Just because the right these days is utterly insane and likes to start wars all over the place doesn't mean there were always wrong
Oh, right, about the right... here's one fun concept for you: McCarthyism.
You know, let's persecute some people for _maybe_ having a different political point of view. Obviously unlike the USSR who was doing the same thing.
Have you heard of this guy? Helped develop the atom bomb that won the Pacific war. During McCarthyism and being branded a communism, he found himself:
A) unable to find work in the USA, because the FBI was actually sending threatening letters to potential employers, and
B) denied a passport, so he couldn't go find work somewhere else either.
Land of the free at its finest, really. So much for the right being sane at the time, eh?
It wasn't a new thing either. A similar commission, even if slightly less rabid had been in effect before the war too.
Did you also know that the right in the USA already had a long history of calling anything it didn't like a "communist plot"? Women's suffrage? According to the right, that was a communist plot. Laws against child labour? You guessed, red commie traitor plot too. Etc.
So, heh... regardless of how you feel about the the USA on the whole after WW2... the right was _nuts_. At times _rabidly_ nuts, at times just vocally nuts, but nuts nevertheless:P
No offense, but you missed the point. The point wasn't whether communism was good or evil. Yes, communism was evil and Stalin was an evil fuck. Ok, now that that's out of the way, let's talk the actual point.
The point was that US's war in Vietnam was a failure, not some glorious act that stopped communism. It was something self-produced and then lost abjectly. It actually pushed two _additional_ countries to communism: Laos and Cambodia.
How the heck can _that_ count as having won the fight and stopped communism? That's what I'm primarily ranting about. Because that's the kind of boast I was answering to. Basically, "yeah, see, if you look at the big picture, we actually won the war, 'cause we stopped the communist expansion." Not an exact quote, but that was the gist of it.
That said, if you want to get bogged in further details:
How about destroying every single democratic regime in Eastern Europe, despite repeated promises to allow free elections?
You mean just like the USA did in Vietnam and Korea? Or the way the USA couped the neutral Cambodia just because they needed a yes-man at the helm who'd allow the Americans to bomb his country? (Surrealistic as that may sound, that's just what happened there.)
Or do you ever wonder why Iran hates the USA and the west now? Because the CIA couped their democratically elected government and re-installed the brutal autocratic shah. You know, better have a dictator as your puppet than a democratic government with delusions of self-determination rights. (Unfortunately, all that hatred against the shah and the westerners who installed him, then got harnessed by the islamists in a bloody insurrection.)
Or a few other places? Believe it or not, the USA was _very_ active in installing and supporting banana-republic dictators left and right. The suicide keyword was "left". Just say that your views are left-side, and you'd get couped by the CIA in no time. And then they'd teach your successor how to torture dissidents. Literally.
Heh. That's champions of democracy and human rights at work for ya. _Obviously_, that's so morally superior compared to the Soviets;)
Are you sure that's been the goal? Sometimes the real goal isn't stated, and the stated goal is just the most plausible excuse.
E.g., if the goal was to give Bush's big oil buddies some lucrative contracts and resources in the area, then making sure Iraq stays a puppet is kinda part of the spec. Getting out before they get a stable puppet government... well, it's sorta like saying "the request was to put the poster on the wall, if you want it _glued_ to stay there, well, that's gonna cost you extra."
But the same applies to IT (and other) projects, yeah, so I guess your metaphor still stands. E.g., I've seen projects where:
- the boss was actually trying to keep it from succeeding, just to prove to everyone that Java is crap and causes projects to fail. The guy was a die-hard one-trick pony, and that one trick was VB. So when someone from above decided to go with Java, the guy switched full time to trying to prove that Java sucks. Not only he didn't spend any time trying to get the project on track (though he did pull stunts like expanding or changing the scope all the time), he spent three quarters of his time convincing the other departments (which were not IT-savvy, since it was a manufacturing company) that, hey, look what happens if you want your programs done in Java.
- someone from above was just syphoning funds to his brother-in-law's contractor company
- it was actually some politics game between departments, and/or showing to someone else down the hierarchy who's boss. In at least one instance it got as frivolous as "if those guys get what they want, then _I_ am not signing the spec." In another, pretty much a replacement to MS Project was coded just so one manager could enforce that all reports ever will be done with his favourite colours and fonts.
- someone needed more people in the team to get a promotion to the next management rank. So an otherwise simple spec got blown up into a thoroughly baroque thing that is now 4 years overdue.
- gaming some dysfunctional corporate rules. E.g., someone gets a bonus if they "save" enough money when they negotiate a server or a project. So they'll get the same product or project as 4 million where he negotiated a 50% discount, instead of a 50000$ thing with no discount. Or conversely, once the suppliers get wind that they'll have to go through that, the prices start directly inflated to some arbitrary value where they can offer a generous "discount" to get the contract.
- consultants or employees (managers included) whose only real goal is to get paid for the rest of their days. Bonus points for consultant or contractor company whose goal isn't just to get fixed to the teat for eternity, but to bring more of their people to that teat too.
Etc.
A _lot_ of projects seem a lot less absurd or like management failures, when you understand what the actual goal was. Often the covert real goal was an outstanding success, even if the overt "goal" looks like a total failure.
Actually, if it's C or C++, I wonder what's obfuscating the source code going to achieve anyway. Once you've compiled and stripped the debug info, it's all machine-code instructions and addresses.
- The adresses are the same whether you randomized the variables and method names or not.
- The machine-code instructions... well, an optimizing compiler already does a decent job of jumling that, _if_ you compile with optimizations on. And most simple obfuscation techniques tend to not make a huge difference there.
E.g., if you went and unrolled loops per hand, well, it won't do much of a difference once the optimizer would do the same unrolling anyway. Using macros and copy-and-paste to inline lots of code and make it hard to follow the logic? Chances are it will look roughly the same as the compiler's own inlining. Etc.
The only way to really make a difference in the binary output is to really mess the algorithm itself. It's possible, but I wouldn't advise it anyway. I doubt that _that_ many people are qualified to invent a brand new algorithm that (A) does the same thing, (B) does it efficiently, and (C) is harder to understand. Most just manage C, via some spaghetti code or such, but quite often lose A (via bugs) and B.
Actually, if it's in the USA, probably on the whole the farmer got subsidized, not paid taxes.
So while "How many times should the government be able to tax one product?" is emotional and all, the question is also whether said government wants to subsidize cars. Helping farms stay afloat is one thing. (Because food prices won't go higher without those subsidies, and you'd just bankrupt most farmers, like happened in the Great Depression.) But subsidizing fuel is entirely a different question. If the farmer and factory making that oil had went for biodiesel insteast, chances are they _wouldn't_ have been subsidized at all.
Also, before someone jumps in to wave the banner of subsidizing local fuel against those "evil" arabs... well, consider this: taxes don't go into some black hole, and subsidy money don't come out of nowhere. If you want the government to subsidize fuel, it will have to tax someone for that money.
So in effect it would end up taxing the guys with small cars or no cars, to give some money back to the guys with SUVs, sports cars and trucks. That's the way it tends to work: you take from everyone and subsidize equally per pound/gallon/whatever. So whoever consumes more, is effectively getting some money from someone else. Is that more fair? Hardly.
For that matter even the "How many times should the government be able to tax one product?" rhetoric is missing the same point: tax money don't go into some black hole, or in the king's bank account, but come back as (A) services provided by the state, and (B) extra aggregate demand which creates employment and keeps the economy going. (Look up Keynesian Economics some day.) So without A you wouldn't have schools, roads and police stations, and without B you probably would have a lot higher unemployment and lower wages. If you want to keep your standard of living (including that you have a highway to commute on, instead of taking the freakin' train), that money has to come from _somewhere_.
Dropping taxes on this, pretty much means they have to get that money from somewhere else. Either they fuck up the industry with more taxes (which actually would yield pretty little and cause more industry to move offshore, plus it messes with the keynesian multiplier in a bad way), or they fuck up the commerce (and it's actually you who get indirectly taxed, because you get higher prices), or they tax you some more.
So in effect, again, less taxes on fuel means that the guys with the bigger cars get the biggest break, and the guys with smaller cars or no cars might actually pay more in some other kind of tax. I'd be hard pressed to see that as an improvement. Even skipping past the "fairness" of giving a break to the guys who had more money in the first place, the message is, "get a bigger gas guzzler and pollute the planet more."
Let me see, what happened in Vietnam (and eerily enough, Korea didn't go that differently either.)
1. Actually refused to allow elections and backed an inept dictator that was hated even by the south. That's a funny way to spread democracy, you know.
2. It lost its chunk of Vietnam to the communists.
3. It actually created such an anti-american sentiment in Laos and Cambodia that they went Communist too. You know, let's bomb some countries which aren't our enemies, just because the communists smuggle arms and supplies through their territory. In fact, let's bomb a country that's our _ally_ FFS. If you trace the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, it went from a fringe group that noone really supported, to _massive_ support in the zones bombed by the Americans.
At any rate, voila, two more countries lost to communism as a result of inept American meddling in the area. Way to stop the spread of communism, buddy.
4. That and Korea scared China into flipping from a country just licking its wounds and wanting to be left alone, to becoming a lot more politically and militarily active. Just because some idiot generals wanted to push the border all the way to China, and at least one idiot actually advocated attacking China.
5. It takes some massive dose of revisionism to call it some spread of communism in the first place, when it was just a country (two, if you count Korea too), that just wanted to reunite. And that the _only_ reason it escalated to war is because the USA didn't allow elections.
Contrary to Domino theory bullshit and McCarthist propaganda, the USSR was _not_ your enemy at that point. The only reason why there was, say, a north and south Korea was because the Russians actually stopped their advance at the exact spot where the USA asked them to ask. The USSR was still licking its wounds after WW2 anyway, and it knew it's in no condition to start a world war.
