I hate to break it to you, but (A) they didn't judge best or worst, but most absurd as science goes, and (B) they do have people qualified in several branches of science and technology. In fact, I'd expect that if anyone is qualified to judge woowoo doomsday scenarios based on stellar alignments and mysterious radiations from the galaxy, it would be NASA. That's, you know, the kinda thing they _are_ supposed to do: know what's happening up there.
Of course, don't tell that to the homeschooled idiots who'd rather wait for a "rapture" that kept being sold as any day now for 2000 years straight and never happened, than fix the real problems on Earth in the meantime. And who'll even take a non-existent Mayan prophecy as support for their Bible delusions. Or to the gang who just wants to believe any non-scientific idiocy, presumably because it makes them feel less bad about sleeping through Physics class high-school.
My mother selected 3 of the 4 hotels for my honeymoon, the other coming from the NY times travel section. Guess which one was the dump with paper thin walls and crappy beds?
Yeah, my mom can be a practical joker like that too;)
Maybe you should use your advice and use your fucking head before doing another canned moral rant?
The whole thread is, yes, about Microsoft refusing to publish an Adults Only game. Can you read? Do you know what "Adults Only" means? Hint: it's not for children.
So maybe, just maybe, we are indeed talking about adults, and the only delusional cretin seeing it as a setup for your canned "think of the children!!!111eleventeen" angle is you.
I think even the scenario of your kids getting your game is one scare that's blown out of proportion. It's letting them sneak the canard right back in that consoles are for kids, only this time in the form of necessarily having a kid around in some form or another. I wouldn't give them even that as a given.
The fact is, the average age for marriage in the USA has risen lately to 27 years old. Very likely more than that if you exclude the Amish. While they do breed more often and earlier, you don't really have to worry about those having XBoxes and Kinect. And averages are averages. There are people not touching marriage with a ten foot pole until the thirties or fourties or indeed never.
The child bearing age has risen too, year after year. To the extent that we can seriously start worrying more about genetic diseases for that factor alone. There are a lot of people who only have children in the thirties or fourties or indeed fifties. Again the Amish are screwing up the statistics a bit for the USA, but they don't have XBoxes. I suspect that if you looked at the rest of the people, you'd get something more similar to England and Wales (a somewhat similarly urbanized and industrialized country) where the average childbearing age is 29.4 years old. And it was already 28.4 a decade ago and climbed slowly but steadily ever since, so we're not looking at an isolated 2010 spike. And again, averages are averages. The gauss curve goes waay to the right of 29.4.
The fact is, there are plenty of legitimate buyers who _don't_ have children anywhere near their home. There are plenty of XBoxes around where really there is no child with access to it at all.
(Except maybe if some child commits breaking and entering to start playing with a stranger's console, in which case he has bigger problems than accidentally finding someone's porn game. I mean, it's pretty much the Arson, Murder and Jaywalking trope at that point.)
So, yeah, it's nice of MS to make their console mandatorily friendly to a lot of people's non-existing children. I eagerly await their also adjusting their ratings to protect the feelings of imaginary friends, imaginary pets and the Tooth Fairy.
... then maybe you should not do them in the first place?
I actually looked at the messages up the thread. Nobody was proposing to show hardcore porn to children. The first to even mention it is you. Heck, neither the one you were answering to nor the OP even mentioned hardcore porn, they mentioned titties. And again, nobody was proposing to show even those to children.
Then here you build one more strawman ("It seems a small step to go from the nonsense argument that sex is harmless to children": nobody had made that argument) to base another fallacy on, namely the slippery slope.
I can't even begin to comprehend what kind of confusion of mind even got you the idea that children have _anything_ to do with it. Never mind that nobody you were answering to had even mentioned kids, but whatever delusions gave you the idea that that's even remotely a possibility? I'm sure you know that the average gamer age is in the thirties by now, and there are even gaming grandmas by now. Adults playing console games and spending their money on games that weren't ever intended for kids is an issue as old as the first Playstation, unless you've been under a rock the last 16 years straight. Yeah, that's since 1994.
Really, if you don't like bullshit strawmen, don't do them. Yes, I get it, you just had to do your canned scare quotes and self-righteous moral outrage. You can wait until someone actually makes those arguments and serve your canned moral outrage to those.
They could do the same thing with black people, Mormons, and socialists; but that would be as stupid and ignorant as your suggestion. It's comments like yours that make social networking sites (like Slashdot) look very stupid and lame. Why don't you people go back to 4chan?
So your argument is... what? That we should keep the trans-gendered out of the army, because figuring a way to let them in would... what? Could apply to blacks, Mormons and socialists too?
Hate to break the bad news to you, my dear Neanderthal, but in the meantime we do allow blacks, Mormons and even socialists in the army. Sorry, buddy, the 40's called and they want their BS scare back. Actually, sorry, even earlier than that. They had black units in WW2. Heck, even WW1.
But, tell you what, I'm a nice guy... I'll meet you half-way. I'll move to 4chan when you lot scared of gays and trans-gendered move into the 20'th century. I'm not even unreasonable. I'm not even asking for 21'st century or late 20'`th. I realize it's too big a leap. You don't go cold turkey on stupidity. But at least moving into, dunno, the 60's would be kinda nice.
Does the guy trying to lose muscle to look to like a girl move into a support job? Will the army issue testosterone injections to get the girl beefed up for front-lines combat?
Is there a reason why either is even a problem? The army has tests and standards one must pass. If someone wants to fit a role and they don't qualify, they don't get it. It goes not just for guys wanting to pass for girls or viceversa, but also for guys/girls trying to pass for a sniper, or guys/girls trying to pass for a marine, and everything. The standards are already there. You have to be this buff to ride, basically.
Is there some inherent reason why trans people can't be held to the existing standards? Or better said, is there a reason why refusing them a priori is a better solution?
Actually, that one seems to me like the easiest to fix. Just have a separate barrack for trans-guys and one for trans-gals.
