1. Except even then, the comparison to other minorities is still bogus. Other minorities are protected against discriminating or, as you call it mocking, to their face, but don't get to forbid you from playing something that might offend them. E.g., they don't get to tell the hilbillies reenacting Civil War fights that nobody should play the CSA troops because, you know, the CSA was all for slavery and offensive to blacks. E.g., they don't get to tell kids to stop playing cowboys and indians because it's insensitive to the natives.
So in effect even if you want to treat them as a real minority, it's still asking a bit more than any real minority actually does.
Yes, I'm all for extending the same courtesy as I extend to any other minorities. I definitely would be against a serviceman/servicewoman being denied service somewhere, and I'll be the first to frown at someone who calls him/her insulting names or stereotypes. But that's where it frigging stops. When they start dictating what units can be in my games so they're not insulted, I'll also be the first to tell them to take a hike. That's already way beyond non-discrimination, it's already that "minority" trying to elect itself the boss of someone else.
2. Well, then those families should have asked the guy/gal actually down there what he/she thinks, before whining at EA.
Because all I wrote before is based on my experience of actually being in the army. (Granted, thankfully never in actual combat.) We were trained all the time to deal with a real guy trying to really kill us. And he won't stop if you just go, "OMG, I'm so offended that you chose the side who hates me, I'm gonna sit in that corner and pout." You have to kill that motherfucker before he kills you and your mates. (Or more like pin him down until someone or something else can kill him.)
Even as simulations go, we didn't have to face some pixelated shape on a screen, but charge up a hill against real guys with real assault rifles and support weapons, (although thankfully not with live ammo.) How's that for realism? And you couldn't go "well, I'm offended that those guys from the other platoon are playing the side that hates us", because, well, none of us fancied explaining that to an officer, much less to a court martial.
I'd have been actually quite happy if that only happened on a computer screen. Heck, it would have saved me the bother of marching with all the gear and sprinting up a hill.
So if any family member of mine would be offended that someone else would play as the guy trying to kill me, well, they'd damn well better ask me about it. I'd be happy to tell them what I think of _that_ virtual threat.
3. Even more importantly, it still doesn't work. A rose by any other name is still a rose. Some renamed Taliban are still trying to shoot at the electronic effigy of those troops? So the difference is... what?
It would seem to me that the really offensive part in a war is that those guys are really trying to get you dead. Down in the ground with dirt on your head. That they're called Taliban or Red Army or "other side", WTH difference does it make?
Ditto for those families. Someone is still trying to shoot those guys in the game. You'd think that would be the main worry, not the exact name that they have in the game.
Actually, I have a tough time imagining that it's the soldiers who got offended by the thought of someone being able to play the Taliban. In fact, the posts I've seen from self-identified members of the armed forces in this thread, not a single one was along the lines of "whew, thank goodness they removed those!"
Not entirely surprising as someone who is actually shot at in real life, has bigger concerns than some pixelated other soldier being shot at in a video game. If you're the kind who'll actually lose his mental shit over a pimple-faced kid playing Taliban for lulz, you'll be a major liability (and probably a casualty) when you meet real Taliban who want you dead for real. Seriously, I can't imagine anyone trained to keep their wits about in a real combat situation, faced with real people who want him/her dead, and real deadly bullets, getting a major trauma over a few kids playing a video game.
The real minority complaining about this kind of shit are some puritans who probably only saw a weapon on TV, and who are all about protecting someone _else's_ sensibilities. You know, the "it's not about me, but OMG it might offend that other guy over there" kind. Even if that guy over there doesn't actually feel any need to be protected by such a knight in shiny armour.
So, really, quit doing that. If you yourself have something to complain about, complain, and if the army has anything to complain about, let the army do it. But inventing some other minority to protect is kinda getting silly.
You know, one thing I never get is such references to "wanting to pretend to be terrorists who hate your country." Why is that even worth mentioning anyway?
For most of the rest of the world, we're already used to the idea that someone somewhere hates our countries and that in the name of fun someone has to play that side too. Either because you wouldn't get much of a multiplayer if everyone is on the same team, or because that's the only single-player campaign there is. E.g., there never was any way to play either Wolfenstein game in Germany without basically pretending to be on the side of some guys who were really, really pissed off at Germany. And for good reason too. (Granted, they pussified it by changing the symbols and everything to some weird other war than WW2, but you're still fighting Germans and everyone knew what it's really about.)