You know what the USSR and China wanted at that point? They just wanted to have no border with NATO, if possible, because the USA had suddenly flipped from being their ally to treating them like mortal enemies. That's one reason why, for example, Stalin actually proposed to let Germany reunite if it stays neutral and doesn't join either pact. The wars in Korea and Vietnam just convinced them to rearm faster and help start the Cold War sooner.
And if you want something which stopped both sides, that was the rise of long ranged nuclear weaponry and the mutually assured destruction.
Redefining it as, basically, "nah, see, they calmed down because of the war (USA lost) in Vietnam" is pretty laughable.
Good question and good point indeed, I'll concede that.
I guess mostly because it took a really long time to get sufficiently pissed off about it. Generally I just cared about playing the games, and I didn't really care about Sony's bullshit games. Sure, it was an annoyance that Sony doesn't want to sell me those games, but, meh, I cared about the game, not about making a point.
Now you can say that that's just contributing to the problem... and you'd be right too.
Sure, if it helped _piracy_, I'd even understand that. But here's what irks me: region codes. And that's one thing that's circumvented by those modchips and such.
_And_ please consider this: Sony likes to present circumventing region coding as some form of piracy. Heck, even without any copying or hacking the console or anything. Even just buying an original DVD from Japan to play on your imported PS2 counts as piracy for Sony, or at least they'll try to handwave it as such.
Now I'll admit I don't know whether the PS3 has region coding or not, but Sony did annoy me with that before. Repeatedly.
Region codes on games serve _no_ legitimate purpose. The excuse on movie DVDs was that it eats into theatre ticket sales: someone who bought the US DVD early has often seen the movie that way before it even gets into the theatres. OK, I can even live with that mercantile reason. But that just simply doesn't apply to games. There simply is no big-screen theatre version of, say, Gran Turismo. Here at most... it replaces the sale of a localized copy, which, wtf, is the same price anyway. (After you subtract the VAT.)
I just refuse to feel like an evil pirate for buying an imported game. Sony got my money fair and square there. It's _not_ piracy.
Better yet: for some games it actually made them _extra_ money. Some games were never released in Europe. So they wouldn't have sold a single copy here and made Sony a single cent, if it weren't for imports. Those imports that Sony tries to choke actually are extra copies sold.
I look at my shelves of PS1 games for example, and about a third of that stuff is... well, stuff I bought imported, in _spite_ of Sony's doing their best to not sell it here. Really, I'm that evil a pirate: I gave them some money they were trying not to take.
I don't even know why companies pull that kind of crap and treat the European market as some pariah to be avoided. I can understand that there are costs and delays related to localization, but, really, I can live with an US version. Most people down here understand English, even if you have to coax them into actually admitting it. And some of the die-hard manga fans took Japanese lessons too, so they can even play the Japanese versions.
At any rate, it's irking to see Sony demonize us too. "Auugh, those evil importers and modchip sellers and their customers are a bunch of evil pirates. Must stop them!" WTF.
Exactly. Reading the summary left me scratching my head too. You've nailed the moral judgment excellently already, so I won't repeat that.
But I'll add another thought there: regardless of the moral judgment, exactly what is to learn from porn or gambling sites anyway?
No, seriously. Spammers, scammers, DDOS extortionists, etc, actually face some technical challenges. They need zero day exploits to maintain their army of zombie machines. They need to circumvent or disable protections. (See the many viruses or trojans that disable the major antiviruses and firewalls.) They need to dodge the law, at _least_ in that they need to transfer the ill gotten money abroad without leaving _too_ many obvious traces. Etc.
Those are real technical challenges. Antiviruses for example are getting so defensive against being disabled, that it's sometimes hard to fully uninstall them even as the legit owner of the machine.
You can learn something from that, and (in response to other posts) there _are_ legitimate uses for that knowledge too. E.g., whatever techniques they use to automate looking for buffer overflows, should be mandatory testing techniques for new software.
But porn and gambling sites? Gimme a break. I dare say most of the porn sites are actually just a plain old normal web site. There's nothing particularly high-tech about them, really. Just some thumbnails linking to a video or larger picture. In really "high tech" cases, they might open a popup via javascript for the page with the embedded movie. But that's about it.
Exactly what's to learn there.
Sure, a number of sites use porn as a bait to get one virused. But even then it helps to realize that that's not primarily a porn site, it's primarily a script-kiddie site and the porn is just the bait there. Just because the porn is the bait, doesn't make porn itself some high-tech black-hat thing.
To use a metaphor, there have been cases where people have been lured in a RL (non-internet, back-of-the-van kind) scam with such promises as a cheap second-hand laptop or whatever other cheap no-questions-asked good. Yet that doesn't make laptops themselves some evil bad-guy kind of scam. It's just the bait, the scam is a completely different half of that incident.
Now you may notice that (A) this was an answer to someone who actually asked, and (B) apparently he was satisfied with the detailed answer, since he thanked.
Did anyone ask whether _you_ care or not? I don't recall that. But you just had to butt in and pretend that anyone actually gives a damn about your pathetic delusions of self-importance, didn't you? It must give meaning to your pathetic loser life to pretend that someone will give a damn about your personally approving of their conversation. Heh.
Yeah, imagine that... someone actually having a conversation that doesn't center around what your highness cares or doesn't care about. People actually exchanging information without giving a damn about whether _you_ are personally interested. Amazing thing that.
But I don't expect something that complex to compute in your tiny smooth neanderthal brains. Sorry about that. You have my compassion for being born such a complete cretin. It must be hard.
Now imagine me having a heartfelt chuckle at your complete stupidity, little troll. Carry on.
That's pretty much it, yeah. They figured it's worth fucking their old players up the ass, to try to appeal to the larger WoW group.
Except here's the sad part: they didn't manage to look better to WoW players either. I'm someone who actually likes WoW, in fact I think it's the best MMO ever. And lemme tell you, even from that perspective, the post-NGE SWG just sucks.
I wouldn't be able to even transfer my existing WoW skills and all the stuff I liked about the WoW interface to it, because the new SWG is a FPS with a really bad interface. Equally bad for either for a MMORPG or for a FPS. Even forgetting WoW, from the perspective of someone who's played CS and Quake 3 and the whole UT series in the day, and still had a subscription to Planetside, the whole new SWG implementation is just sub-par for a FPS too.
The reason for _that_ interface change just adds a touch of surrealism to it all. The classes change was at least driven by greed and trying to appeal to WoW players, but the interface change is a separate story of incompetence and stupidity.
It's not even because someone liked the FPS idea more. It's because they couldn't figure out how to stop bots with the old interface. With the old, traditional MMO interface, some people would script bots that ran through a loop of target nearest enemy, shoot at it until it dies, heal when needed, loot, target next enemy. And they'd leave it running overnight. And since the SWG team couldn't figure how to stop that -- and their GMs were busy with bad PR moves like teleporting protesters into deep space instead -- they came up with a FPS interface where you have to keep the crosshair over the enemy all the time.
Sure, it stopped the botting (except for Entertainers and such), but at what cost? It's a solution that's worse than the problem. Even the players which were actually pissed off about the bots, got more pissed off about having the game turned into another genre. It's really like cutting someone's leg off to cure a sprained ankle.
At any rate, even skipping over the change as such, it gave all the players the wrong message. It told them that:
1. Such changes can happen again. So even if you like the new system, God knows when you too will get raped.
2. That Sony doesn't give a fuck about you players. Sure, we all knew in the back of the head that corporations are in it for the money, and that Sony isn't your best buddy, but we like to pretend that they're at least human. Outright shafting the existing players for purely the mercantile reason of wanting more money, feels really inhuman somehow. It's not even a case of tweaking or improving the game to appeal to more people, it's something that outright says, "fuck you lot, we're going for the other group instead. They have more money." It just feels... low.
Well, that's technically true, but you have to wonder exactly how much of a leg up.
On one hand, indeed SWG got screwed more than their other existing games. On the other hand, some things _are_ common to all SOE games. As I was saying, the wholesale changing the whole bloody spell list happened in EQ2 too. It wasn't of the magnitude of the NGE fuck-up, but it was a fuck-up anyway.
I don't know... applying Occam's Razor, I find it less likely that a bunch of independent teams independently decided to fuck-up their own games at the same time, than that some fucktard higher up at Sony pushed them all to do it. Not that the former is impossible, but it's a lot less probable.
Sure, some fucked up more, and some had the sense and sanity to stop a lot earlier. But there had to be some "auugh! copy WoW _now_! Marketting says people like dumbed down games! Dumb down _now_!" pressure from above to get them all to do it at the same time.
Heck, it's not just the change of system either. If you look at the quests too, EQ2 and SWG started roughly at the same time to get a buttload of quests that just felt like mass-produced crap that didn't even make sense. It speaks lots that both games ended with such nonsense crap as a sniper scope for a _sword_ in SWG... that actually was a potion, or like quests in EQ2 to kill deer and bears to see which of them stole a book.
I mean, seriously, think about it. Anywhere else if someone found it on their TO-DO list that today they have to code a scope for swords, they'd just go tell someone, "Excuse me? Did I get that right? And how do you want to implement that without attachments?" That they just went ahead and coded it as a potion, speaks volumes. Whoever did that was just a jaded peon who just did their quota and tried not to think about it.
And that it started happening in both games at the same time, makes me think of a more general SOE problem. Something happened there, and it came from higher up than either dev team.
At any rate, since it _did_ happen in more than one game, including at least one where George Lucas and Raph Koster had no say... well, it means it can happen to a new SOE game too.
Will it be as big a fuck-up as SWG? No, probably not. That's a monumental achievement as fuck-ups go. Mere mortals can't even hope to achieve something equal to that. But it can be pretty fucked up anyway. And there's _something_ currently at work at SOE which seems to create the right conditions for fucking up. That's all I'm saying.
Sorry, I play WoW and I've played SWG. The post-NGE SWG is _not_ WoW. I actually like WoW, I wouldn't have minded it too much if the NGE just aligned the interface to the WoW one.