And before the usual "OMG, but that'll make them build extra barracks and cost too much!!!!111eleventeen" idiocy pops up, let me remind you that a modern division in the USA is 17,000 to 21,000 people, not counting the civillian personnel on the base and whatnot. That'll be a lot of barracks or dorms or whatever. It's not like they have one huge hangar in which 20,000 soldiers sleep. Anyone pretending they absolutely, positively can't allocate a building or a floor, or really whatever kind of compartment they use, for a couple of trans people, is more full of shit than a sewer.
There we go. No more "OMG squick factor of someone with a penis sleeping in the women barracks" scare, is it?
That was easy, wasn't it? Just 30 seconds of using one's brains instead of mindlessly bleating canned scare quotes did it.
But if that genuinely never occurred to you on your own, just ask and I'll gladly teach you more advanced stuff like counting to 20 without taking off your shoes. And I could even refer you to a good doctor who can get you walking without bruising your knuckles in no time too;)
I was born in the quaint town of P5$+19"797q4. It's lovely in the spring. You should visit. My mother's maidens name was B192zve8p6; an ancient and distinguished family, if you must ask. My first pet was a cat named Ö8z~30+r.vd. We all loved her. And I went to ß8s8h,u:82 memorial school.
It's not incest in the biological sense that happens there, at least judging by the summary. That guy isn't boning his actual mom or anything. It's sex between two adults that are as unrelated as it gets, except for the fact that one of them had married a parent of the other.
Even the usual objections about making kids with six toes don't actually apply. Those people aren't actually biologically related.
It's no more incest than, dunno, boning your cousin's wife.
Granted, boning a friend's or relative's wife is generally accepted as a not nice thing to do. That guy isn't very filial, to say the least. But incest? It's incest only via a legal redefinition in _some_ states. And not the kind of "incest" most people think of when they hear that word. For most of us it's _less_ incest than marrying one's second cousin, which is actually legal.
So, really, WTF? We don't even need to go as deep as murder for worse stuff that's out there, if Amazon is that hell-bent on enforcing guy code morals. Why don't we just ban all novels featuring an adulterous wife, at that? It's not even slippery slope, it's exactly what they removed here.
Dunno, it seems to me DOOM should do the same as everyone else celebrate 18 when it can go get drunk and laid. Well, at least drunk anyway. But laid is right next, as soon as it can get a girl into its mom's basement that is totally awed by its grenade jumping skills. Any day now;)
At the risk of repeating myself, it's stupid to try to argue something down just based on an over-simplified summary of a trope.
Yes, believe it or not, there's only a handful of tropes around. You can find the same tropes in kids shows, or in elaborate alegories for adults. Until someone invents a new trope, yes, of course, you'll find examples of each in both lightweight kids' stuff and in profound stuff and anything in between.
Dismissing something just because some trope was also done in a kid's show, without any consideration of the context or how well it was done, is just freaking stupid.
Not the least because it's a textbook example of the association fallacy.
I'm not sure I need an extra category there, though. The kind of hipster who praises X just because it's "in" and dismisses Y with some hare-brained excuse just because it's not on the list of hip things he should like, falls quite neatly under "stupid" in my system.
Of course, then everyone will complain about the discrepancies/inaccuracies/inconsistencies or whatever. OMG not canon oneleventyone!!!!
You mean like how everyone complained about Knights Of The Old Republic not being yet another dumb merchandising exercise of the movie characters? Oh, wait, they didn't. It actually received high praise, several awards, and was described as one of the most influential pieces of work of the Star Wars universe. And it sold a metric buttload of copies too.
And it actually did better than, say, SWG's using the signature characters as merchandising.
Because it seems to me like that's the real problem with game to movie, or movie to game adaptations. They're really just doing a merchandising exercise. You know, same as putting Vader's mug on a t-shirt. It doesn't make the t-shirt any better, but you expect people to buy it just because OMG IT'S DARTH VADER.
And similarly you end up with a movie or game whose only merit is that it features certain signature characters, but they don't actually do anything meaningful or interesting. And somehow, much to Hollywood's surprise, that seems to work less well for movies than for t-shirts. People tend to still expect an interesting story in a movie, not just seeing Mario.
If you reduce it to an oversimplified strawman, of course nothing is profound. The Odyssey is just about some guy dicking around the sea instead of going home. LORD of the ring is a old-timey==good vs industrialism-and-change==bad story. War And Peace is about war and identity crisis. Crime And Punishment is just about the simple moral dilemma of whether you can justify evil means for a good purpose, so basically good vs evil again. (Since you already reduced similar themes in ME2 to just simple good vs evil, or to seeing the same basic trope in a choose-your-adventure book.) Etc. Not very profound when put that way, is it?
In fact, I your message was trolling, because otherwise it's so stupid it's depressing. What makes something profound or not isn't just having theme X or theme Y in it, but you do with it and what you explore from there. You can take any theme in the world and turn it into a shallow exercise, or do something thought-provoking with. You just need to look at the likes of Lewis Caroll who managed to turn something as dry as hating the new mathematics and especially topology, into a classic, or L. Frank Baum who took a political alegory so far that most people don't even figure it out and again managed to turn it into something both popular and for many people thought-provoking.
Except this one is actually worse. The gist of it is: oh, we'll continue to track you all right, but we'll give you more ads you're not interested in. I.e., it's not even a fucking opt out of being tracked or the ads, it's accepting to still be tracked but forfeit the meager rewards of occasionally getting an interesting ad out of it. As opposed to, dunno, your point B, it doesn't even say "ok, ok, we'll stop collecting your data, but keep the old one." It flat out tells you "hell, yeah, we'll keep collecting your data and using it for everything except targeting ads. And oh, it's actually up to the individual companies if they actually want to obey even that. It's not like anything you click on this site is actually binding to anyone."