Or I don't think many people would go out of the way to apologize to Russians that such games as No One Lives Forever featured them as the bad guys, and it was only possible to play as someone who basically hates the USSR.
Most of us came to terms with the idea that someone somewhere hates or hated our respective country. Heck, down here in the old world we have about 5000 years of recorded history of everyone hating everyone else. We hated the Romans, the Romans hated us, then we were kinda friends with Rome and hated someone else, and they hated us in return, and so on. And the Mesopotamians were bashing each other's head in with bronze maces long before that, while both we and the ancestors of the Romans (and even Greeks) were running around in fur loincloths. And before even written history, we have finds like Ötzi who was killed in combat (presumably by someone who didn't like him or his tribe much), or prehistoric caves in France and Spain of stick figures shooting arrows at each other and bashing each other's heads in with clubs. (Again, I'm guessing it meant those tribes weren't particularly fond of each other.)
Why is the reality that someone out there doesn't like you something that the USA needs to frown upon?
And besides, again, it's a game. What's the difference between that and, dunno, playing an Orc attacking the Humans, or a Zerg doing the same, or really whatever? It's not like someone really wants to feel like he's really hating the USA or humanity, it's just playing an available role.
My grandfather died in WW2, could you please remove the Germans from all your future WW2 games as well? The Japanese, too.
Both my grandfathers fought in WW2. One of them was crippled, and actually the other who was a decorated officer (ok, ok, only Iron Cross second class) had the most horror stories and never really ticked right ever after. So can we please remove the Americans, Brits and especially the fucking Russians from games too? (And I don't say "fucking" as just an expletive. Those guys raped even their own female soldiers when they liberated female POW camps.) It seems insensitive that people can buy games where they can play folks who shot at both my grandfathers and some who literally raped half of Europe.
The French can stay, though. Those never harmed anyone;)
(Not entirely serious post. Just illustrating that there are more countries in the world than the USA, and the EU _is_ a major market for computer games. If we're going remove everything that could offend someone from the USA, then we're going to start the same over here, and there won't be much left which you _can_ put in a game.)
Since PNG compression is lossless, it doesn't matter at all for the purpose of quality. Whether you had their webkit in your browser and had the image decoded directly to screen, or have it compressed to PNG first, is basically irrelevant. It'll look exactly the same.
E.g., I remember one case from another board who was hearing differences in sound quality when playing MP3's off different hard drives in his computer. And no, he didn't mean the HDD's own noise. He was convinced that it's like on the old cassettes, where different kinds of tape (e.g., iron vs chrome) had different frequency responses. So it stood to reason to him that some HDD's have better bass than others.
Did you look at the full size images offered for download? Because the ones on the page are scaled down, and any artefacts will be inherently "antialised" out. But when you look at them at 1:1 zoom and flip between the two, it's not hard to notice small differences. E.g., the wood texture in picture 4 is notably different IMHO and the chairs in 9 look IMHO blurrier.
Think positively. It sounds like a business opportunity to me.
Think all the special power cables, wooden volume knobs, and the other BS that gets sold to "audiophiles" who don't, in fact, hear the difference, under the claim that it'll increase the fidelity when they listen to something off their iPod. You just need to add an organic, hand-tuned volume knob, and *wham* all those missing harmonics spring into place.
I for one welcome this new development and would like to offer videophiles an amazing DVI-D cable that removes such WebP imperfections. For the low price of 499.95$, plus VAT, shopping and handling.
I stopped reading your rant at the second... er, paragraph. The post you submitted resembles the writings of a manic. Perhaps you should put down the video games.
So let's recap: you haven't, by your own confession, read more than about two sentences. Yet you feel qualified to comment about the post. And at that nothing bearing any relationship to what was in it.
So in effect you posted an "I'm too stupid to read more than two sentences, and too stupid to realize the inherent problem with commenting about what I haven't read" confession. Am I supposed to take it as some kind of winning move or something?
