interested in you.
Plus, while sex is nice, it's... what? Maybe you can make a whole hour out of it, foreplay included. If they had hands for foreplay anyway. That still leaves 15 hours awake of not being able to do anything. So from a simple maths point of view, between (A) being able to do _something_ the whole day, and (B) having sex once a day followed by 15 hours of watching the walls... I dunno, the former doesn't seem that horrible an alternative.
Plus, how would you realistically solve their sex problem anyway? Pay a small army of prostitutes? Because if all someone can do is lay in bed, they're not going to be that attractive to many women anyway, and they won't have the opportunity to meet many women anyway. At least if they can do something online, they might have some small chance of actually talking to one. Or if all else fails, it gives them something to do instead of spending 16 hours a day fantasizing about sex.
Basically, "yeah, but they'd need sex more" seems to be akin to giving a chocolate bar once a week to starving kids in Africa. Sure, chocolate is nice, but I'm guessing they'd still be happier with having bread and clean water 3 times a day instead. The next step would be maybe some vegetables too. And so on. There's a long list of stuff they need more than chocolate. Necessities before luxuries, and all that.
A man is only as old as the woman he feels ;)
You just have to think positively. Sounds to me like a cure for obesity.
RFID are "passive" devices, in that they're powered by the reader's electromagnetic field. Think like a transformer (the kind with coils, not the robots;), sorta, and the reader has one half while the RFID chip has the other half.
Well, there are active ones too, but you wouldn't want to operate that guy every year to change the batteries.
This limits range drastically, since both EM fields power is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. Basically, if you wanted to scan from a mile away to see where your sex offender is, be prepared to fry everything that moves in that area. You'd have to not only have a beam powerful enough to power a normal RFID from a mile, but still be powerful enough that the RFID can broadcast enough power to be sensed from a mile.
The army is an even pickier customer, since while you may want, for example, to know how many gas masks or shells are still in a crate, you don't want the enemy to know that from a mile away anyway. You don't want the enemy's radar stations to say, "guys, I'm sensing a big ammo dump at these coordinates, aim all artillery that way and fire at will."
That said, "sex offenders" is:
1. a broad enough category. It can mean just as well someone who was drunk off their ass and peed in public, or whatever. It doesn't have to mean convicted rapist.
2. something which should be the courts' domain, but instead ends up a public hysteria issue, as you illustrate in proposing to perform mandatory surgery on them.
I'm sorry, but there's a fine difference between "rule of the law" and "mob rule", even for sex offenders. It's up to the courts to determine if they're still guilty/dangerous enough to be kept behind bars, or served their sentence and can probably rent a flat and get a job like everyone else. It's not up to neighbourhood mobs to require everyone scanned, or up to random gas station owners to decide "youse can't tank here, 'cuz we don't deal with your type", which is what would happen with a RFID implant.
Plus, the courts and police have enough rules and safeguards (and still occasionally send an innocent to jail) which evolved out of thousands of years of discovering how to apply the law _fairly_. We've already had city-state mayors passing arbitrary decrees and applying their own uneven justice. We've already had mob rule plenty of times and its dispensing arbitrary justice by whims, populism and mass hysterias. (E.g., the democracy of ancient Greece also produced such excesses as Athens executing its fleet admirals because they failed to save some sailors in a _storm_, or as Socrates being sentenced to death for just being the unpopular guys.) And it took us a lot of time and some bloody revolutions to get rid of that crap. In the meantime we've discovered that it's better to apply the law fairly and uniformly, and we wrote the rules and passed the laws to see to it that it happens that way.
Mob rule just doesn't have any of those safeguards, and it already had thousands of years to show how much harm it can do.
So even for convicted offenders (sex or otherwise), I'd rather have the courts deal with them, than have them scanned by neighbourhood posses and judged summarily by every newspaper stand owner.
In other words, there's a reason we don't just tattoo it on their forehead. If we wanted those people victimized for the rest of their life, we wouldn't have had to wait for RFID, it would be cheaper to do just that. But the whole idea is that it's not supposed to work that way. Unless you're a judge and it happens in court, it's just not your job to decide extra punishment, including where that guy can go or can't go.
Yes, IQ is _one_ measure of _one_ kind of intelligence. So far, so good.
(And a very flawed one, since it seems to reflect education and past reflexes a lot more than what it claims to measure. But let's ignore that for now.)