And from that they have the chutzpah to conclude that really, people don't want to opt out of being tracked.
Really, the scenario that comes to mind is sending a bunch of girls a letter that says, "Hi! Me and these 5 other guys are the ones who've been stalking you all these years and sending you creepy postcards and the occasional box of chocolates for Valentine's Day. But now we're nice guys and let you opt out! Just sign here and we'll... ah, who am I kidding, we'll still stalk you obsessively. But we promise to pretend we don't know you like chocolates and roses, so we might send you a dead cat or a baby skull instead, and maybe a bouquet of nightshade. And actually we can't even promise that. Really, each of us can decide for himself." And from that concluding that actually girls want to be stalked, because only one lass with Down Syndrome actually signed the opt out.
Even by the standards of the crap that "industry self-regulation" generally means, this takes the cake. I guess when you have a bunch of folks whose job is to lie to the public _and_ to the corporate masters paying for it, man, it's such a surprise that their own survey says that people love it. I mean what are the odds?
Actually, after reading their powerpoint slide, the mentioned stats on page 5 actually say:
Overall click through rate: 0.0035%
Which is actually what you'd expect for something where you have to click an icon _inside_ an ad to even get to their opt-out site. Especially an icon that says "Advertising Choices" instead of something clearer like, say, "Opt Out Of Ads." Not that that would make it much better, since we all learned anyway to not click on spammers' opt out links and that they typically lead to something worse than ignoring them.
Additionally, again: it's an icon _inside_ an ad. If I ever saw their stupid icon, I would assume it to be yet another lame FakeUI trick to make me click on the ad. The only kind of person who clicks on buttons on ads they're not interested to, is probably also the kind of person who believes they'll win an iPad by shooting 5 ducks in an ad or opens attachments called PornPix.xls.exe in emails. I.e., the terminally retarded.
The place I'd look for some genuine choices to turn off ads would be, say, in my user preferences on a site, not inside an ad.
And, geeze, if it's options call it "options", will ya? Calling it "Advertising Choices" is as far from suggesting "opt out" as humanly possible.
* in 20 people who click on icon opt out
* 1 in 5 people who make it to opt-out page opt out
That's 3 in 4 users who click on the icon but never make it to the Opt Out page. Wtf? Why doesn't it lead directly to an opt-out page in the first place?
In fact, if you do look at their page 3, clicking on the icon leads you to a marketing bullshit page that starts with justifying why they showed you the ad. At which point, yeah, 3/4 of the people giving up sounds about right.
It's starting to sound like they took a lesson from The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy:
"`...You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anyone or anything.' `But the plans were on display...' `On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.' `That's the display department.' `With a torch.' `Ah, well the lights had probably gone.' `So had the stairs.' `But look you found the notice didn't you?' `Yes,' said Arthur, `yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of The Leopard".'"
Anyway, if you make it to the opt out page, basically at that point they tell you it doesn't opt you out of anything. It's on the same page 3. It tells you they'll still track you and collect your data and share it around, but you'll get worse ads from _some_ companies. WTF kind of opt out is that?
Plus, it tells you pretty clear that it's a pointless site, and, regardless of what checkboxes you click, it's still up to the individual companies whether they'll still track you or not. And that you actually have to click on each company's link to see what policy they actually have. I.e., basically the opt-out page is itself just a bullshit ad page with links to companies that you can click on, nothing more. That 1 in 5 still took their chances and clicked the checkboxes, is... interesting.
At any rate, it seems to me like their conclusion is weird that "Transparency doesn't foster opt-out". They didn't measure that. They just showed that if you make a misleading icon that nobody sane will ever click on, put it in the worst place for encouraging users to click, and of the few that click you manage to lose 3/4 before they make it to the opt out page, and then the opt-out page is phrased to flat out tell people that you'll still track them anyway... yeah, you'll have very few opt outs. That's not "transparency". It's actually quite the opposites. It's like putting the customer complaints department at the South Pole and only accessible in person, and then concluding that you have the most satisfied customers ever because nobody ever has complaints.
I dunno, it's easy to jump to conclusions, but given where the data comes from, it's a bit like trusting the telemarketers that only 5% of people are bothered by repeated calls at dinner time.
And it's especially the combination that makes me wonder. I'd assume that if people just didn't give a fuck, they wouldn't have clicked to learn more in the first place. I mean, I don't go click on penis enlargement pill adds just to change my mind later. If I'm not interested, I don't click at all.
That only 5% of those who went to that page actually went through, makes me suspect that it just sounded pointless, or confusing, or asked for more personal data to join that list than the relatively anonymous just tracking the browser rather than the person that is currently happening.
I mean, think I gave you a form like this to opt out of some crap:
First Name: Last Name: Address: City: Postcode: Phone Number: Social Security Number: EMail Address:
[ ] I have read the Privacy Statement and understand that I have none, and any data I voluntarily enter can be used for marketing purposes, sold to the highest bidder and shared with every web site we advertise on
Would you go ahead with that, or just say "fuck it, I'll just clear my cookies and browser history more often."?
You know, though, I just have to wonder how much better this is for the Japanese after all.
I mean, looking at the history of single-player RPGs, for a long time the Japanese were years ahead of what we had in the west in terms of story and all. I mean before 1997 or so, real RPGs on the PC and in the West were few and far in between. Even Square was releasing Final Fantasy VII in 1997, whereas on the western PC front the world was taken by surprise by Fallout 1. It was like, "whoa, you can actually have a game with a lot of story on the PC?" Though arguably the one that really got the ball rolling and the RPG genre taken seriously in the West was Baldur's Gate in 1998.
Before that -- and even a long time _after_ that -- western PC RPGs were mostly brainless grind implementations, a la SSI's Eye Of The Beholder series or Might And Magic. If you even had a quest at all, it would be of the kind, "hack and slash your way across the continent and down that dungeon and back, and bring back the item at its end." And not as one of many quests for that dungeon, but as the whole story of the first half of the game, or sometimes even the whole game.