Lemme try: OMG, whatEVER will I do now? My life is meaningless if one cretin troll has stopped reading my message;)
Sorry, I can't do that. Your being too stupid to read is your problem not mine.
Gaming may be an escape for you. For others, it is a regular activity. In that sense, interrelation between real life and online games is beneficial. I don't want to tell my friends, "Look me up online by." I would rather tell them to identify me by my birth name, or by an existing identity provider: OpenID, Google, or Facebook. Stop pretending that everyone shares your beliefs, and that the world should be shaped according to them, because they don't, and it shouldn't.
AC because 1) I rarely log into Slashdot, and 2) anonymity is occasionally useful, for when discretion fails.
1. That still is based on the false assumption that there are any players who actually asked for it. Blizzard's _stated_ goal all along for tying it into Facebook and whatnot was basically to try to get more players that way. They even called it "cross-polination". Whether or not it actually is beneficial for anyone, I believe that only started to be even considered when players got up in arms about it.
I.e., it has nothing to do with what _you_ want. It's the management at Activision being greedy fucktards. That's all.
2. Here's another clue, though, which I feel that too many people lack: 99% the friends which are interested in your (or my) WoW achievements, are on WoW too anyway. The rest fall somewhere between "don't give a fuck about your hobby" to "annoyed already to hear about it again."
Frankly, I don't know what kind of mental failure makes some people assume that every co-worker, acquaintance, and guy on the bus, is _dying_ to hear about their Counter-Strike score or WoW raiding gear or whatever. Heck, I even was a WoW player myself, and let me assure you, I don't give a flying fuck about half the things people seem to assume that I absolutely must hear in detail, and half the rest I find stupid.
Like that some guy is now training his dagger skill by hacking treants. Let me go on record saying that I don't give a flying fuck. And I'm not even talking about some idle conversation in a cigarette break, when you'd yap inane topics anyway, but the guy actually called me to tell me that. What. The. Fuck.
Do you think I'd genuinely be more interested to find it out via an online link?
Or some other guy coming over from the next building to tell me that he now has 99 mounts, 'cause he's bought the transparent mount for real money. I think he thought I'd be all thrilled, but all I could think was, "wtf, you're telling me you paid real cash for the sake of getting one notch closer to a stupid achievement title in a game? How retarded is that?"
You may be confused because we don't actually say stuff like that. Rest assured though that that tends to be the thought process behind that smile and "oh, wow, cheers. Hope you get the last one soon too." (Much as I know I'll hear about that one in detail too.)
Would I absolutely be thrilled to check that out online via his realID? Nope. Good grief, nope.
3. And it's not just a personal belief. If you've paid any attention to what has been said and drawn in comics about the CS-heads, you'll find a metric buttload (or about 0.63 British arseloads;)) of complaints about people who won't shut up about it. I've yet to see even one single complaint to the effect of "goddammit, my friend doesn't tell me enough about his CS score. I so wish I could check his score online."
4. But, yes, basically that is one factor that Blizzard is betting on. They just know that if you give fucktards a link to spam their friends and barely acquaintances on Facebook with it, a lot will do. They also hope that some of those will decide to check out the game... even at the exapense of annoying the heck out of the other 99% who get spammed that way.
Frankly, it smacks me of an antisocial business decision. It's not that far off from the spammer model. In this case it relies on people with poor judgment clicking to send the spam, instead of having an automated run, but in the end it still boils down to the same shotgun approach.
So, more idiotic scaremongering and ad-hominems. Boohoo, the guy debating you can be mis-represented as supporting TEH BIGOTS. Let me guess, you're just too stupid to form a coherent argument and that is genuinely the best you can do? Sure looks that way so far. The world must be nice and comfortable when instead of actual logic or facts you can just divide the world into the good guy (you) and TEH EVIL GUYS (whoever has opinions different from yours.)
So, yep, looks like I was right: you're a cretin. Enjoy.
Oh, and something I predict will soon mean a lot less jobs for homosexuals: Project Gaydar. If you remember the Futurama episode where Bender makes pronouncements about who's gay, yep, now apparently datamining your Facebook page for stuff like who you're friends with and such can produce a gaydar score for how likely you are to be gay.