Seriously, the new interface and mechanics are _Planetside_ with a SW theme, not WoW with a SW theme. Except it's worse than Planetside too, in the classes department, since Planetside too is a classless game where you get whatever combination of skills you think fits your style more.
You really have to wonder what they were smoking, really. They already had Planetside and it had buggerall subscribers. They had already gutted the development on Planetside and merged several servers in one, because the income and player numbers were abysmally low. At any rate, it actually had a lot less subscribers than SWG. So someone thinks... "I know, let's turn SWG into Planetside." I mean, wth, they could have just asked their own marketting department if aiming for the market share of the other game is actually an improvement.
But to return to the "it's not WoW" topic, WoW actually has a lot more complexity than the new SWG. For starters:
- WoW has a metric buttload of skills which you need to combine (semi) intelligently to make the most out of a given situation. There are skills which slow down the enemy, skills which reduce your damage taken, skills which boost your own damage, skills which temporarily give you a break from one or more enemies (though they might cause a wipe if you use them in the wrong place), and a ton more. Add different timers on them, and you actually have to think in combinations to suit the actual tactical situation there. It's _not_ just a case of sitting there and mashing fire, FPS-style, with the odd lobbing a grenade now and then.
- WoW does have those talent trees which actually allow _some_ customization to your character. A Survival spec hunter actually needs different tactics to make the most out of its spec, than a Beastmastery hunter. And a Shadow priest doesn't play the same as a Holy spec priest. (The former can spam the Psychic Scream and Mind Flay combo -- again, it has to be used as a combo for maximum effect -- while the latter doesn't even have Mind Flay.) It's not as flexible as the original SWG system, but it's not as rigid and unidimensional as the post-NGE system either.
Most WoW classes would be unable to actually play WoW and survive, if they were as unidimensional as the new SWG classes.
At any rate, trust me, I actually like WoW and the post-NGE SWG is just crap even compared to WoW. It's too dumbed down even for WoW.
Now I can imagine that the order to dumb down SWG did come in reaction to WoW. But that's probably from some people who didn't even understand WoW. It was a knee-jerk reaction, without even trying to understand why WoW works or what do people actually find in it.
_That_ is the most damning thing there. I'm not even against copying ideas from other games, but mindless copying without understanding... well, you see the result in NGE. They didn't actually understand what makes WoW fun to WoW players, and they ended up with something that appeals to neither their old player base nor to WoW players.
In addition to what was already said, let's put it like this: the NGE turned the whole game into a whole other genre. It went from being a SF MMORPG to a FPS with a bad interface, plus a rigid no-choices class system which just says which special attacks you get at which level. The most common metaphor for it is that they turned SWG into Planetside, but that doesn't even do it justice: it's a Planetside with a bad interface, and with actually less freedom than Planetside.
Pay attention to that part about turning the game into a whole other genre, please, and you'll probably understand why most people are annoyed by it. Imagine that you've signed up for, dunno, Eve Online because you like the space combat, and after a couple of years it gets suddenly turned into Everquest instead. Oh and you get to choose a fantasy class instead of your customized ship. Sorry, there's no way to play your old character as it was any more.
Even if you don't think that one is inherently a worse game as such, it's the whole thing of turning it into another game. You can surely see how that would annoy a lot of people. A lot liked the old game, and just don't like the new mechanics and wouldn't have signed up for the new game.
And forcing everyone else to pick a fundamentally different character class is a pretty obvious (and justified) reason for discontent. Imagine that you've actually invested time and energy in creating and levelling up a very specific flavour of character... and suddenly you have to pick from a list of 9 fundamentally different ones, because your old combination is no longer available. Imagine that even the interface doesn't work like it used to any more.
If you're familiar with, say, WoW, imagine that you've wanted to play a hunter. Say, a very specific flavour too, like Beastmastery spec hunter, or Marksman spec hunter. You've done quests, you've grinded your epics, you've spent time at the auction house getting just the right kind of equipment for that character. Because, you know, that's the character you wanted to play. (Feel free to replace with whatever class you actually liked, if that makes the metaphor easier to swallow.) Then imagine that a patch came and just deleted that class. In fact, it deleted both pet classes, so switching to Warlock isn't an option either. Sorry, pal, pet classes are out. We'll let you switch to another class, though. You can be a scrapper, tanker, defender, controller or blaster like in COH now.
Oh yeah, also imagine that they just decided to get rid of the talent trees and the old abilities too. Having a choice of spec was so difficult to balance and all. You may have carefully planned advancing your character, but that goes right into the garbage bin. Now everyone gets to be a clone of everyone else, and uniformly get a pre-determined skill every 5 levels.
Surely you see how that would piss off a lot of people, right? It's not even whether the new classes are "worse" as such (although methinks they are.) People get emotionally attached to that character, and having it unilaterally nuked and turned into something fundamentally different... well, it's gonna feel like that character just got raped. Yet that's just what SOE did in the NGE.
Now also imagine that there was a prestige class, available only to people who've grinded the other classes to level 70. (Which actually would be less grind in WoW than the old SWG "hologrind" to Jedi.) So you've grinded like a slave, dumped thousands of hours into mindlessly levelling up a bunch of unrelated classes (half of which maybe you didn't even like in the first place), did the same quests and shot the same NPCs over and over again... and finally got your prestige class. Now you're a Jedi. Bloody finally.
Now imagine that the same patch comes by and nukes all that achievement, and makes it one of the normal classes available to all newbies. In fact, imagine they got rid of the old Warrior class, and made your Jedi just the melee tank class. Yep, that was another stunt Sony pulled in the N
SOE has and WILL make drastic gameplay changes, including completely invalidating your character achievements even deleting whole aspects of the game! That is what they did to SWG. If they did it before they could do it again.
They did it in other games already. Try EQ2 whole classes swung between random extremes, and the whole set of spells got changed at least twice. E.g., one of my characters swung from primarily dual-wielding damage-dealer, to primary tank who can't even solo random mobs without a tower shield, to primarily two-hander specialist. It doesn't even have the same abilities as when I designed that character. And crafting got changed into something not even resembling the same thing.
Now admittedly, I don't claim it's anywhere _near_ the magnitude of the SWG NGE fuck-up. That's not even close. SWG didn't just get randomly changed, it got turned into a whole other _genre_. You just can't top _that_ kind of achievement. Still, it just shows the kind of random changes to one's characters that Sony won't think twice about doing.
That said, if I'm to take a wild uninformed guess about the future:
I'm thinking more like... anyone else remember that in SWG smugglers _still_ can't actually smuggle? That content just doesn't exist.
Or that they created 4 flavours of the trader class in the NGE, and made them not able to even do the normal quests (since being stuck at combat level 1 kinda makes it impossible to actually kill anything for a quest fast)... and nerfed 3 flavours out of 4 into mostly making a loss? (Now duly noted, crafting in a lot of games, WoW included is mostly a time-sink on the side. But that's just the point: it's a secondary activity of a character mostly geared towards adventuring. But making a class that can _only_ craft and then making them produce worse stuff than the drops off random desert chicken, is kinda harsh.)
Or that they actually broke the Entertainers (you get items like posters which should start a quest, but they don't actually do anything), and the random generated quests send you to dance for some tourists... in an empty room without any tourists? Or that it tells you all the time that Entertainers are masters of extracting information from people, yet the content to actually do that simply doesn't exist after the tutorial?
Or that there's a shitload of levels of Politician, yet you went from zero to max the instant you join a city, since the content for all those levels just didn't exist?
Etc.:P
So I'm having this mental image of a SOE game with spies... that can't actually spy. And mercenaries which are stuck doing the same randomly generated quest over and over again, because that's all the mercenary content, but can't actually get any meaningful mercenary employment:P
Why do I suspect the parent poster supported the Iraq war based on its "evidence"?
Because you're a cretin? Because your smooth neanderthal brains can't deal with other stances than "us-vs-them"? Just a thought.
Point in case: here noone was arguing whether the Darfur massacre exists or not, but that a satellite image by itself doesn't prove much. Yes, if there's more information to confirm it, that's good, but that kinda was the whole point: you need a ton of context information before you even know what that picture even means.
Let me spare you the effort to figure that out: it's _not_ taking either a pro- or contra- "save Darfur" stance, it's just debating a tangential detail. No more, no less. It's really just a marginally off-topic tangent. But I guess that just doesn't compute in your retarded "us-vs-them" world, does it? Someone _has_ to take sides in your view of the world, don't they?
Is there some connection between that and Iraq? Not really, and I'm pretty sure I've been against war in Iraq for years. But it seems that in your tiny little brains there's no room for such complexities. People have to be neatly divided into two camps. If someone doesn't support this, they surely pro-war in Iraq too. That someone can actually have different positions, on two unrelated issues, and use their own brains instead of following party lines, doesn't even compute in your deffective little mind, does it?
Heh. Actually, I'm not going to panic at all, especially since I'm not really an environmentalist.
Other than that, pretty much noone ever said that those species will ever find their perfect environment or niche ever again. They're kept, pretty much, as museum pieces. It's not survival of the fittest, and that's pretty much what I was saying too. We already know we're fit enough to wipe them out.
Pretty much that's all that that conservation is: keeping bits of Earth as museums where we can still see what lived there before we came along. There are valid environmental concerns around, but noone's imagining that those species will some day become fit enough to dodge bullets from scoped rifles. (If we actually thought they could evolve Matrix-like reflexes, we'd probably just kill them before they do.)
Same as we keep some pharaoh's sarcophagus or a 17'th century musket in a museum, really. Noone imagines that the pharaoh will some day get fit enough to rise from the sarcophagus (what with the organs being in separate jars) or that the muskets will someday become better than a modern assault rifle. But we keep them there anyway.