The problem becomes when people start acting like it's the one single measure of intelligence, and obviously the one number by which you can measure that human on the whole. That is what some of us are railing about.
It's like proclaiming that everyone's fitness and physical prowess can be squeezed in one single number. Let's say, how fast they run the 100m sprint. Obviously, the shorter the time, in better physical condition someone is, and the better they'll perform in sports. Right?
Well, wrong. Some people have instead very high endurance: a sprinter won't typically win the marathon, and viceversa. Some people have great eye-to-hand coordination: a sprinter won't necessarily be a good tennis player. Some people have great raw strength and can lift impressive weights. Some people can make split-second assessments of a chaotic situation, and take the right decision in that split second: see, most team sports. Etc.
It would be pure stupidity to claim that all those unrelated skills and talents can be squeezed into a single number, and that you can neatly assess and order every single human by that one criterion.
And that's just the mistake that is done with IQ: everyone acts as if there's only one kind of intelligence, and IQ measures it objectively. If you even look at the title of this thread, it doesn't say "first born have higher IQ", it says outright, "first born gets the brains". _That_ is the problem. In the mind of whoever wrote that, there was no room for other kinds of intelligence or other ways to measure it. For him, IQ = Brains, it's that simple.
More importantly, the excuse that some extremely successful people didn't finish university is used as a "so what if I'm not bothering to learn anything?" or "it's good to be an underachiever" excuse. What such people miss is the fact that those guys worked hard and learned on their own anyway.
E.g., while it's true that, say, Steve Jobs decided to drop out, then he hung around and took the courses that interested him. He learned a lot in that time.
Or I do personally know some people who are well paid software architects, consultants and the like, and who did drop out of college and went on to just do what they liked the most. (And in retrospect, I should have probably done the same thing.) But the thing is: we're not talking people who spent their time getting drunk off their ass. We're talking people who had a passion for computers, and spent most of their waking hours learning and getting some practical experience. That's a freakin' huge difference.
Or since the GP post was about the NBA, I'd wager that there too we're talking about people who spent a lot of their own time training, or just playing the game. It may not be the most intellectual or school-grade-driven job, but it involved some talent, dedication and plain-old hard work anyway.
Basically, yes, it's possible to be successful and well paid without a school, but the rub is: it takes a lot of effort anyway. Those who were just underachievers, are those you see behind the counter at McDonalds.
Yes, because obviously plate tectonics are totally caused by global warming, and we didn't have earthquakes or volcanoes before the 19'th century industrialization. Heck, seein' as the current theory is that plate tectonics are a very important part of the Earth's dynamo, we probably didn't even have a magnetic field before and solar radiation blew all hydrogen into space like on Venus. Plus, it makes me respect the age of exploration sailors a lot more if they managed to use a compass without a magnetic field ;)
If it only were one lost letter, I'd probably even think it's a typo. I tend to occasionally lose a letter or two too.
My biggest gripes are with (1) l33t, and (2) words mangled for no other reason than mangling them.
I mean, take the following example taken verbatim from a COH group chat: "soz m8 g2g gt skewl 2moz" No, literally.
Where shall I even start on that abhomination:
1. "skewl" I mean, what the _bloody_ fuck? It's only one letter shorter than "school", but the "o" in "school" is double, so you don't even need to move your fingers much to type it. And _especially_ for one finger typists (since often the excuse for such monstrosities is "I can't type fast enough"), "skewl" actually involves moving your finger around more.
It's a word mangled by retards just to sound "kewl". Fucktards.
2. "soz", "2moz" and other such use of "z" for half the word endings in the fucking dictionary. I mean, wtf? "Z" doesn't even remotely sound like anything with a "r" in it. And which ending _is_ is supposed to be, anyway? "rry" and "rrow" are very different bits of word.
3. "m8", "2moz" and other such l33t use of digits. Here's a thought for those smackards: not everyone is a native English speaker, so their reflex reading of a digit will be in their mother tongue, not in English. So is it "macht"? (8 = Acht in German. "Macht" = power, or the Force.) Mocho? Mhuit? Or what? You're forcing someone to effectively translate it back and forth, piece by piece, just to discover what it means.
Ah well...