And if you still think people won't do it, the best part is, racists never think they're racist. Think of all those "I'm not racist, but [insert horribly racist thing]" or "I'm not sexist, but [insert reasons why the bitch should be in the kitchen instead of having her own job]" and the sad thing is they actually believe it. They think their bigotry isn't bigotry but, why, almost pure science that blacks are dumb and criminal, and women working ruined the economy. And, oh, if you think the rest of the company or society wouldn't let them get away with it, yes, most proclaim they wouldn't, but actually more people choose to work with the white overt racist than with the black.
Why don't you tell that to the families of people that have died from work violence. You know, the type that show up with a gun and start shooting people. Want to bet many had good job performance reviews?
Bet you don't care about those people though do you. Let them die is your motto. Just don't fuck with anything that YOU consider private. EVEN if you post it online.
I can understand the argument of people getting set up. All I have to do is look at fuck wads like you to see that possibility. But to arrogantly say, all that matters is job performance?
1. And you're answering that to a post which actually said it'll be used to do some covert racial or religious or political discrimination.
It already happens too. If you think someone surely can't just happen to find more flaws online for blacks or foreigners than for blacks without getting sued... guess what? It already happens. In a study, for the same resume they found out you had about 50% more chances to get called for a job interview with a name like John than a name like Ulambongo, and nobody gets sued for those uncannily non-uniform results. Welcome to the new world of online checking, where you don't even have to guess by name, and can just look on Facebook for whether that guy is a black or muslim or whatever you don't like.
But at any rate, the relationship to your retarded rant is... what? Are you willing to claim that racial and religious and political profiling (which are the kind of things the GP predicted) are actually necessary to predict who'll shoot up the place? Or did you have your canned rant and just had to use it whether it fits or not?
2. And your argument is... wait, what? The tiny percentage of workplace deaths? According to CDC data, that's an average of 800 per year, with the maximum being about 1000 in 1994, and the minimum just over 500 in 2006.
That's 500 in 310,000,000 people or roughly 1.5 per _million_ people.
So you're going to justify discrimination against literally tens of millions of people to maybe prevent a tiny percentage of 500 deaths a year? Even as scaremongering attempts to justify why someone else needs to bend over for the good of the corporate or government overlords, this has to take the cake for failed sense of proportions.
Asshole. Seriously, what a mother fucking asshole.
From my experience with trying a lot of MMOs... yes it can. You don't even need to try hard to end up with something that sucks more ass than the toilets on the space station.
Add one of those "free to play" (but you need to pay a few hundred bucks just to get the same you'd get in the first month on WoW, and generally we'll try hard to make your character suck if you don't) setups, and it can really really suck.
And generally, don't underestimate how much room downwards there is in any domain. Just about any time I said "it can't be worse than that" or "nobody can be even more clueless", some altruistic soul promptly came along and showed him-/her-self as proof that I'm wrong. Be it MMOs or programming a simple web site or just about anything at all.
TBH, I'd hardly count using normal maps as fancy texturing. They've been standard stuff for years. And, heck, even if you somehow managed to get a graphics card which lacks that, simple lighting interpolation based on corner normals has been standard in, well, any hardware-accelerated card I know of. And even in ye olde days of doing it in software, Phong or Gouraud shading were rather run of the mill stuff.
But at any rate, as I was saying, I _have_ used polearms and maces with 16-sided or even 12-sided shafts before, and if you have any interpolation of the normals at all, it actually looks pretty ok. Even without normal maps.
Ultimately the key factor is that you're not looking at it head-on and magnified. A 16-sided polygon for a circle looks not very smooth when you just draw it on the screen. When you look at a 16-sided cylinder a bit sideways and with even basic lighting interpolation it's actually much harder to see those edges. Not the least because there's a gradient of lighting across them.
Granted, with normal maps it looks even better. But if you can't or won't use that, and have to have thousands of those cylinders on the screen at the same time, I'd say 16-sided is more than good enough.
Actually, it still sounds stupid to me, although more in the way of whatever were they thinking when they based an MMO on that.
Even if you remove the bits used in connections, there will still be plenty which aren't. As a trivial example, any sloped roof made of Lego bricks will still be a huge brush of nubs.