Now you can propose destroying the museums, for all I care. I'd find it sorta sad, but I'm not going to panic. But that's really what it is: destroying a bit of the past. Not "survival of the fittest." That's all I'm saying.
Why a troll such as you got modded "interesting" befuddles me, but I'll bite.
Maybe because some people aren't as interested in groupthink games as you seem to be. Sometimes reality isn't as convenient as "someone quick hide any inconvenient questions." Mind you, the question _can_ be stupid, but "someone quick mod it down" isn't a panacea either.
No, it couldn't have been "anything." "Anything" includes meteorite strikes, Acts of Gawd, and other such unlikelihoods.
Which is just bogus even as debating semantincs goes. If your point is that it's only "a large number of different things" instead of literally "anything", then that's not really useful. My point still stands even then. "It can mean more than one thing" is plenty enough.
No, you take it. Part of the reason that the Great Fire spread so quickly was the density of flammable wooden structures. What we actually see in the satellite photographs is not dense urban construction.
Fires happened all over the place, not only in London. It may not be immediately obvious to someone from the age of flame retardants everywhere. But before those, fire running amok was one of the constants of human history. Wood burns surprisingly well when untreated, and straws (as in, thatched roof) even more so. In a dry sub-desert environment, doubly so, since it's dry wood and dry straws.
Maybe you can't wrap your brain around the fact that the long tradition of killing your fellow man has gone on for millennia and isn't all that uncommon.
And maybe you can't wrap yours that we have an equally long history of propaganda to support that killing.
The fact is that the average peasant would rather stay on his farm, than take part in a war where the best he can "win" is remaining alive to return to the farm. That's a very loose quote from memory from Goering, btw. I don't like the fellow on the whole, but he was right in _that_ aspect. You need to lie a bit to that peasant to get him chest-thumping patriotically, or marching in a neat line to the front.
And it's not something that started and ended in the 30's and 40's, either. The same applied when the Greeks went to fight the Persians in the 2'nd millenium BC, or when the USA went to fight Iraq recently.
Invariably you have to first motivate the people a bit as to why it should be their problem that you want to go fight some war where they have nothing to win. So you'd start by presenting the enemy as (A) doing some unspeakable atrocities, or (B) quite often that they're not even humans at all. They're a bunch of vampires or ghouls eating corpses, really.
E.g., when the Romans went to war against Carthage, the "they're doing atrocities!" smear campaign went into full speed too. The Carthaginians were presented as burning infants alive to appease their dark gods. Surely it's your duty as a Roman citizen to go stop that atrocity, right? (The only funny thing is that each account gives a different version as to _how_ did they sacrifice those children. Did anyone actually see one of those sacrifices, or is it just propaganda run amok? I guess we'll never really know.)
You can see that all through the middle ages and even renaissance too. Accusations of cooking and eating babies, and or drinking their blood, can be found all over the place, whether it was in a "why we should go to war against X" context, or confession extracted by torture in witchcraft trials. If you listen to those confessions, half the witches or even christian sects all over europe had human babies as their primary food source. Too bad that the same confessions also admit stuff like flying on broomsticks or fucking with the devil (quite literally), which kinda ruins the credibility of the whole. Again, the attrocity accusation was really just the boilerplate template for any "why should we exterminate X with extreme prejudice" campaign.
Actually, that's sorta the whole point: context is _everything_. And the context you're given can be misleading (deliberately let you connect the dots in the wrong direction), or outright a lie.
Yes, if you also have the right context, you can make an informed judgment. But do you? That's the question I'm asking.
Since you mention Nazis and mass graves, there is already at least one case where that was a lie. There are mass graves in Poland which the Soviets blamed the Nazis for. Turns out that it was the _Soviets_ themselves who were responsible for that. Stalin's NKVD had rounded up what they thought would be potential problem elements there, such as the Polish army officers, and summarily executed them.
Atrocity? Yes. But the context was an outright lie. Now I'm not saying the Nazis were nice guys, far from it, but in this case they had just provided a convenient scapegoat for NKVD's own atrocities.
And before someone says that's revisionism: no, it's not. The USSR finally owned up in the end. It's as official a confession as it gets.
Also, since you mention Nazis, those guys pioneered another thing: whole "war documentaries" that were entirely produced in a movie studio. Yay for first-hand front-line footage. You can believe that, can't you? I mean, the images surely speak for themselves, right? Well, too bad it came from a studio in Berlin instead of from France.
That's the whole point: if I show you a small pile of corpses in a mass grave, it's emotional and all, but you're entirely dependent on the context provided. How do you just know from that image alone whether that's Jews massacred by the Nazis, or "kulaks" (rich peasants, i.e., any peasant who wasn't starving) massacred by Stalin's NKVD, or maybe some the victims of the post-WWI flu epidemic (think like the bird flu, but it could be transmitted from human to human), or whatever else? The context is _everything_. And by just giving you the proper lie as a context, that image can be made to mean almost anything.
The point isn't to grow complacent or "post-modernist" but to start realizing when you don't have enough reliable context to make an informed judgment.
E.g., in this case, sure, burned villages is an emotional thought and all, but who burned whose houses?
One context particularly used as a battle-banner by a lot is that the Darfur conflict is some muslims-massacring-christians case. That's actually false, as both sides involved are muslims. It's an ethnic/racial war, not a religious war. There you go, an outright false context that's been used a lot lately.
Or how do you know which of the two sides burned the villages down? There are at least two sides in any conflict. And even the arab militias were funded in response to the insurgent forces of the other side. Are all the burned houses on the rebels side, or did the rebels do some burning of their own? In the absence of some first-hand information from down there, how _do_ you draw the right conclusions from just a satellite photo?
Because the whole point I was making _is_ "a photo can mean anything". And I still see nothing wrong with that judgment.
There are entirely too many drawn in taking sides and waving banners just because the nice man on TV told them which side to join, and how loud to shout. I'm thinking the world as a whole would be a much better place if more people stopped and thought, "wait a minute, that can mean anything whatsoever." We probably would have less atrocities to worry about in the first place, if those comitting them in the first place didn't take the media's/imam's/shaman's/whatever word for it unthinkingly.
Again, I'm _not_ making any judgment about the conflict in Sudan or about AI. I _am_ however making a point that an image can mean anything, and it can be manipulated into seeming to mean something completely different than it really does.
I may not have enough data about the conflict in Sudan, but I think I do have enough data to make a judgment about how an image can be manipulated or used as "proof" of whatever you want it to prove. You just need to watch TV these days, really.
So, basically, it's really simple and there's no contradiction there.
Those are some interesting points about Western civilization, to be sure, but you really don't have the first clue about the Sudanese conflict, do you?
Actually, thanks for bringing that up. 'Cause, see, that's the whole flippin' point I was trying to make.
No, I don't know enough about that conflict to have an informed opinion. And I'm not going to suddenly jump to a spoon-fed conclusion based on some emotional images and wording. When I have enough other data there, I might make a judgment. But I refuse to jump to one of the sides and wave a banner, just because the media spoon fed me some images.
That's all I'm preaching: exercise some healthy skepticism, get your information from more than one source. That's all.
If you already know enough about that conflict, by all means, go ahead and have an opinion about it. But so far I only have someone's word that some pictures mean what he says they mean. And that's just not enough data to base an opinion on.
Bingo. You just gave the best example of one of the biggest manipulations in European history.
Thing is, you could use the same media manipulation techniques to that one too. (If they had photography back then, which they didn't.) Get a few refugees to testify with tears in their eyes about how the Jews are ethnically cleansing them by poisoning their water supplies, show some photographs of piled bodies, show some satellite images of whole areas which turned from fertile farmland back to woods because the peasants there kinda went extinct. Voila, now you have your "proof" of the atrocities Jews commited against the poor Christians of that region.
Before anyone accuses me of anti-semitism, I _know_ it wasn't the Jews to blame there. It's just an example of the kind of absurdity one can support with careful picking of whose testimonies they listen, and some emotional images.
Look, I'm not against gathering more evidence, but I'm just pointing out that just one photo (satellite or not) can be massaged into meaning anything you want it to mean.
E.g., do you even know which side was inhabiting that area, if not for being spoon fed that it's an atrocity against the Sudanese?
I'll also point out that history (some of it very near) is full of manipulation and selective confirmation. And often you just need to choose whose side propaganda you want to listen to.
E.g., if you would have asked German prisoners in '39, they would have told you that they're just fighting against the Polish aggressors. (The Third Reich propaganda massively broadcast news of the polish "aggression" and Germany just protecting its borders.)
I'll also point out that tribal warfare _is_ brutal like that. You can find archaeological evidence from the pre-columbian era where whole villages were razed. And most native tribes from all over the world were engaged in endemic warfare long before the Europeans got there. IIRC attrition rates in some areas reached 60%. Of the total population, not of the army. As in, really, if you were born in one of those tribes, chances would be about 60% that you'd die in combat, and not in your bed of old age. (By comparison, even the WW2 barely averaged 1% of the total population of the countries involved.)
As soon as humans invented missile weapons, suddenly in caves everywhere you have crude drawings of groups of archers shooting at each other, often led by some priest with some holy totem. And it didn't take much longer to invent flaming arrows.
Even in civilized nation warfare, the US secession war saw such things as the burning of Columbia. Or the fire bombing of Dresden or Tokyo, in WW2.
Now think that 10-100 times worse, and you have an accurate image of tribal warfare, at least for some tribes. Humans needed some tens of thousands of years to get shocked by the horrors of soldiers dying of all sorts of diseases in the Crimean war, or by the brutal realities of WW1 and WW2, and start getting ideas that maybe we should all act a bit nicer. Whole areas of the globe just didn't get there.
And yes, it would be nice if we somehow dragged them into the 21'st century. But it also helps if you realize that neither side there got in the 21'st century, and it's usually not just one side massacring the others.