I mean, someone back then could have said essentially the same thing you do, only in reverse: "see, the Japanese want a lot of story and dialog and quests, while the West is content to just whack rats for several hours for xp and loot." Heck, there were even people being dismissive of Japanese games and gamers, and viewing that lot of story as some failure.
Now I'm getting to hear the exact opposite for MMOs: see, we westerners want lots of quests and story and dialogue, while supposedly the Japanese just want to grind.
Something doesn't add up, IMHO. You can't really have both X and Not X be true at the same time.
My very uninformed wild guess would be more like probably in Japan too there are a lot of people who think FFXIV is stupid.
As an FFXIV Player I can tell you that the game DOES SUCK...if you are one of the many elitist pricks that think they can do everything solo.
It took me about 2 months to finally get into a good LS that actually does things together, the majority of the player base on FFXIV right now is of the mind set "I dont need help, Im better than them", and let me tell you, you're not. Grinding solo compared to getting into a group and finding the right mobs to fight is a joke, I went from getting 1k sp a day (that was mostly from leves) to getting 40k sp in 4 hours (basically I found the equivelent of FFXI's Bhaflau thickets in FFXIV).
Uh, dude, I hope that's a joke, because that sounds like the most idiotically game ever. I'm starting to congratulate myself even more for giving it a skip.
It's not about solo vs group, but if all that's to do is grind mobs for xp, that's practically the implementation of the snarky quip that MMOs are about beating small rats with a small stick for 5 hours, so you can get a bigger stick and beat bigger rats. And it was a dismissive quip, not one supposed to illustrate what's fun in them.
Beating up rat after rat after rat is a boring job for obsessive-compulsives. Most of us put up with that as filler, to see the next piece of the story, get the next reassurance that we're the great saviour of the furbolg race, or just the next achievement.
It's not even a new idea. The whole history of the MMO genre at least in the West has been increasingly discovering how to add more of that single-player DNA into it, so to speak. More quests, more story, more scripted events, more pretense that you actually changed the world, etc. That Square-Enix would basically ignore a decade of that being proven to work and attract players, is beyond surrealistic in its stupidity.
And... Jesus Fucking Christ, did you just measure fun in a game by xp gained per hour? What about gameplay, story, etc? WTF of a fucked up metric is just how big a number is. Ok, here's a big number for you: +1234567890xp. And you got all that in about a minute of reading this too. I trust this made this the greatest post ever.
Find seven chicks? SEVEN CHICKS? Gee, buddy, way to make a guy even more insecure.
Some of us are happy if we can even find one whose name doesn't end in.jpeg. Much as I'm told the Jpegs are an ancient and distinguished family.
Plus, last time I found one, she whipped and tormented me and called me a loser. And didn't even want to give me my money back when I said that wasn't what I asked for.
Anyway, what was I talking about? Ah, right, some of us are happy to find even one chick. Or half a chick. Finding a guy playing a female char is practically half way there, right?
(Well, normally I wouldn't answer to a sig, but it being in a thread about MMOs I figure it's on topic;)
Aye, but some of us want it to be a loving and intimate relationship, not a quick gangbang with whatever 24 guys were available. Err... I mean... I'm not the kind of slut who'll give everyone a go for attention, you know?
I mean, take my latest case from City Of Heroes. Classic story of boy tank meets girl healer, we seem to hit it off just nice, and soon I invite her to see my supervillain lair. And this time I don't mean mom's basement. They actually have lairs in the game. We hit it off just fine, then we change into spandex and are happily bumping uglies over the head. I mean zombies in the sewer. Can't get much uglier than those.
And then she says, oh God, then she says, "let's bring 6 more guys, it will be FUN!" (Groups in COH have up to 8 members.) I mean, geesh, I'm not even demanding monogamy, but SIX MORE GUYS. It's like she's trying to tell me something. Like that I'm not enough for her. Geeze, it can make a guy awfully insecure, you know?
So I get talked into it against my better judgment. I can tell she's having the time of her life, what with all those ranged DPS-ers all around her, while I'm not even getting a second look. Says that's her role. Yeah, right. More fun in a group my ass. Which reminds me, the only one paying me attention is the melee DPS-er. That guy is practically getting on top of me all the time. I wonder aloud about that guy's sexuality. He calls me weird. Hey, I'm not the one trying to get on top of another guy, buddy.
So then we get to the big archvillain and he's this big and muscular guy, and I get thinking, "I bet HIS girlfriend doesn't ask for six more guys." And I'm in front of this guy as the tank, and everyone is looking at me and expecting me to perform for the big finale, and... oh god... I got performance anxiety and lost the erection. They eventually got the melee DPS-er to tank him.
Made me feel like I wasn't a man any more, it did...
So then next day I go to work, I come back and she's 10 levels higher. I figure she must have soloed it in the meantime. I'm no stranger to soloing an orgasm... err... quest or two myself, lemme tell you.
I ask her what happened, she says, "ah, there were these 7 guys who needed a healer for the respec taskforce, and then we kinda went at it all afternoon." Geeze, like I was saying, I'm not even asking for monogamy, but SEVEN GUYS? And is it that much to ask that I at least be around?
Fucking slut. I threw her out of the lair and changed the locks.
Actually, I think you give them too much credit. There's making a crappy game but at least figuring out what the players want in it and how to keep them hooked and milk them, and then there's the EA way. Though probably Sony would make an even better example, as they turned fucking up in the MMO arena to an art form and pushed boundaries into fuck-up land that nobody else even wanted to think about. Where others were just running around with underpants on their head, Sony was innovating by running around with underpants on the head AND pencils up the nose. But, I'm sure with a bit of effort EA can get to the same level as Sony too.