You know, everyone seems to be focused on the V2 and on "what if the Germans put an A bomb on one?" scenarios. And there's nothing wrong with that, as such, it's indeed valid points by themselves. But IMHO it still misses the more direct refutal of such "innovation didn't ever do much" luddite whines: what about the innovations that _did_ make a huge difference to the war? E.g.,
1. Gyro Gunsights. It's something that most people don't even know existed, because it wasn't hyped much. Everyone knows about the atom bomb or about the Norden sights (also an analog computer, btw) but this thing may have done more than the atom bomb and the V2 combined. By the end of the WW2 it gave the Allies a _massive_ advantage in air combat. It was mounted not only on fighters, but on bomber turrets too, and helped seal the fate of the Luftwaffe in a major way.
Basically it's an analog computer that shows you where to shoot to hit a moving target with uncanny accuracy. The fact is, estimating lead is very difficult even for veteran pilots, and this thing let even a moderately trained newbie shoot better than some of the aces.
And BTW, another analog computer was used by anti-aircraft artillery units, and helped shoot down a hell of a lot of V-1's.
2. The Colossus computer used by the UK to break the German codes. Frankly, knowing where the Germans are and what they're up to, might have been _the_ one factor that affected the war the most.
3. In the same vein: RADAR. The "Battle Of Britain" was massively influenced by the fact that the British had early warning of the incoming planes. A lot more German pilots and later V-1 bombs were shot down because they got detected early by RADAR, than if everyone were to rely on the chance of spotting them from another airplane.
It also claimed a lot of German submarines, as they tended to surface at night to recharge their batteries or move around. An airplane equipped with radar and a spotlight (the Leigh Light) would close in by radar, light the spotlight, then bomb the submarine to pieces. So efficient was the combination, that by the end of 42 most submarines actually preferred to surface by day, so they can at least see the aircraft and maybe fight back.
4. SONAR. Without it, everyone would have been literally blind against submarines. To illustrate how important it was, even a short interval of blindness, as the destroyer passed over the submarine to launch the depth charges, often allowed the submarine to change direction and escape unharmed. That's why such weapons as the Hedgehog and Squid were developped: so you can shoot at the submarine before it enters your blind spot.
5. Want something that would have changed the face of the war even more radically, if it didn't come too late? R4M AA rockets. Germans eventually packed batteries of 24 55mm AA rockets on their airplanes, that could tear a bomber apart from 600m to 1km distance. Safely beyond the range of the machineguns on those bombers.
They didn't need any guidance, btw, since the idea was to _saturate_ the zone with a salvo of rockets. The simple natural spread of the salvo ensured that at least 2-3 would hit the bomber you're aiming at, and the 55mm warhead was more powerful than any gun you could put on an airplane.
An anti-tank version was also designed.
It also was the basis for the US FFAR pods.
Etc, etc, etc.
Briefly whoever can honestly think that innovation and technology were overrated in winning WW2... well, they can ask the Chinese how well their spearmen fared against Japanese tanks. (Not all Chinese divisions were that badly equipped, but, yes, some were still equipped literally to medieval stan
Heh. Trust me, religion for a change has nothing to do with it. It makes for some popular bullshit rhetoric in some circles to blame everything on religion, but it's rarely that simple.
Let me say it loud and clear: fear of violence has _nothing_ to do with religion, and wanting to protect your kids has _nothing_ to do with religion. If you think society fears murder and murderers only because of some arbitrary commandment in the bible, then, sad to say, you may be a psychopath. No, seriously, medically speaking. Ditto if you think that it's only some arbitrary religious commandment that makes people try to protect their kids.
Now whether censoring games actually helps with either, that's not clear indeed. But a religious thing it isn't.
You still don't seem to get it.
Talks about how "they" wanted to ban it, "they" found a back door, etc, are good and fine until you realize who "they" are. _Again_, it's not some government organization that gave that AO rating: the ESRB is the gaming industry's own voluntary asociation. It answers to noone else.
So who are "they"? You're trying to tell me that the rest of the game producers were conspiring against Take Two? Or what?
Bullshit. While I enjoy a good emotional appeal like McCarthyism as much as the next guy, in this case it's just bull.
1. During the McCarthy era the government actually sent letters to businesses and otherwise bullied them into toeing the party line. In this case I don't think it's the ESRB who's telling Nintendo and Sony to not publish AO games. You know, what with both being Japanese companies and all.