Basically, just from the pictures you don't know who did what to whom. And in retaliation to what. It's easy to pin the blame on just one side as the ones cleansing the others, but reality is rarely that neatly divided in the good and the evil. And such pictures can be used to create just such a one-sided view.
While I'll freely admit that I didn't RTFA, the summary has a quote saying "parts of this region were burned so thoroughly that there's nothing left but a large black scar". He's talking about whole parts of the region, not about only the villages being targetted. That's a freakin' huge difference.
That said, the same could be said about New Orleans. Suspiciously the devastation doesn't expand that much further than the city, so it must have been man-made, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, right, about the right... here's one fun concept for you: McCarthyism.
You know, let's persecute some people for _maybe_ having a different political point of view. Obviously unlike the USSR who was doing the same thing.
Have you heard of this guy? Helped develop the atom bomb that won the Pacific war. During McCarthyism and being branded a communism, he found himself:
A) unable to find work in the USA, because the FBI was actually sending threatening letters to potential employers, and
B) denied a passport, so he couldn't go find work somewhere else either.
Land of the free at its finest, really. So much for the right being sane at the time, eh?
It wasn't a new thing either. A similar commission, even if slightly less rabid had been in effect before the war too.
Did you also know that the right in the USA already had a long history of calling anything it didn't like a "communist plot"? Women's suffrage? According to the right, that was a communist plot. Laws against child labour? You guessed, red commie traitor plot too. Etc.
So, heh... regardless of how you feel about the the USA on the whole after WW2... the right was _nuts_. At times _rabidly_ nuts, at times just vocally nuts, but nuts nevertheless
The point was that US's war in Vietnam was a failure, not some glorious act that stopped communism. It was something self-produced and then lost abjectly. It actually pushed two _additional_ countries to communism: Laos and Cambodia.
How the heck can _that_ count as having won the fight and stopped communism? That's what I'm primarily ranting about. Because that's the kind of boast I was answering to. Basically, "yeah, see, if you look at the big picture, we actually won the war, 'cause we stopped the communist expansion." Not an exact quote, but that was the gist of it.
That said, if you want to get bogged in further details:
You mean just like the USA did in Vietnam and Korea? Or the way the USA couped the neutral Cambodia just because they needed a yes-man at the helm who'd allow the Americans to bomb his country? (Surrealistic as that may sound, that's just what happened there.)
Or do you ever wonder why Iran hates the USA and the west now? Because the CIA couped their democratically elected government and re-installed the brutal autocratic shah. You know, better have a dictator as your puppet than a democratic government with delusions of self-determination rights. (Unfortunately, all that hatred against the shah and the westerners who installed him, then got harnessed by the islamists in a bloody insurrection.)
Or a few other places? Believe it or not, the USA was _very_ active in installing and supporting banana-republic dictators left and right. The suicide keyword was "left". Just say that your views are left-side, and you'd get couped by the CIA in no time. And then they'd teach your successor how to torture dissidents. Literally.
Heh. That's champions of democracy and human rights at work for ya. _Obviously_, that's so morally superior compared to the Soviets
Are you sure that's been the goal? Sometimes the real goal isn't stated, and the stated goal is just the most plausible excuse.
E.g., if the goal was to give Bush's big oil buddies some lucrative contracts and resources in the area, then making sure Iraq stays a puppet is kinda part of the spec. Getting out before they get a stable puppet government... well, it's sorta like saying "the request was to put the poster on the wall, if you want it _glued_ to stay there, well, that's gonna cost you extra."
But the same applies to IT (and other) projects, yeah, so I guess your metaphor still stands. E.g., I've seen projects where:
- the boss was actually trying to keep it from succeeding, just to prove to everyone that Java is crap and causes projects to fail. The guy was a die-hard one-trick pony, and that one trick was VB. So when someone from above decided to go with Java, the guy switched full time to trying to prove that Java sucks. Not only he didn't spend any time trying to get the project on track (though he did pull stunts like expanding or changing the scope all the time), he spent three quarters of his time convincing the other departments (which were not IT-savvy, since it was a manufacturing company) that, hey, look what happens if you want your programs done in Java.
- someone from above was just syphoning funds to his brother-in-law's contractor company
- it was actually some politics game between departments, and/or showing to someone else down the hierarchy who's boss. In at least one instance it got as frivolous as "if those guys get what they want, then _I_ am not signing the spec." In another, pretty much a replacement to MS Project was coded just so one manager could enforce that all reports ever will be done with his favourite colours and fonts.
- someone needed more people in the team to get a promotion to the next management rank. So an otherwise simple spec got blown up into a thoroughly baroque thing that is now 4 years overdue.
- gaming some dysfunctional corporate rules. E.g., someone gets a bonus if they "save" enough money when they negotiate a server or a project. So they'll get the same product or project as 4 million where he negotiated a 50% discount, instead of a 50000$ thing with no discount. Or conversely, once the suppliers get wind that they'll have to go through that, the prices start directly inflated to some arbitrary value where they can offer a generous "discount" to get the contract.
- consultants or employees (managers included) whose only real goal is to get paid for the rest of their days. Bonus points for consultant or contractor company whose goal isn't just to get fixed to the teat for eternity, but to bring more of their people to that teat too.
Etc.
A _lot_ of projects seem a lot less absurd or like management failures, when you understand what the actual goal was. Often the covert real goal was an outstanding success, even if the overt "goal" looks like a total failure.
Actually, if it's C or C++, I wonder what's obfuscating the source code going to achieve anyway. Once you've compiled and stripped the debug info, it's all machine-code instructions and addresses.
- The adresses are the same whether you randomized the variables and method names or not.
- The machine-code instructions... well, an optimizing compiler already does a decent job of jumling that, _if_ you compile with optimizations on. And most simple obfuscation techniques tend to not make a huge difference there.
E.g., if you went and unrolled loops per hand, well, it won't do much of a difference once the optimizer would do the same unrolling anyway. Using macros and copy-and-paste to inline lots of code and make it hard to follow the logic? Chances are it will look roughly the same as the compiler's own inlining. Etc.
The only way to really make a difference in the binary output is to really mess the algorithm itself. It's possible, but I wouldn't advise it anyway. I doubt that _that_ many people are qualified to invent a brand new algorithm that (A) does the same thing, (B) does it efficiently, and (C) is harder to understand. Most just manage C, via some spaghetti code or such, but quite often lose A (via bugs) and B.
Actually, if it's in the USA, probably on the whole the farmer got subsidized, not paid taxes.
So while "How many times should the government be able to tax one product?" is emotional and all, the question is also whether said government wants to subsidize cars. Helping farms stay afloat is one thing. (Because food prices won't go higher without those subsidies, and you'd just bankrupt most farmers, like happened in the Great Depression.) But subsidizing fuel is entirely a different question. If the farmer and factory making that oil had went for biodiesel insteast, chances are they _wouldn't_ have been subsidized at all.
Also, before someone jumps in to wave the banner of subsidizing local fuel against those "evil" arabs... well, consider this: taxes don't go into some black hole, and subsidy money don't come out of nowhere. If you want the government to subsidize fuel, it will have to tax someone for that money.
So in effect it would end up taxing the guys with small cars or no cars, to give some money back to the guys with SUVs, sports cars and trucks. That's the way it tends to work: you take from everyone and subsidize equally per pound/gallon/whatever. So whoever consumes more, is effectively getting some money from someone else. Is that more fair? Hardly.
For that matter even the "How many times should the government be able to tax one product?" rhetoric is missing the same point: tax money don't go into some black hole, or in the king's bank account, but come back as (A) services provided by the state, and (B) extra aggregate demand which creates employment and keeps the economy going. (Look up Keynesian Economics some day.) So without A you wouldn't have schools, roads and police stations, and without B you probably would have a lot higher unemployment and lower wages. If you want to keep your standard of living (including that you have a highway to commute on, instead of taking the freakin' train), that money has to come from _somewhere_.
Dropping taxes on this, pretty much means they have to get that money from somewhere else. Either they fuck up the industry with more taxes (which actually would yield pretty little and cause more industry to move offshore, plus it messes with the keynesian multiplier in a bad way), or they fuck up the commerce (and it's actually you who get indirectly taxed, because you get higher prices), or they tax you some more.
So in effect, again, less taxes on fuel means that the guys with the bigger cars get the biggest break, and the guys with smaller cars or no cars might actually pay more in some other kind of tax. I'd be hard pressed to see that as an improvement. Even skipping past the "fairness" of giving a break to the guys who had more money in the first place, the message is, "get a bigger gas guzzler and pollute the planet more."
Ah, the joys of revisionism...
Let me see, what happened in Vietnam (and eerily enough, Korea didn't go that differently either.)
1. Actually refused to allow elections and backed an inept dictator that was hated even by the south. That's a funny way to spread democracy, you know.
2. It lost its chunk of Vietnam to the communists.
3. It actually created such an anti-american sentiment in Laos and Cambodia that they went Communist too. You know, let's bomb some countries which aren't our enemies, just because the communists smuggle arms and supplies through their territory. In fact, let's bomb a country that's our _ally_ FFS. If you trace the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, it went from a fringe group that noone really supported, to _massive_ support in the zones bombed by the Americans.
At any rate, voila, two more countries lost to communism as a result of inept American meddling in the area. Way to stop the spread of communism, buddy.
4. That and Korea scared China into flipping from a country just licking its wounds and wanting to be left alone, to becoming a lot more politically and militarily active. Just because some idiot generals wanted to push the border all the way to China, and at least one idiot actually advocated attacking China.
5. It takes some massive dose of revisionism to call it some spread of communism in the first place, when it was just a country (two, if you count Korea too), that just wanted to reunite. And that the _only_ reason it escalated to war is because the USA didn't allow elections.
Contrary to Domino theory bullshit and McCarthist propaganda, the USSR was _not_ your enemy at that point. The only reason why there was, say, a north and south Korea was because the Russians actually stopped their advance at the exact spot where the USA asked them to ask. The USSR was still licking its wounds after WW2 anyway, and it knew it's in no condition to start a world war.