As I was saying in the other message, actually someone could genuinely be trying to buy or sell depleted uranium, which is a very legal thing to do. More common than you seem to think too. It's an inert and very dense material used, well, whenever you need something heavy and which doesn't take much space. E.g., it's actually used as ballast in boats. SRSLY.
Granted, Amazon wouldn't be the first place to go looking for it, but if I were looking for something like that and happened to stumble upon something like that on Amazon, you can bet your ass I'd have a look at it starting from the assumption that it's a genuine product.
So what you guys did was only waste the time of everyone who wasn't ignorant enough to mistake it for an obvious joke.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to break it to you, but (A) they didn't judge best or worst, but most absurd as science goes, and (B) they do have people qualified in several branches of science and technology. In fact, I'd expect that if anyone is qualified to judge woowoo doomsday scenarios based on stellar alignments and mysterious radiations from the galaxy, it would be NASA. That's, you know, the kinda thing they _are_ supposed to do: know what's happening up there.
Of course, don't tell that to the homeschooled idiots who'd rather wait for a "rapture" that kept being sold as any day now for 2000 years straight and never happened, than fix the real problems on Earth in the meantime. And who'll even take a non-existent Mayan prophecy as support for their Bible delusions. Or to the gang who just wants to believe any non-scientific idiocy, presumably because it makes them feel less bad about sleeping through Physics class high-school.
Yeah, my mom can be a practical joker like that too ;)
Maybe you should use your advice and use your fucking head before doing another canned moral rant?
The whole thread is, yes, about Microsoft refusing to publish an Adults Only game. Can you read? Do you know what "Adults Only" means? Hint: it's not for children.
So maybe, just maybe, we are indeed talking about adults, and the only delusional cretin seeing it as a setup for your canned "think of the children!!!111eleventeen" angle is you.
I think even the scenario of your kids getting your game is one scare that's blown out of proportion. It's letting them sneak the canard right back in that consoles are for kids, only this time in the form of necessarily having a kid around in some form or another. I wouldn't give them even that as a given.
The fact is, the average age for marriage in the USA has risen lately to 27 years old. Very likely more than that if you exclude the Amish. While they do breed more often and earlier, you don't really have to worry about those having XBoxes and Kinect. And averages are averages. There are people not touching marriage with a ten foot pole until the thirties or fourties or indeed never.
The child bearing age has risen too, year after year. To the extent that we can seriously start worrying more about genetic diseases for that factor alone. There are a lot of people who only have children in the thirties or fourties or indeed fifties. Again the Amish are screwing up the statistics a bit for the USA, but they don't have XBoxes. I suspect that if you looked at the rest of the people, you'd get something more similar to England and Wales (a somewhat similarly urbanized and industrialized country) where the average childbearing age is 29.4 years old. And it was already 28.4 a decade ago and climbed slowly but steadily ever since, so we're not looking at an isolated 2010 spike. And again, averages are averages. The gauss curve goes waay to the right of 29.4.
The fact is, there are plenty of legitimate buyers who _don't_ have children anywhere near their home. There are plenty of XBoxes around where really there is no child with access to it at all.
(Except maybe if some child commits breaking and entering to start playing with a stranger's console, in which case he has bigger problems than accidentally finding someone's porn game. I mean, it's pretty much the Arson, Murder and Jaywalking trope at that point.)
So, yeah, it's nice of MS to make their console mandatorily friendly to a lot of people's non-existing children. I eagerly await their also adjusting their ratings to protect the feelings of imaginary friends, imaginary pets and the Tooth Fairy.
... then maybe you should not do them in the first place?
I actually looked at the messages up the thread. Nobody was proposing to show hardcore porn to children. The first to even mention it is you. Heck, neither the one you were answering to nor the OP even mentioned hardcore porn, they mentioned titties. And again, nobody was proposing to show even those to children.
Then here you build one more strawman ("It seems a small step to go from the nonsense argument that sex is harmless to children": nobody had made that argument) to base another fallacy on, namely the slippery slope.
I can't even begin to comprehend what kind of confusion of mind even got you the idea that children have _anything_ to do with it. Never mind that nobody you were answering to had even mentioned kids, but whatever delusions gave you the idea that that's even remotely a possibility? I'm sure you know that the average gamer age is in the thirties by now, and there are even gaming grandmas by now. Adults playing console games and spending their money on games that weren't ever intended for kids is an issue as old as the first Playstation, unless you've been under a rock the last 16 years straight. Yeah, that's since 1994.
Really, if you don't like bullshit strawmen, don't do them. Yes, I get it, you just had to do your canned scare quotes and self-righteous moral outrage. You can wait until someone actually makes those arguments and serve your canned moral outrage to those.
So your argument is... what? That we should keep the trans-gendered out of the army, because figuring a way to let them in would... what? Could apply to blacks, Mormons and socialists too?
Hate to break the bad news to you, my dear Neanderthal, but in the meantime we do allow blacks, Mormons and even socialists in the army. Sorry, buddy, the 40's called and they want their BS scare back. Actually, sorry, even earlier than that. They had black units in WW2. Heck, even WW1.
But, tell you what, I'm a nice guy... I'll meet you half-way. I'll move to 4chan when you lot scared of gays and trans-gendered move into the 20'th century. I'm not even unreasonable. I'm not even asking for 21'st century or late 20'`th. I realize it's too big a leap. You don't go cold turkey on stupidity. But at least moving into, dunno, the 60's would be kinda nice.
Is there a reason why either is even a problem? The army has tests and standards one must pass. If someone wants to fit a role and they don't qualify, they don't get it. It goes not just for guys wanting to pass for girls or viceversa, but also for guys/girls trying to pass for a sniper, or guys/girls trying to pass for a marine, and everything. The standards are already there. You have to be this buff to ride, basically.
Is there some inherent reason why trans people can't be held to the existing standards? Or better said, is there a reason why refusing them a priori is a better solution?
Seems to me like a non-problem basically.
Actually, that one seems to me like the easiest to fix. Just have a separate barrack for trans-guys and one for trans-gals.