2. McCartyism made sure that you'll never work again, while this at worst means not publishing a game. For extra points: a game they should have had a good idea from the start that it'll get an AO rating. I'm sorry but there's a freakin' massive difference between the two.
And incidentally: no, you don't have a sacred right to make a profit at all cost. There's a difference between freedom of speech, which is what the McCarthy era was infringing on, and the right to make a profit by selling ultra-violent games to kids. I mean, what next? The right to open a cocaine stand in a school?
3. Sorry to dawn some reality upon your self-righteous parrade, but the ESRB is the gaming industry's own organizations. It's not like that AO rating came from some oppressive congressional comission. It's the gaming industry's own organization, and it uses people who are unaffiliated with either the government or the devs to judge a game's suitability for kids. So basically it's some people like you and me who judged that, nope, a game where extreme violence is the _whole_ game is unsuitable to kids.
And let me say that again: I'm a gamer too, but I _don't_ think it sounds like a game I'd buy for my kids.
And finally, lemme say another thing: I'm sick and tired of the whole retarded hypocrisy. Whenever someone complains about kids and violent games, what's the standard retort? "Yeah, but it wasn't for kids, most gamers are adults, adults have a right to buy a violent game if they want to, blah, blah, blah." Then the game gets an Adults Only rating, and what happens? "Auugh, censorship! McCarthyism! The government is trying to stop me from selling the game at WalMart! We'll be ruined without them selling our game!"
Well, the industry should freakin' make up its mind already. Either A or B, not both. Either you're genuinely making games for adults, in which case freakin' learn to live with a rating that says just that: "Adults Only." Or you want to sell those games to kids, in which case freakin' learn to live with what's considered apropriate for kids. Neither is wrong by itself, but choose _one_. One or the other, not both.
Because the distinct impression I'm left with, is that they want to both make a "duh, it was for adults game" _and_ then sell it to kids anyway.
It's worse actually. If you actually try to keep the buzz up for several years straight, pretty much by making an even more over-the-top claim periodically, you end up with one (or both of):
1. guaranteed disappointment, as the game can't possibly match the increasingly outrageous claims. See, B&W.
2. backlash, as people get fed up with the hype and pretty much start developping an allergy to it. See, Daikatana.
Well, it sorta does in an indirect way, at the very least.
Imagine that you're talking to a guy that looks like Rambo, but has a squeaky eunuch voice. (Well, at least an adult would have to be an eunuch to sound like that.) I'm guessing you'd be trying real hard to not burst into fits of laughter. I'm also guessing that it would make it a lot harder to take him seriously as a bad-ass tough guy, or at least you'd get funny ideas what he's really compensating for.
That's the thing. Regardless of 11 years or not, most voices just don't match that character. It may not necessarily be age or gender discrimination as such, but a character kind of is a _whole_. If the parts are mismatched, it starts to trip suspension of disbelief. Think "uncanny valley" if it makes the point easier to swallow. (Although I don't actually believe the uncanny valley hypothesis as such.)
Basically a big burly male orc with a 11 year old girl's voice, is just as weird as the same orc with hooves or floppy ears. It makes one think "wth is wrong with that guy?"
Thing thing is, as long as you don't know something about a character, you're free to imagine the details it in a way that makes sense for you. Having the wrong details shoved down your throat can trip suspension of disbelief in a major way.
And the more time you've had to imagine it in your own way, the more it will feel wrong when you get something that doesn't match. See how fans of some, say, novel or comic end up arguing to hell and back in which ways it was the wrong choice of actors.
So basically, if I understand it right, it could have been a great game if only:
1. it had been better tested, _and_
2. they had fixed the bugs and gameplay problems, _and_
3. they had judged their market better, _and_
4. had better marketting.
I'm sorry, but, by the same token, any game ever could have been great if only they did those 4 steps. Daikatana would have been a great hit if it did all 4 of those.
Heck, especially #4 was what created the massive anti-Daikatana backlash. ("John Romero will make you his bitch.")
Ah, don't take it too seriously. These days everyone has to throw together some smack talking "top X worst Y", just to show that they're hip and irreverent like that, and you better believe them that when, by contrast, they give 95% to EA's latest game they really mean it.
There are a ton of games who were worse, or did worse for other reasons. Daikatana, ET, etc.