You know what the USSR and China wanted at that point? They just wanted to have no border with NATO, if possible, because the USA had suddenly flipped from being their ally to treating them like mortal enemies. That's one reason why, for example, Stalin actually proposed to let Germany reunite if it stays neutral and doesn't join either pact. The wars in Korea and Vietnam just convinced them to rearm faster and help start the Cold War sooner.
And if you want something which stopped both sides, that was the rise of long ranged nuclear weaponry and the mutually assured destruction.
Redefining it as, basically, "nah, see, they calmed down because of the war (USA lost) in Vietnam" is pretty laughable.
Ah. Thanks for that info. I didn't know he had a hand in screwing up EQ2 too.
Good question and good point indeed, I'll concede that.
I guess mostly because it took a really long time to get sufficiently pissed off about it. Generally I just cared about playing the games, and I didn't really care about Sony's bullshit games. Sure, it was an annoyance that Sony doesn't want to sell me those games, but, meh, I cared about the game, not about making a point.
Now you can say that that's just contributing to the problem... and you'd be right too.
Sure, if it helped _piracy_, I'd even understand that. But here's what irks me: region codes. And that's one thing that's circumvented by those modchips and such.
_And_ please consider this: Sony likes to present circumventing region coding as some form of piracy. Heck, even without any copying or hacking the console or anything. Even just buying an original DVD from Japan to play on your imported PS2 counts as piracy for Sony, or at least they'll try to handwave it as such.
Now I'll admit I don't know whether the PS3 has region coding or not, but Sony did annoy me with that before. Repeatedly.
Region codes on games serve _no_ legitimate purpose. The excuse on movie DVDs was that it eats into theatre ticket sales: someone who bought the US DVD early has often seen the movie that way before it even gets into the theatres. OK, I can even live with that mercantile reason. But that just simply doesn't apply to games. There simply is no big-screen theatre version of, say, Gran Turismo. Here at most... it replaces the sale of a localized copy, which, wtf, is the same price anyway. (After you subtract the VAT.)
I just refuse to feel like an evil pirate for buying an imported game. Sony got my money fair and square there. It's _not_ piracy.
Better yet: for some games it actually made them _extra_ money. Some games were never released in Europe. So they wouldn't have sold a single copy here and made Sony a single cent, if it weren't for imports. Those imports that Sony tries to choke actually are extra copies sold.
I look at my shelves of PS1 games for example, and about a third of that stuff is... well, stuff I bought imported, in _spite_ of Sony's doing their best to not sell it here. Really, I'm that evil a pirate: I gave them some money they were trying not to take.
I don't even know why companies pull that kind of crap and treat the European market as some pariah to be avoided. I can understand that there are costs and delays related to localization, but, really, I can live with an US version. Most people down here understand English, even if you have to coax them into actually admitting it. And some of the die-hard manga fans took Japanese lessons too, so they can even play the Japanese versions.
At any rate, it's irking to see Sony demonize us too. "Auugh, those evil importers and modchip sellers and their customers are a bunch of evil pirates. Must stop them!" WTF.
Exactly. Reading the summary left me scratching my head too. You've nailed the moral judgment excellently already, so I won't repeat that.
But I'll add another thought there: regardless of the moral judgment, exactly what is to learn from porn or gambling sites anyway?
No, seriously. Spammers, scammers, DDOS extortionists, etc, actually face some technical challenges. They need zero day exploits to maintain their army of zombie machines. They need to circumvent or disable protections. (See the many viruses or trojans that disable the major antiviruses and firewalls.) They need to dodge the law, at _least_ in that they need to transfer the ill gotten money abroad without leaving _too_ many obvious traces. Etc.
Those are real technical challenges. Antiviruses for example are getting so defensive against being disabled, that it's sometimes hard to fully uninstall them even as the legit owner of the machine.
You can learn something from that, and (in response to other posts) there _are_ legitimate uses for that knowledge too. E.g., whatever techniques they use to automate looking for buffer overflows, should be mandatory testing techniques for new software.
But porn and gambling sites? Gimme a break. I dare say most of the porn sites are actually just a plain old normal web site. There's nothing particularly high-tech about them, really. Just some thumbnails linking to a video or larger picture. In really "high tech" cases, they might open a popup via javascript for the page with the embedded movie. But that's about it.
Exactly what's to learn there.
Sure, a number of sites use porn as a bait to get one virused. But even then it helps to realize that that's not primarily a porn site, it's primarily a script-kiddie site and the porn is just the bait there. Just because the porn is the bait, doesn't make porn itself some high-tech black-hat thing.
To use a metaphor, there have been cases where people have been lured in a RL (non-internet, back-of-the-van kind) scam with such promises as a cheap second-hand laptop or whatever other cheap no-questions-asked good. Yet that doesn't make laptops themselves some evil bad-guy kind of scam. It's just the bait, the scam is a completely different half of that incident.
Ah, a retard. How cute...
Now you may notice that (A) this was an answer to someone who actually asked, and (B) apparently he was satisfied with the detailed answer, since he thanked.
Did anyone ask whether _you_ care or not? I don't recall that. But you just had to butt in and pretend that anyone actually gives a damn about your pathetic delusions of self-importance, didn't you? It must give meaning to your pathetic loser life to pretend that someone will give a damn about your personally approving of their conversation. Heh.
Yeah, imagine that... someone actually having a conversation that doesn't center around what your highness cares or doesn't care about. People actually exchanging information without giving a damn about whether _you_ are personally interested. Amazing thing that.
But I don't expect something that complex to compute in your tiny smooth neanderthal brains. Sorry about that. You have my compassion for being born such a complete cretin. It must be hard.
Now imagine me having a heartfelt chuckle at your complete stupidity, little troll. Carry on.
That's pretty much it, yeah. They figured it's worth fucking their old players up the ass, to try to appeal to the larger WoW group.
Except here's the sad part: they didn't manage to look better to WoW players either. I'm someone who actually likes WoW, in fact I think it's the best MMO ever. And lemme tell you, even from that perspective, the post-NGE SWG just sucks.
I wouldn't be able to even transfer my existing WoW skills and all the stuff I liked about the WoW interface to it, because the new SWG is a FPS with a really bad interface. Equally bad for either for a MMORPG or for a FPS. Even forgetting WoW, from the perspective of someone who's played CS and Quake 3 and the whole UT series in the day, and still had a subscription to Planetside, the whole new SWG implementation is just sub-par for a FPS too.
The reason for _that_ interface change just adds a touch of surrealism to it all. The classes change was at least driven by greed and trying to appeal to WoW players, but the interface change is a separate story of incompetence and stupidity.
It's not even because someone liked the FPS idea more. It's because they couldn't figure out how to stop bots with the old interface. With the old, traditional MMO interface, some people would script bots that ran through a loop of target nearest enemy, shoot at it until it dies, heal when needed, loot, target next enemy. And they'd leave it running overnight. And since the SWG team couldn't figure how to stop that -- and their GMs were busy with bad PR moves like teleporting protesters into deep space instead -- they came up with a FPS interface where you have to keep the crosshair over the enemy all the time.
Sure, it stopped the botting (except for Entertainers and such), but at what cost? It's a solution that's worse than the problem. Even the players which were actually pissed off about the bots, got more pissed off about having the game turned into another genre. It's really like cutting someone's leg off to cure a sprained ankle.
At any rate, even skipping over the change as such, it gave all the players the wrong message. It told them that:
1. Such changes can happen again. So even if you like the new system, God knows when you too will get raped.
2. That Sony doesn't give a fuck about you players. Sure, we all knew in the back of the head that corporations are in it for the money, and that Sony isn't your best buddy, but we like to pretend that they're at least human. Outright shafting the existing players for purely the mercantile reason of wanting more money, feels really inhuman somehow. It's not even a case of tweaking or improving the game to appeal to more people, it's something that outright says, "fuck you lot, we're going for the other group instead. They have more money." It just feels... low.
Well, that's technically true, but you have to wonder exactly how much of a leg up.
On one hand, indeed SWG got screwed more than their other existing games. On the other hand, some things _are_ common to all SOE games. As I was saying, the wholesale changing the whole bloody spell list happened in EQ2 too. It wasn't of the magnitude of the NGE fuck-up, but it was a fuck-up anyway.
I don't know... applying Occam's Razor, I find it less likely that a bunch of independent teams independently decided to fuck-up their own games at the same time, than that some fucktard higher up at Sony pushed them all to do it. Not that the former is impossible, but it's a lot less probable.
Sure, some fucked up more, and some had the sense and sanity to stop a lot earlier. But there had to be some "auugh! copy WoW _now_! Marketting says people like dumbed down games! Dumb down _now_!" pressure from above to get them all to do it at the same time.
Heck, it's not just the change of system either. If you look at the quests too, EQ2 and SWG started roughly at the same time to get a buttload of quests that just felt like mass-produced crap that didn't even make sense. It speaks lots that both games ended with such nonsense crap as a sniper scope for a _sword_ in SWG... that actually was a potion, or like quests in EQ2 to kill deer and bears to see which of them stole a book.
I mean, seriously, think about it. Anywhere else if someone found it on their TO-DO list that today they have to code a scope for swords, they'd just go tell someone, "Excuse me? Did I get that right? And how do you want to implement that without attachments?" That they just went ahead and coded it as a potion, speaks volumes. Whoever did that was just a jaded peon who just did their quota and tried not to think about it.
And that it started happening in both games at the same time, makes me think of a more general SOE problem. Something happened there, and it came from higher up than either dev team.
At any rate, since it _did_ happen in more than one game, including at least one where George Lucas and Raph Koster had no say... well, it means it can happen to a new SOE game too.