And before the usual "OMG, but that'll make them build extra barracks and cost too much!!!!111eleventeen" idiocy pops up, let me remind you that a modern division in the USA is 17,000 to 21,000 people, not counting the civillian personnel on the base and whatnot. That'll be a lot of barracks or dorms or whatever. It's not like they have one huge hangar in which 20,000 soldiers sleep. Anyone pretending they absolutely, positively can't allocate a building or a floor, or really whatever kind of compartment they use, for a couple of trans people, is more full of shit than a sewer.
There we go. No more "OMG squick factor of someone with a penis sleeping in the women barracks" scare, is it?
That was easy, wasn't it? Just 30 seconds of using one's brains instead of mindlessly bleating canned scare quotes did it.
But if that genuinely never occurred to you on your own, just ask and I'll gladly teach you more advanced stuff like counting to 20 without taking off your shoes. And I could even refer you to a good doctor who can get you walking without bruising your knuckles in no time too ;)
Well, some of us were more fortunate there.
I was born in the quaint town of P5$+19"797q4. It's lovely in the spring. You should visit. My mother's maidens name was B192zve8p6; an ancient and distinguished family, if you must ask. My first pet was a cat named Ö8z~30+r.vd. We all loved her. And I went to ß8s8h,u:82 memorial school.
Strangely enough, nobody ever guesses those ;)
Actually it seems to me even more WTF than that.
It's not incest in the biological sense that happens there, at least judging by the summary. That guy isn't boning his actual mom or anything. It's sex between two adults that are as unrelated as it gets, except for the fact that one of them had married a parent of the other.
Even the usual objections about making kids with six toes don't actually apply. Those people aren't actually biologically related.
It's no more incest than, dunno, boning your cousin's wife.
Granted, boning a friend's or relative's wife is generally accepted as a not nice thing to do. That guy isn't very filial, to say the least. But incest? It's incest only via a legal redefinition in _some_ states. And not the kind of "incest" most people think of when they hear that word. For most of us it's _less_ incest than marrying one's second cousin, which is actually legal.
So, really, WTF? We don't even need to go as deep as murder for worse stuff that's out there, if Amazon is that hell-bent on enforcing guy code morals. Why don't we just ban all novels featuring an adulterous wife, at that? It's not even slippery slope, it's exactly what they removed here.
Dunno, it seems to me DOOM should do the same as everyone else celebrate 18 when it can go get drunk and laid. Well, at least drunk anyway. But laid is right next, as soon as it can get a girl into its mom's basement that is totally awed by its grenade jumping skills. Any day now ;)
Bah. Amazon can take my sheep when they can pry her off my cold, dead... err... oh, you mean NOVELS about that. Well, yeah, censorship is bad too ;)
At the risk of repeating myself, it's stupid to try to argue something down just based on an over-simplified summary of a trope.
Yes, believe it or not, there's only a handful of tropes around. You can find the same tropes in kids shows, or in elaborate alegories for adults. Until someone invents a new trope, yes, of course, you'll find examples of each in both lightweight kids' stuff and in profound stuff and anything in between.
Dismissing something just because some trope was also done in a kid's show, without any consideration of the context or how well it was done, is just freaking stupid.
Not the least because it's a textbook example of the association fallacy.
I'm not sure I need an extra category there, though. The kind of hipster who praises X just because it's "in" and dismisses Y with some hare-brained excuse just because it's not on the list of hip things he should like, falls quite neatly under "stupid" in my system.
You mean like how everyone complained about Knights Of The Old Republic not being yet another dumb merchandising exercise of the movie characters? Oh, wait, they didn't. It actually received high praise, several awards, and was described as one of the most influential pieces of work of the Star Wars universe. And it sold a metric buttload of copies too.
And it actually did better than, say, SWG's using the signature characters as merchandising.
Because it seems to me like that's the real problem with game to movie, or movie to game adaptations. They're really just doing a merchandising exercise. You know, same as putting Vader's mug on a t-shirt. It doesn't make the t-shirt any better, but you expect people to buy it just because OMG IT'S DARTH VADER.
And similarly you end up with a movie or game whose only merit is that it features certain signature characters, but they don't actually do anything meaningful or interesting. And somehow, much to Hollywood's surprise, that seems to work less well for movies than for t-shirts. People tend to still expect an interesting story in a movie, not just seeing Mario.
If you reduce it to an oversimplified strawman, of course nothing is profound. The Odyssey is just about some guy dicking around the sea instead of going home. LORD of the ring is a old-timey==good vs industrialism-and-change==bad story. War And Peace is about war and identity crisis. Crime And Punishment is just about the simple moral dilemma of whether you can justify evil means for a good purpose, so basically good vs evil again. (Since you already reduced similar themes in ME2 to just simple good vs evil, or to seeing the same basic trope in a choose-your-adventure book.) Etc. Not very profound when put that way, is it?
In fact, I your message was trolling, because otherwise it's so stupid it's depressing. What makes something profound or not isn't just having theme X or theme Y in it, but you do with it and what you explore from there. You can take any theme in the world and turn it into a shallow exercise, or do something thought-provoking with. You just need to look at the likes of Lewis Caroll who managed to turn something as dry as hating the new mathematics and especially topology, into a classic, or L. Frank Baum who took a political alegory so far that most people don't even figure it out and again managed to turn it into something both popular and for many people thought-provoking.
So, really, troll or just stupid?
Except this one is actually worse. The gist of it is: oh, we'll continue to track you all right, but we'll give you more ads you're not interested in. I.e., it's not even a fucking opt out of being tracked or the ads, it's accepting to still be tracked but forfeit the meager rewards of occasionally getting an interesting ad out of it. As opposed to, dunno, your point B, it doesn't even say "ok, ok, we'll stop collecting your data, but keep the old one." It flat out tells you "hell, yeah, we'll keep collecting your data and using it for everything except targeting ads. And oh, it's actually up to the individual companies if they actually want to obey even that. It's not like anything you click on this site is actually binding to anyone."