The reasoning starts to get dubious right on the first page linked from the summary. So a console fighting game is bad because by the 90's everyone was sick and tired of fighting game clones? Well, gee, I guess they never heard that fighting games _still_ sell on consoles, a decade later.
Second page... from what I understand, so that game was bad because it was a button-mashing Diablo clone. Well, gee, someone tell that to the people _still_ selling button-mashing Diablo clones.
Etc.
As I was saying, just another "top X worst Y", and not even well thought out at that.
1. I'm sorry, but that's still no excuse for fraud and deceit. If you think someone's ideas or books are crap, then just offer less for them in the first place. Hiding money via generous transfers to daughter companies and bogus overhead rates, isn't the honest solution any way you want to slice it.
I mean, picture I offer you a generous 20% royalties if you let me make a movie based on your novel. Then somehow the movie actually does surprisingly well, but I come and say, "oh, sorry, we actually made a loss. See, Moraelin Film Marketting Inc. took 50% of the gross, and Moraelin Film Distributions Corp. took 30%, and Moraelin Props Inc took 15% for the sets, and the remaining 5% doesn't even cover the filming expenses. Those dastardly daughter companies made a tidy profit, but I made a loss, so I don't have to pay you anything." Regardless of whether it was a good novel or a bad novel, it's still dishonest. (Even if technically it might not be illegal.) I promised you some money, and did some siphoning to my other companies just to avoid paying it.
2. And the problem isn't just Forrest Gump, they do the same to better authors too. They even do it to other guys: e.g., at the bottom of it, that's why Peter Jackson isn't directing The Hobbit. They shafted him too. (And the actors too for merchandise rights, btw.) According to the studios, the LOTR movies actually made a big loss, somehow, so they don't have to pay any royalties.
Unfortunately that _is_ a fascist state image. When the government is _that_ extremely cosy with the military-industrial complex (to the extreme he describes it), plus an aggressive imperialist international stance, banner waving, _and_ routinely silencing dissenting opinions (see how someone is _always_ trying to suppress his books and movies)... well, that's almost literally how Mussolini's Italy worked.
And that's just one thing I have a problem with. Decisions taken in anger tend to be the worst possible decisions, and often cutting one's nose to spite one's face.
I don't want Joe Average to be pissed off, I'd rather have Joe Average make an _informed_ choice. I don't want Joe Average voting on, say, health care reform just to show the middle finger to Bush and his rich buddies, I want Joe Average to actually understand what he's getting and, most importantly, what the trade off is.
Now I'm not saying you should (necessarily) keep the existing system. If another one exists that works better, ok, change the system. But I want Joe to actually understand the choice, not to just be manipulated into being angry against just the right party.
No. I've yet to see at least one book or movie of his where he doesn't play the conspiracy card that the FBI/CIA/neocons/whatever are trying to silence him and steal/block/whatever his book or movie. E.g., ooer, this time he had to hide a copy of the movie in Canada so the FBI doesn't confiscate it.
I'm sorry, but the only states where that kind of things happened, were either fascist or communist totalitarian regimes. If you live in a state where the government routinely confiscates and outlaws movies just because they're conflicting with the ruling party's ideology, then you _are_ already screwed.
It doesn't matter if you actually use the exact words "fascist dictatorship" literally, at that point, you've just described one. And he's hammering on an image of America that's fitting that image to the letter. Whatever you want to call it, that's what he describes.
You mean unlike TFA, where he claims stuff like having to hide his movie abroad so the government can't confiscate and suppress it? Or unlike the times he claimed that some government/big-oil/neocon conspiracy got the publishers to avoid his book, and it only got miraculously saved by, for example, some librarian protest? (It must not have been a too powerful pressure after all, if a couple of librarians are all it takes to change the publisher's mind.) I'm sorry, but what he describes there is closer to a totalitarian secret police than to anything resembling even America. Whether you actually call them "Gestapo" or "NKVD" or nothing whatsoever, that's what he describes.
1. I'm not opposed to hyperbole as such, I'm opposed to over-using it. As I was saying, figures of speech are like condiments in food. A little is good for taste, but when it's the main ingredient it's bad.
2. Hey, I never said _I_ was any good at using hyperbole
Basically because of Hollywood Accounting.