Will it be as big a fuck-up as SWG? No, probably not. That's a monumental achievement as fuck-ups go. Mere mortals can't even hope to achieve something equal to that. But it can be pretty fucked up anyway. And there's _something_ currently at work at SOE which seems to create the right conditions for fucking up. That's all I'm saying.
Sorry, I play WoW and I've played SWG. The post-NGE SWG is _not_ WoW. I actually like WoW, I wouldn't have minded it too much if the NGE just aligned the interface to the WoW one.
Seriously, the new interface and mechanics are _Planetside_ with a SW theme, not WoW with a SW theme. Except it's worse than Planetside too, in the classes department, since Planetside too is a classless game where you get whatever combination of skills you think fits your style more.
You really have to wonder what they were smoking, really. They already had Planetside and it had buggerall subscribers. They had already gutted the development on Planetside and merged several servers in one, because the income and player numbers were abysmally low. At any rate, it actually had a lot less subscribers than SWG. So someone thinks... "I know, let's turn SWG into Planetside." I mean, wth, they could have just asked their own marketting department if aiming for the market share of the other game is actually an improvement.
But to return to the "it's not WoW" topic, WoW actually has a lot more complexity than the new SWG. For starters:
- WoW has a metric buttload of skills which you need to combine (semi) intelligently to make the most out of a given situation. There are skills which slow down the enemy, skills which reduce your damage taken, skills which boost your own damage, skills which temporarily give you a break from one or more enemies (though they might cause a wipe if you use them in the wrong place), and a ton more. Add different timers on them, and you actually have to think in combinations to suit the actual tactical situation there. It's _not_ just a case of sitting there and mashing fire, FPS-style, with the odd lobbing a grenade now and then.
- WoW does have those talent trees which actually allow _some_ customization to your character. A Survival spec hunter actually needs different tactics to make the most out of its spec, than a Beastmastery hunter. And a Shadow priest doesn't play the same as a Holy spec priest. (The former can spam the Psychic Scream and Mind Flay combo -- again, it has to be used as a combo for maximum effect -- while the latter doesn't even have Mind Flay.) It's not as flexible as the original SWG system, but it's not as rigid and unidimensional as the post-NGE system either.
Most WoW classes would be unable to actually play WoW and survive, if they were as unidimensional as the new SWG classes.
At any rate, trust me, I actually like WoW and the post-NGE SWG is just crap even compared to WoW. It's too dumbed down even for WoW.
Now I can imagine that the order to dumb down SWG did come in reaction to WoW. But that's probably from some people who didn't even understand WoW. It was a knee-jerk reaction, without even trying to understand why WoW works or what do people actually find in it.
_That_ is the most damning thing there. I'm not even against copying ideas from other games, but mindless copying without understanding... well, you see the result in NGE. They didn't actually understand what makes WoW fun to WoW players, and they ended up with something that appeals to neither their old player base nor to WoW players.
In addition to what was already said, let's put it like this: the NGE turned the whole game into a whole other genre. It went from being a SF MMORPG to a FPS with a bad interface, plus a rigid no-choices class system which just says which special attacks you get at which level. The most common metaphor for it is that they turned SWG into Planetside, but that doesn't even do it justice: it's a Planetside with a bad interface, and with actually less freedom than Planetside.
Pay attention to that part about turning the game into a whole other genre, please, and you'll probably understand why most people are annoyed by it. Imagine that you've signed up for, dunno, Eve Online because you like the space combat, and after a couple of years it gets suddenly turned into Everquest instead. Oh and you get to choose a fantasy class instead of your customized ship. Sorry, there's no way to play your old character as it was any more.
Even if you don't think that one is inherently a worse game as such, it's the whole thing of turning it into another game. You can surely see how that would annoy a lot of people. A lot liked the old game, and just don't like the new mechanics and wouldn't have signed up for the new game.
And forcing everyone else to pick a fundamentally different character class is a pretty obvious (and justified) reason for discontent. Imagine that you've actually invested time and energy in creating and levelling up a very specific flavour of character... and suddenly you have to pick from a list of 9 fundamentally different ones, because your old combination is no longer available. Imagine that even the interface doesn't work like it used to any more.
If you're familiar with, say, WoW, imagine that you've wanted to play a hunter. Say, a very specific flavour too, like Beastmastery spec hunter, or Marksman spec hunter. You've done quests, you've grinded your epics, you've spent time at the auction house getting just the right kind of equipment for that character. Because, you know, that's the character you wanted to play. (Feel free to replace with whatever class you actually liked, if that makes the metaphor easier to swallow.) Then imagine that a patch came and just deleted that class. In fact, it deleted both pet classes, so switching to Warlock isn't an option either. Sorry, pal, pet classes are out. We'll let you switch to another class, though. You can be a scrapper, tanker, defender, controller or blaster like in COH now.
Oh yeah, also imagine that they just decided to get rid of the talent trees and the old abilities too. Having a choice of spec was so difficult to balance and all. You may have carefully planned advancing your character, but that goes right into the garbage bin. Now everyone gets to be a clone of everyone else, and uniformly get a pre-determined skill every 5 levels.
Surely you see how that would piss off a lot of people, right? It's not even whether the new classes are "worse" as such (although methinks they are.) People get emotionally attached to that character, and having it unilaterally nuked and turned into something fundamentally different... well, it's gonna feel like that character just got raped. Yet that's just what SOE did in the NGE.
Now also imagine that there was a prestige class, available only to people who've grinded the other classes to level 70. (Which actually would be less grind in WoW than the old SWG "hologrind" to Jedi.) So you've grinded like a slave, dumped thousands of hours into mindlessly levelling up a bunch of unrelated classes (half of which maybe you didn't even like in the first place), did the same quests and shot the same NPCs over and over again... and finally got your prestige class. Now you're a Jedi. Bloody finally.
Now imagine that the same patch comes by and nukes all that achievement, and makes it one of the normal classes available to all newbies. In fact, imagine they got rid of the old Warrior class, and made your Jedi just the melee tank class. Yep, that was another stunt Sony pulled in the N
They did it in other games already. Try EQ2 whole classes swung between random extremes, and the whole set of spells got changed at least twice. E.g., one of my characters swung from primarily dual-wielding damage-dealer, to primary tank who can't even solo random mobs without a tower shield, to primarily two-hander specialist. It doesn't even have the same abilities as when I designed that character. And crafting got changed into something not even resembling the same thing.
Now admittedly, I don't claim it's anywhere _near_ the magnitude of the SWG NGE fuck-up. That's not even close. SWG didn't just get randomly changed, it got turned into a whole other _genre_. You just can't top _that_ kind of achievement. Still, it just shows the kind of random changes to one's characters that Sony won't think twice about doing.
That said, if I'm to take a wild uninformed guess about the future:
I'm thinking more like... anyone else remember that in SWG smugglers _still_ can't actually smuggle? That content just doesn't exist.
Or that they created 4 flavours of the trader class in the NGE, and made them not able to even do the normal quests (since being stuck at combat level 1 kinda makes it impossible to actually kill anything for a quest fast)... and nerfed 3 flavours out of 4 into mostly making a loss? (Now duly noted, crafting in a lot of games, WoW included is mostly a time-sink on the side. But that's just the point: it's a secondary activity of a character mostly geared towards adventuring. But making a class that can _only_ craft and then making them produce worse stuff than the drops off random desert chicken, is kinda harsh.)
Or that they actually broke the Entertainers (you get items like posters which should start a quest, but they don't actually do anything), and the random generated quests send you to dance for some tourists... in an empty room without any tourists? Or that it tells you all the time that Entertainers are masters of extracting information from people, yet the content to actually do that simply doesn't exist after the tutorial?
Or that there's a shitload of levels of Politician, yet you went from zero to max the instant you join a city, since the content for all those levels just didn't exist?
Etc.
So I'm having this mental image of a SOE game with spies... that can't actually spy. And mercenaries which are stuck doing the same randomly generated quest over and over again, because that's all the mercenary content, but can't actually get any meaningful mercenary employment
Because you're a cretin? Because your smooth neanderthal brains can't deal with other stances than "us-vs-them"? Just a thought.
Point in case: here noone was arguing whether the Darfur massacre exists or not, but that a satellite image by itself doesn't prove much. Yes, if there's more information to confirm it, that's good, but that kinda was the whole point: you need a ton of context information before you even know what that picture even means.
Let me spare you the effort to figure that out: it's _not_ taking either a pro- or contra- "save Darfur" stance, it's just debating a tangential detail. No more, no less. It's really just a marginally off-topic tangent. But I guess that just doesn't compute in your retarded "us-vs-them" world, does it? Someone _has_ to take sides in your view of the world, don't they?
Is there some connection between that and Iraq? Not really, and I'm pretty sure I've been against war in Iraq for years. But it seems that in your tiny little brains there's no room for such complexities. People have to be neatly divided into two camps. If someone doesn't support this, they surely pro-war in Iraq too. That someone can actually have different positions, on two unrelated issues, and use their own brains instead of following party lines, doesn't even compute in your deffective little mind, does it?
You amuse me, little cretin.
Heh. Actually, I'm not going to panic at all, especially since I'm not really an environmentalist.
Other than that, pretty much noone ever said that those species will ever find their perfect environment or niche ever again. They're kept, pretty much, as museum pieces. It's not survival of the fittest, and that's pretty much what I was saying too. We already know we're fit enough to wipe them out.
Pretty much that's all that that conservation is: keeping bits of Earth as museums where we can still see what lived there before we came along. There are valid environmental concerns around, but noone's imagining that those species will some day become fit enough to dodge bullets from scoped rifles. (If we actually thought they could evolve Matrix-like reflexes, we'd probably just kill them before they do.)
Same as we keep some pharaoh's sarcophagus or a 17'th century musket in a museum, really. Noone imagines that the pharaoh will some day get fit enough to rise from the sarcophagus (what with the organs being in separate jars) or that the muskets will someday become better than a modern assault rifle. But we keep them there anyway.