And from that they have the chutzpah to conclude that really, people don't want to opt out of being tracked.
Really, the scenario that comes to mind is sending a bunch of girls a letter that says, "Hi! Me and these 5 other guys are the ones who've been stalking you all these years and sending you creepy postcards and the occasional box of chocolates for Valentine's Day. But now we're nice guys and let you opt out! Just sign here and we'll... ah, who am I kidding, we'll still stalk you obsessively. But we promise to pretend we don't know you like chocolates and roses, so we might send you a dead cat or a baby skull instead, and maybe a bouquet of nightshade. And actually we can't even promise that. Really, each of us can decide for himself." And from that concluding that actually girls want to be stalked, because only one lass with Down Syndrome actually signed the opt out.
Even by the standards of the crap that "industry self-regulation" generally means, this takes the cake. I guess when you have a bunch of folks whose job is to lie to the public _and_ to the corporate masters paying for it, man, it's such a surprise that their own survey says that people love it. I mean what are the odds?
Actually, after reading their powerpoint slide, the mentioned stats on page 5 actually say:
Which is actually what you'd expect for something where you have to click an icon _inside_ an ad to even get to their opt-out site. Especially an icon that says "Advertising Choices" instead of something clearer like, say, "Opt Out Of Ads." Not that that would make it much better, since we all learned anyway to not click on spammers' opt out links and that they typically lead to something worse than ignoring them.
Additionally, again: it's an icon _inside_ an ad. If I ever saw their stupid icon, I would assume it to be yet another lame FakeUI trick to make me click on the ad. The only kind of person who clicks on buttons on ads they're not interested to, is probably also the kind of person who believes they'll win an iPad by shooting 5 ducks in an ad or opens attachments called PornPix.xls.exe in emails. I.e., the terminally retarded.
The place I'd look for some genuine choices to turn off ads would be, say, in my user preferences on a site, not inside an ad.
And, geeze, if it's options call it "options", will ya? Calling it "Advertising Choices" is as far from suggesting "opt out" as humanly possible.
That's 3 in 4 users who click on the icon but never make it to the Opt Out page. Wtf? Why doesn't it lead directly to an opt-out page in the first place?
In fact, if you do look at their page 3, clicking on the icon leads you to a marketing bullshit page that starts with justifying why they showed you the ad. At which point, yeah, 3/4 of the people giving up sounds about right.
It's starting to sound like they took a lesson from The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy:
"`...You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anyone or anything.'
`But the plans were on display...'
`On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.'
`That's the display department.'
`With a torch.'
`Ah, well the lights had probably gone.'
`So had the stairs.'
`But look you found the notice didn't you?'
`Yes,' said Arthur, `yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of The Leopard".'"
Anyway, if you make it to the opt out page, basically at that point they tell you it doesn't opt you out of anything. It's on the same page 3. It tells you they'll still track you and collect your data and share it around, but you'll get worse ads from _some_ companies. WTF kind of opt out is that?
Plus, it tells you pretty clear that it's a pointless site, and, regardless of what checkboxes you click, it's still up to the individual companies whether they'll still track you or not. And that you actually have to click on each company's link to see what policy they actually have. I.e., basically the opt-out page is itself just a bullshit ad page with links to companies that you can click on, nothing more. That 1 in 5 still took their chances and clicked the checkboxes, is... interesting.
At any rate, it seems to me like their conclusion is weird that "Transparency doesn't foster opt-out". They didn't measure that. They just showed that if you make a misleading icon that nobody sane will ever click on, put it in the worst place for encouraging users to click, and of the few that click you manage to lose 3/4 before they make it to the opt out page, and then the opt-out page is phrased to flat out tell people that you'll still track them anyway... yeah, you'll have very few opt outs. That's not "transparency". It's actually quite the opposites. It's like putting the customer complaints department at the South Pole and only accessible in person, and then concluding that you have the most satisfied customers ever because nobody ever has complaints.
I dunno, it's easy to jump to conclusions, but given where the data comes from, it's a bit like trusting the telemarketers that only 5% of people are bothered by repeated calls at dinner time.
And it's especially the combination that makes me wonder. I'd assume that if people just didn't give a fuck, they wouldn't have clicked to learn more in the first place. I mean, I don't go click on penis enlargement pill adds just to change my mind later. If I'm not interested, I don't click at all.
That only 5% of those who went to that page actually went through, makes me suspect that it just sounded pointless, or confusing, or asked for more personal data to join that list than the relatively anonymous just tracking the browser rather than the person that is currently happening.
I mean, think I gave you a form like this to opt out of some crap:
First Name:
Last Name:
Address:
City:
Postcode:
Phone Number:
Social Security Number:
EMail Address:
[ ] I have read the Privacy Statement and understand that I have none, and any data I voluntarily enter can be used for marketing purposes, sold to the highest bidder and shared with every web site we advertise on
Would you go ahead with that, or just say "fuck it, I'll just clear my cookies and browser history more often."?
You know, though, I just have to wonder how much better this is for the Japanese after all.
I mean, looking at the history of single-player RPGs, for a long time the Japanese were years ahead of what we had in the west in terms of story and all. I mean before 1997 or so, real RPGs on the PC and in the West were few and far in between. Even Square was releasing Final Fantasy VII in 1997, whereas on the western PC front the world was taken by surprise by Fallout 1. It was like, "whoa, you can actually have a game with a lot of story on the PC?" Though arguably the one that really got the ball rolling and the RPG genre taken seriously in the West was Baldur's Gate in 1998.
Before that -- and even a long time _after_ that -- western PC RPGs were mostly brainless grind implementations, a la SSI's Eye Of The Beholder series or Might And Magic. If you even had a quest at all, it would be of the kind, "hack and slash your way across the continent and down that dungeon and back, and bring back the item at its end." And not as one of many quests for that dungeon, but as the whole story of the first half of the game, or sometimes even the whole game.