Basically think even a small city like Stormwind, if it were made of Lego. Even after removing the bits used in actual connections, you're still left with several million polygons just in nubs and cylinders, on top of what the same city would have if built otherwise.
Sounds more like sheer incompetence
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Building the LEGO MMO
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· Score: 2, Informative
WoW Avatars (without equipment) are not really complex model wise, so i can imagine that to be true. If you take an WoW character with some fanc gear equipt i'm sure the equation is moot. (As each piece probably has more polygons then the Avatar itself:o)
1. As someone who's dabbled into 3D modelling, you'd be surprised how fast the polygons go into something that actually doesn't look all that detailed. Especially if you make it for 1920x1200 screens, not for ye olde 320x200 VGA mode. You can sink a few hundreds into a face alone just so it doesn't look offensive, much less look good.
Then comes even the basic equipment a WoW character has. I'm not even talking about epic equipment. Just your basic curved blade can east up anywhere between a hundred and a couple hundred polygons just so it doesn't look like it's made of abrupt angles. Etc.
And generally, while the WoW characters do look cartoonish, they're not particularly low detail by my guess. Sure, they're not Doom 4 class, but they're not Quake 1 either, if you get my drift. At a wild guess, I'm guessing even a newbie avatar would have a couple thousand triangles.
Which brings me to the point:
2. How do you actually reach twice that with a freaking basic lego brick, other than sheer incompetence? I mean, Jesus Haploid Christ, I was feeling like a noob because my detailed weapons were in the several hundreds range, and these guys are talking several thousands for a freaking lego brick. How does one _do_ that?
I mean, let's do some maths. The bulk probably goes into the nubs on the brick. Let's make the cylinder actually a 16 sided prism, which from my experience looks smoothly round even for a gun barrel or polearm shaft you're seeing in first person. That's 32 triangles for the cylinder. The top is 16 triangles (think dividing by lines from the centre to the corners.) Let's round the transition nicely from sides to top, for which actually three steps of increasing slope is more than enough. (Heck, at the size of those even one is enough, but let's be generous.) That's 3x32 more triangles for that. Grand total: 80 triangles.
But wait, we have to do the hole on the other side too, and let's do it at the same level of detail. (Although here that rounded transition is really overkill with 3 segments, but ok.) So it's another 80, for a total of 160 per nub.
A two by eight brick is 16 such nubs, for a total of 16, which needs 2560 triangles. Add a few more for the plate and you're still under 3000.
Note that so far it's just assuming the most basic 3d rendering engine. With normal maps you can make things look equally round with half that number of polygons. You just model it in this high polycount, generate the normal map, then reduce the count of the actual model.
So, really, how does one reach twice the polycount of a WoW avatar other than sheer cluelessness? It reminds me of the daikatana story where a newbie artist was asked to draw an arrow for the crossbow, and painted an IIRC 2048 pixel wide bitmap for it.
3. And, really, anyone who's played WoW or any other MMO can tell you that things can get really annoying when you have 1000 characters on your screen. Think the old Ironforge, back when it had the only auction house. There were people who had a slideshow there or their computer crashed. Or I remember an event on Anarchy Online, waay back, when they actually told people to look at the ground to avoid a crash because of too many people. (Yeah, smart idea to have a major event where everyone only sees their own feet.)
The prospect of having several creations made of thousands of bricks, each of which has several thousand triangles, on the screen should make anyone who has a clue wonder if they're doing it right.
Now that you mention it, don't most of those contacts also involve anal probing with dildo-shaped implements, mutilating cattle and apparently making crop circles for the heck of it?
I mean, I can imagine a thousand Martian redneck hillbilies going,
"Hey, Billy Joe Bob, it says here them Earthlings have a new ambers.. am... contact person." "What's one of those do, Bubba?" "Way I figures it, Billy Joe Bob, it means we gots to meet her when we goes down there." "But we was gonna do some crop circling and mutilate some of those strange animals they keep around. Do ya figure she's gonna help us with that?" "Nope, probably not." "Right, I'll fire up the ol' anal probe then." "Careful back there, Billy Joe Bob, I just bought us the Jackhammer probe upgrade. Don't wreck nuthing with it."
I mean, why not just get the goatse guy as the ambassador?