Now you can propose destroying the museums, for all I care. I'd find it sorta sad, but I'm not going to panic. But that's really what it is: destroying a bit of the past. Not "survival of the fittest." That's all I'm saying.
Maybe because some people aren't as interested in groupthink games as you seem to be. Sometimes reality isn't as convenient as "someone quick hide any inconvenient questions." Mind you, the question _can_ be stupid, but "someone quick mod it down" isn't a panacea either.
Which is just bogus even as debating semantincs goes. If your point is that it's only "a large number of different things" instead of literally "anything", then that's not really useful. My point still stands even then. "It can mean more than one thing" is plenty enough.
Fires happened all over the place, not only in London. It may not be immediately obvious to someone from the age of flame retardants everywhere. But before those, fire running amok was one of the constants of human history. Wood burns surprisingly well when untreated, and straws (as in, thatched roof) even more so. In a dry sub-desert environment, doubly so, since it's dry wood and dry straws.
And maybe you can't wrap yours that we have an equally long history of propaganda to support that killing.
The fact is that the average peasant would rather stay on his farm, than take part in a war where the best he can "win" is remaining alive to return to the farm. That's a very loose quote from memory from Goering, btw. I don't like the fellow on the whole, but he was right in _that_ aspect. You need to lie a bit to that peasant to get him chest-thumping patriotically, or marching in a neat line to the front.
And it's not something that started and ended in the 30's and 40's, either. The same applied when the Greeks went to fight the Persians in the 2'nd millenium BC, or when the USA went to fight Iraq recently.
Invariably you have to first motivate the people a bit as to why it should be their problem that you want to go fight some war where they have nothing to win. So you'd start by presenting the enemy as (A) doing some unspeakable atrocities, or (B) quite often that they're not even humans at all. They're a bunch of vampires or ghouls eating corpses, really.
E.g., when the Romans went to war against Carthage, the "they're doing atrocities!" smear campaign went into full speed too. The Carthaginians were presented as burning infants alive to appease their dark gods. Surely it's your duty as a Roman citizen to go stop that atrocity, right? (The only funny thing is that each account gives a different version as to _how_ did they sacrifice those children. Did anyone actually see one of those sacrifices, or is it just propaganda run amok? I guess we'll never really know.)
You can see that all through the middle ages and even renaissance too. Accusations of cooking and eating babies, and or drinking their blood, can be found all over the place, whether it was in a "why we should go to war against X" context, or confession extracted by torture in witchcraft trials. If you listen to those confessions, half the witches or even christian sects all over europe had human babies as their primary food source. Too bad that the same confessions also admit stuff like flying on broomsticks or fucking with the devil (quite literally), which kinda ruins the credibility of the whole. Again, the attrocity accusation was really just the boilerplate template for any "why should we exterminate X with extreme prejudice" campaign.
Anti-semitism too s
Actually, that's sorta the whole point: context is _everything_. And the context you're given can be misleading (deliberately let you connect the dots in the wrong direction), or outright a lie.
Yes, if you also have the right context, you can make an informed judgment. But do you? That's the question I'm asking.
Since you mention Nazis and mass graves, there is already at least one case where that was a lie. There are mass graves in Poland which the Soviets blamed the Nazis for. Turns out that it was the _Soviets_ themselves who were responsible for that. Stalin's NKVD had rounded up what they thought would be potential problem elements there, such as the Polish army officers, and summarily executed them.
Atrocity? Yes. But the context was an outright lie. Now I'm not saying the Nazis were nice guys, far from it, but in this case they had just provided a convenient scapegoat for NKVD's own atrocities.
And before someone says that's revisionism: no, it's not. The USSR finally owned up in the end. It's as official a confession as it gets.
Also, since you mention Nazis, those guys pioneered another thing: whole "war documentaries" that were entirely produced in a movie studio. Yay for first-hand front-line footage. You can believe that, can't you? I mean, the images surely speak for themselves, right? Well, too bad it came from a studio in Berlin instead of from France.
That's the whole point: if I show you a small pile of corpses in a mass grave, it's emotional and all, but you're entirely dependent on the context provided. How do you just know from that image alone whether that's Jews massacred by the Nazis, or "kulaks" (rich peasants, i.e., any peasant who wasn't starving) massacred by Stalin's NKVD, or maybe some the victims of the post-WWI flu epidemic (think like the bird flu, but it could be transmitted from human to human), or whatever else? The context is _everything_. And by just giving you the proper lie as a context, that image can be made to mean almost anything.
The point isn't to grow complacent or "post-modernist" but to start realizing when you don't have enough reliable context to make an informed judgment.
E.g., in this case, sure, burned villages is an emotional thought and all, but who burned whose houses?
One context particularly used as a battle-banner by a lot is that the Darfur conflict is some muslims-massacring-christians case. That's actually false, as both sides involved are muslims. It's an ethnic/racial war, not a religious war. There you go, an outright false context that's been used a lot lately.
Or how do you know which of the two sides burned the villages down? There are at least two sides in any conflict. And even the arab militias were funded in response to the insurgent forces of the other side. Are all the burned houses on the rebels side, or did the rebels do some burning of their own? In the absence of some first-hand information from down there, how _do_ you draw the right conclusions from just a satellite photo?
Because the whole point I was making _is_ "a photo can mean anything". And I still see nothing wrong with that judgment.
There are entirely too many drawn in taking sides and waving banners just because the nice man on TV told them which side to join, and how loud to shout. I'm thinking the world as a whole would be a much better place if more people stopped and thought, "wait a minute, that can mean anything whatsoever." We probably would have less atrocities to worry about in the first place, if those comitting them in the first place didn't take the media's/imam's/shaman's/whatever word for it unthinkingly.
Again, I'm _not_ making any judgment about the conflict in Sudan or about AI. I _am_ however making a point that an image can mean anything, and it can be manipulated into seeming to mean something completely different than it really does.
I may not have enough data about the conflict in Sudan, but I think I do have enough data to make a judgment about how an image can be manipulated or used as "proof" of whatever you want it to prove. You just need to watch TV these days, really.
So, basically, it's really simple and there's no contradiction there.
Actually, thanks for bringing that up. 'Cause, see, that's the whole flippin' point I was trying to make.
No, I don't know enough about that conflict to have an informed opinion. And I'm not going to suddenly jump to a spoon-fed conclusion based on some emotional images and wording. When I have enough other data there, I might make a judgment. But I refuse to jump to one of the sides and wave a banner, just because the media spoon fed me some images.
That's all I'm preaching: exercise some healthy skepticism, get your information from more than one source. That's all.
If you already know enough about that conflict, by all means, go ahead and have an opinion about it. But so far I only have someone's word that some pictures mean what he says they mean. And that's just not enough data to base an opinion on.
Bingo. You just gave the best example of one of the biggest manipulations in European history.
Thing is, you could use the same media manipulation techniques to that one too. (If they had photography back then, which they didn't.) Get a few refugees to testify with tears in their eyes about how the Jews are ethnically cleansing them by poisoning their water supplies, show some photographs of piled bodies, show some satellite images of whole areas which turned from fertile farmland back to woods because the peasants there kinda went extinct. Voila, now you have your "proof" of the atrocities Jews commited against the poor Christians of that region.
Before anyone accuses me of anti-semitism, I _know_ it wasn't the Jews to blame there. It's just an example of the kind of absurdity one can support with careful picking of whose testimonies they listen, and some emotional images.
Look, I'm not against gathering more evidence, but I'm just pointing out that just one photo (satellite or not) can be massaged into meaning anything you want it to mean.
E.g., do you even know which side was inhabiting that area, if not for being spoon fed that it's an atrocity against the Sudanese?
I'll also point out that history (some of it very near) is full of manipulation and selective confirmation. And often you just need to choose whose side propaganda you want to listen to.
E.g., if you would have asked German prisoners in '39, they would have told you that they're just fighting against the Polish aggressors. (The Third Reich propaganda massively broadcast news of the polish "aggression" and Germany just protecting its borders.)
I'll also point out that tribal warfare _is_ brutal like that. You can find archaeological evidence from the pre-columbian era where whole villages were razed. And most native tribes from all over the world were engaged in endemic warfare long before the Europeans got there. IIRC attrition rates in some areas reached 60%. Of the total population, not of the army. As in, really, if you were born in one of those tribes, chances would be about 60% that you'd die in combat, and not in your bed of old age. (By comparison, even the WW2 barely averaged 1% of the total population of the countries involved.)
As soon as humans invented missile weapons, suddenly in caves everywhere you have crude drawings of groups of archers shooting at each other, often led by some priest with some holy totem. And it didn't take much longer to invent flaming arrows.
Even in civilized nation warfare, the US secession war saw such things as the burning of Columbia. Or the fire bombing of Dresden or Tokyo, in WW2.
Now think that 10-100 times worse, and you have an accurate image of tribal warfare, at least for some tribes. Humans needed some tens of thousands of years to get shocked by the horrors of soldiers dying of all sorts of diseases in the Crimean war, or by the brutal realities of WW1 and WW2, and start getting ideas that maybe we should all act a bit nicer. Whole areas of the globe just didn't get there.
And yes, it would be nice if we somehow dragged them into the 21'st century. But it also helps if you realize that neither side there got in the 21'st century, and it's usually not just one side massacring the others.
Basically, just from the pictures you don't know who did what to whom. And in retaliation to what. It's easy to pin the blame on just one side as the ones cleansing the others, but reality is rarely that neatly divided in the good and the evil. And such pictures can be used to create just such a one-sided view.
While I'll freely admit that I didn't RTFA, the summary has a quote saying "parts of this region were burned so thoroughly that there's nothing left but a large black scar". He's talking about whole parts of the region, not about only the villages being targetted. That's a freakin' huge difference.
That said, the same could be said about New Orleans. Suspiciously the devastation doesn't expand that much further than the city, so it must have been man-made, eh?