I mean, someone back then could have said essentially the same thing you do, only in reverse: "see, the Japanese want a lot of story and dialog and quests, while the West is content to just whack rats for several hours for xp and loot." Heck, there were even people being dismissive of Japanese games and gamers, and viewing that lot of story as some failure.
Now I'm getting to hear the exact opposite for MMOs: see, we westerners want lots of quests and story and dialogue, while supposedly the Japanese just want to grind.
Something doesn't add up, IMHO. You can't really have both X and Not X be true at the same time.
My very uninformed wild guess would be more like probably in Japan too there are a lot of people who think FFXIV is stupid.
Uh, dude, I hope that's a joke, because that sounds like the most idiotically game ever. I'm starting to congratulate myself even more for giving it a skip.
It's not about solo vs group, but if all that's to do is grind mobs for xp, that's practically the implementation of the snarky quip that MMOs are about beating small rats with a small stick for 5 hours, so you can get a bigger stick and beat bigger rats. And it was a dismissive quip, not one supposed to illustrate what's fun in them.
Beating up rat after rat after rat is a boring job for obsessive-compulsives. Most of us put up with that as filler, to see the next piece of the story, get the next reassurance that we're the great saviour of the furbolg race, or just the next achievement.
It's not even a new idea. The whole history of the MMO genre at least in the West has been increasingly discovering how to add more of that single-player DNA into it, so to speak. More quests, more story, more scripted events, more pretense that you actually changed the world, etc. That Square-Enix would basically ignore a decade of that being proven to work and attract players, is beyond surrealistic in its stupidity.
And... Jesus Fucking Christ, did you just measure fun in a game by xp gained per hour? What about gameplay, story, etc? WTF of a fucked up metric is just how big a number is. Ok, here's a big number for you: +1234567890xp. And you got all that in about a minute of reading this too. I trust this made this the greatest post ever.
Geesh.
Find seven chicks? SEVEN CHICKS? Gee, buddy, way to make a guy even more insecure.
Some of us are happy if we can even find one whose name doesn't end in .jpeg. Much as I'm told the Jpegs are an ancient and distinguished family.
Plus, last time I found one, she whipped and tormented me and called me a loser. And didn't even want to give me my money back when I said that wasn't what I asked for.
Anyway, what was I talking about? Ah, right, some of us are happy to find even one chick. Or half a chick. Finding a guy playing a female char is practically half way there, right?
(Well, normally I wouldn't answer to a sig, but it being in a thread about MMOs I figure it's on topic;)
Aye, but some of us want it to be a loving and intimate relationship, not a quick gangbang with whatever 24 guys were available. Err... I mean... I'm not the kind of slut who'll give everyone a go for attention, you know?
I mean, take my latest case from City Of Heroes. Classic story of boy tank meets girl healer, we seem to hit it off just nice, and soon I invite her to see my supervillain lair. And this time I don't mean mom's basement. They actually have lairs in the game. We hit it off just fine, then we change into spandex and are happily bumping uglies over the head. I mean zombies in the sewer. Can't get much uglier than those.
And then she says, oh God, then she says, "let's bring 6 more guys, it will be FUN!" (Groups in COH have up to 8 members.) I mean, geesh, I'm not even demanding monogamy, but SIX MORE GUYS. It's like she's trying to tell me something. Like that I'm not enough for her. Geeze, it can make a guy awfully insecure, you know?
So I get talked into it against my better judgment. I can tell she's having the time of her life, what with all those ranged DPS-ers all around her, while I'm not even getting a second look. Says that's her role. Yeah, right. More fun in a group my ass. Which reminds me, the only one paying me attention is the melee DPS-er. That guy is practically getting on top of me all the time. I wonder aloud about that guy's sexuality. He calls me weird. Hey, I'm not the one trying to get on top of another guy, buddy.
So then we get to the big archvillain and he's this big and muscular guy, and I get thinking, "I bet HIS girlfriend doesn't ask for six more guys." And I'm in front of this guy as the tank, and everyone is looking at me and expecting me to perform for the big finale, and... oh god... I got performance anxiety and lost the erection. They eventually got the melee DPS-er to tank him.
Made me feel like I wasn't a man any more, it did...
So then next day I go to work, I come back and she's 10 levels higher. I figure she must have soloed it in the meantime. I'm no stranger to soloing an orgasm... err... quest or two myself, lemme tell you.
I ask her what happened, she says, "ah, there were these 7 guys who needed a healer for the respec taskforce, and then we kinda went at it all afternoon." Geeze, like I was saying, I'm not even asking for monogamy, but SEVEN GUYS? And is it that much to ask that I at least be around?
Fucking slut. I threw her out of the lair and changed the locks.
Actually, I think you give them too much credit. There's making a crappy game but at least figuring out what the players want in it and how to keep them hooked and milk them, and then there's the EA way. Though probably Sony would make an even better example, as they turned fucking up in the MMO arena to an art form and pushed boundaries into fuck-up land that nobody else even wanted to think about. Where others were just running around with underpants on their head, Sony was innovating by running around with underpants on the head AND pencils up the nose. But, I'm sure with a bit of effort EA can get to the same level as Sony too.
As I was saying in the other message, actually someone could genuinely be trying to buy or sell depleted uranium, which is a very legal thing to do. More common than you seem to think too. It's an inert and very dense material used, well, whenever you need something heavy and which doesn't take much space. E.g., it's actually used as ballast in boats. SRSLY.
Granted, Amazon wouldn't be the first place to go looking for it, but if I were looking for something like that and happened to stumble upon something like that on Amazon, you can bet your ass I'd have a look at it starting from the assumption that it's a genuine product.
So what you guys did was only waste the time of everyone who wasn't ignorant enough to mistake it for an obvious joke.