In a nutshell, they calculate a shitload of costs (and often actually give that money to their daughter companies and such) as percentages of the income. E.g., marketting for the movie might be calculated as, say, 25% of the income, so even if your film sells a billion copies, that expense just increases accordingly. Often to the point where the movie _will_ look like it made them a loss, even if it became the greatest success of all time and sold a billion copies.
And since there is no time when you can say "ok, it's over", you can't even really call the bluff. There is no date when you can say "ok, it's over, let's divide the loot." There's always the DVD version, the Blue Ray version, the remastered edition, the "han shot third" edition, etc, so they can just say they earmarked those funds for marketting those. So, see, it's still not a profit, it's money your movie cost them.
It's not a joke, such movies as Forrest Gump or the LOTR movies, according to Hollywood, actually made a loss. Mind-boggling as that sounds.
_Why_ they do it, is so they can shaft you on royalties. Any contract where they promise you x% of the profit, is almost guaranteed to be x% of zero, since they'll massage it into looking like it made a loss.
Frankly, Marvel already made a damn good deal if they made anything at all.
Which also tells you why they'd rather take the risks. Because it beats getting shafted. Someone probably woke up to the reality that they got shafted again, and trying to get a better contract is like tilting at the windmills. So they're trying to avoid Hollywood, if they can.
Wouldn't even be the only one. The author of Forrest Gump, IIRC, also refused to sell them the rights to the sequel, after being shafted on the first (and thus only) movie. Since they said the first one made them a loss, he said something like that he can't in good conscience let any more money be wasted on a failure.
Marvel, on the other hand, obviously doesn't want to just give up on movies completely, like that guy did. So they're trying to do it themselves.
It's not that simple. If a nuke goes off right above you, the fallout will be substantial, and a lot of the dust and ashes will become radioactive just because of the radiation bombardment. (A lot of previously stable atoms can absorb a neutron and become a radioactive isotope, for example.) The dust from the bomb itself contains a lot of unstable isotopes, and a lot of vaporized enriched uranium that didn't get a chance to fission. (You never get 100% of the uranium mass to blow up, no matter how you build the bomb.) When it cools off, you'll have some kilos of uranium oxide around. Even leaving aside the radiation problem, uranium is a heavy metal and thus toxic.
The blast may have also breached tanks full of chemicals at a local factory, vaporized some building isolated with asbestos, or burned God knows what.
So basically a bunker that isn't water proof might well be less useful than you think.
Look, I'm actually more to the left than he is, as usually is the case in Europe. What by US standards counts as "conservative" and "liberal", in most of continental Europe would pass for "ultra-conservative" and "conservative". Yeah, we're a bunch of commie mutant traitors like that ;)
I even agree with some of his points. Well, dunno about this particular movie, but I ended up buying a couple of his books because the back cover said they were "hilarious." (Ooer. Americans must be quite a cheerful and fun loving folk, if even that kind of bitter whine counts as "hilarious".)
That said, his endless "auugh, the government is out to get me" is starting to look stupid already, for a start. Look, if the government wanted to silence him, he'd be silent already. If America was the kind of fascist oligarchy that he always describes, he probably wouldn't even be alive at this point, or at least someone would have framed him for something already and sent him to a maximum security jail.
This is just yet another such publicity stunt, for conspiracy theorists. How about waiting until the government actually does something about it, before "leaking" the movie? Or if he wants to distribute it via P2P, fine, that's a mighty fine way to distribute your works, really. But it's just a choice of distribution, not some great act of resistance against fascism.
Hyperbole (like metaphors, similes, and everything else) is like a condiment in food. If half your dish is salt or pepper, you probably overdid it. Same here. Not only it makes his bitter whine sound even more bitter, it doesn't even serve his purposes that well, since you never know what's a genuine assessment and what's another of his over-the-top hyperboles. It's like the boy who cried wolf: by the time you've described something as a totalitarian plot for the 1000'th time, noone (sane) takes it seriously any more.
Such ego-stroking stunts are just that kind of bad hyperbole. Yes, probably some people above would dislike his point, but some might even agree with him. Either way, he's _not_ going to end up with the Gestapo on his doorstep and with the SS burning his movies and book, either.
More importantly, there are always two sides to each issues. There's rarely a free meal: to get X you give up some Y, or viceversa. And neither extreme is an utopia, so you have to figure out your own least crappy compromise among all possible crappy compromises. Which is why there's a political debate and more than one party and platform. One thinks that it's totally worth giving up X to get more Y, one thinks the opposite, one thinks the balance is good enough as it is, one wants to give up both X and Y to gain Z, and yet another one runs around with pencils up its nose and thinks it's an airplane.
The reason why the government does X instead of Y, may not always be the best, may not always even be honest, but aren't always "let's oppress someone for the fun of it either" either. Whether it's about health care or letting the Bin Laden family fly away after 9/11, there are real issues ranging from costs to international relations to ideology behind those choices. And by ideology I mean "what we think is best for the economy", not just "let's be neo-conservative because the conspiracy told us to". Those ideas might well be wrong (everyone can't be right at the same time, or you wouldn't need more than one party), but painting one side with the broad brush of "auugh, they're all bought by their industrialist friends and trying to silence me" is just an ad-hominem.
Stances basically saying "my version is by definition perfect, and everyone else is a fascist peddling crooked crap solutions" aren't really doing anyone any good.
Or at least I hope it's hyperbole, because otherwise he'd have to be paranoid schizophrenic to actually believe all that. But I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. It's probably hyperbole.
Well, the fact that it's slowed down and compressed sounds clever enough to me :P
Well, here's one less technological reason: time and economic motivation.
Let's say we actually discover some hideously cheap and massive source of energy, let's say we build hideously powerful and efficient engines, let's say we even transcend to some society where 200 people in a generation ship don't just kill each other in 420 years, etc. Take your pick of magic wands except FTL, no other restrictions. Mix and match from your favourite SF authors, or come up with an even more magic-like technology. As far as tech goes, anything goes.
Permissive enough a setup, I would think. OK?
Well, what's the motivation to invest some massive money into creating a colony? No, ideological reasons don't make good reasons for that kind of a huge investment. Societies which blew huge chunks into ideological tours-de-force tended to go bankrupt. See the USSR, see North Korea, etc.
No, the actually successful colonization efforts have been driven by (A) economic reasons, or (B) overpopulation. As an example of A you can see the success of the British East India Company in, well, India, and as an example of B you can see for example the colonization of America by the British.
Well, overpopulation too is becoming extinct. It used to be that you need to make 3-4 kids just so 1 would survive, so you made 10 just in case. But as more and more countries get sanitation and medical care, and experience long times without wars, there is first a boom and then they actually start to breed a lot less. (Though they might still get some minimal population growth via immigration.) The same pattern has applied almost everywhere so far. Once people finally figure out that 1 kid is more than enough to pass the genes, they actually start to stop after 1 or 2 kids. And they tend to start later too. So, no, overpopulation won't be the driving reason for star colonization.
That leaves economic reasons. We could get uranium and all sorts of other useful stuff from our colonies. Right?
Well, wrong. Think: how long does it take to actually ship those materials, and to notify the colony of demand changes. Let's say, 20 light years away, travel at an average 10% of the speed of light. (Which actually means accelerating gradually to 20% at the middle of the distance, and decelerating the last half. It's already waaay future tech.)
So now think that something changed down here. We don't need uranium any more, we need thorium. It takes 20 light years just for a radio signal to reach them, and another 200 years for the ship to get here. In the meantime, we're still getting the old cargo ships. Some 220 years after we stopped needing the previous resource, we're still not getting the new thing we need. In fact, we're probably still getting the old stuff we don't need any more, because probably noone fitted the ship with twice the fuel so they can turn around and go back.
Thing is, demand is increasingly volatile, and it's nuts to plan what you'll need in 220 years. Some 220 years ago, oil was virtually useless, now it's a big political issue. Grain and food were expensive and many a captain made a neat profit carrying grain, now we subsidize farmers to _not_ produce more of it, we just have to freaking much. Coal went from being used only for gunpowder some 220 years ago, to being a major strategic resource (all industry, railroads, and warships used coal by the end of the 19'th century), to being "meh" again. Weaving was a major money-making profession, and good hand-woven textiles were expensive trade goods, then it declined to the point where today even the janitor can afford more clothes than a _noble_ had back then. Opium went from being worth a war with China about 150 years ago, to not even being legal any more. Natural rubber went from being worthless (before the 1870's or so, noone even considered it worth bothering with in the colonies), to being a major strategic resource, to just being synthetized in industrial quantities. Etc.
And you can completely forget about importing anything manuf