I kinda doubt that that was the _whole_ story though. All the photos I've seen of the disease, and someone with that kind of depigmentation I actually knew IRL, were cases of it happening in patches, rather than just becoming gradually uniformly whiter. The guy I knew was nicknamed "the dalmatian" because, really, that's what he looked like because of it.
It also tends to be disproportionally more pronounced around the eyes, nostrils and mouth, and often asymmetrically so.
Michael Jackson's face never showed any signs of that. Even if the final result of a really extreme version might conceivably be uniformly white, the intermediate stages would not. At some point in between he'd not as much need a glove to hide it, he'd need a mask.
Really, even if he had it, and assuming that no "bleaching" was involved, he would have to use makeup heavily to look relatively uniformly white. In which case, really, if he's ashamed of becoming white _and_ is using makeup for it anyway, then why not dark makeup? Something doesn't add up.
But... even in the link you provided, down the page it says they did find a lot of monobenzone and hydroquinone in his home, which, guess what? Is used to depigment the skin. It can be used to make someone with vitiligo uniformly white, but it does amount to "bleaching" the skin to remove the unaffected patches. Or, if I'm to be mean, it can also be used to depigment someone who doesn't have vitiligo at all. There is no difference there between killing the melanocites (pigmentation cells) in an unaffected skin patch on someone with vitiligo, and killing them in an unaffected skin patch in someone who just is unaffected.
But at any rate, if he wasn't using those to whiten his skin, WTH _did_ he have all those tubes of it for? We're not even talking one or two bought just in case. There was a total of 37 tubes, roughly evenly divided between the two.
It seems to me like, maybe because Vitiligo or maybe not, he did whiten his skin chemically too. And frankly I wouldn't hold it against him either way. But let's not invent some disease that's just, you know, totally natually uniform when that very likely wasn't the case.
This is only true if your desktop firewall actually filters out something that the server-based solutions do not. There is often-times a lot of overlap, so that the desktop filters are made redundant.
Actually, yes they do. They filter out the attacks from that infected laptop that Johnny Marketting Guy takes outside the "secure" enclosure 90% of the time, and the tunnel from outside that Joe IT Guy and Jane Programmer apparently absolutely can't work without, and that smartphone that's rooted six way to Sunday that Jack Manager absolutely _demands_ to connect to the internal network because he supposedly can't work without that, etc.
Not really. Or rather, not really like in Civ 4. In Civ 4 you can basically have a monopoly on religion, so to speak. Historically that didn't work anywhere near that good.
E.g., sure, you can superficially say that the Egyptians did the same, but really they didn't. Each city has its own deity before Narmer even came along, and really mostly stuck with it. Even afterwards, there were several competing systems even inside the country, with the Ennead being severely at odds with the Ogdoad and both being at odds with Akhenaten's monotheism or with the Hyskos cult of Set.
And then Egyptians having polytheism didn't stop the Greeks from having their own different version, nor the Akkadian zone from having its own, nor the Mayans or Azteks across the ocean from having their own, and so on.
Even stuff like "Hinduism" or "Monotheism" that's in the game, really weren't anywhere near a monopoly.
E.g., Hinduism... which Hinduism? It's a blanket label applied to a multitude of religions in India ranging from polytheistic to monotheistic to technically atheistic. It's about as accurate as saying that everything from England to Persia is Abrahamic.
Monotheism? Which Monotheism? Judaism didn't prevent Zoroastrianism from existing in parallel (and while some versions were strictly dualist, some were really monotheistic), nor the monolatry of Marduk in Mesopotamia taken to near-monotheistic extremes, nor most of the Phoenician city-states from really having each their own monotheistic cult of Ba'al. Was it the same religion? Nope. Check out the whole Jezebel episode in the Old Testament for an example one monotheistic religion kicking out another.
Heck, even Judaism had splintered relatively early. Ever hear of the Good Samaritan? There's a reason a Samaritan is chosen there. Because Samaria had its own version of One True Judaism and were bitter religious enemies with Jerusalem over that. That parable chooses for "even he counts as your neighbour" an example as extreme as that. So there you have it. Two countries with their own version of it.
Even when technically there was one religion, having a grip on it world-wide proved to be a nigh impossible task. Christianity was splintered majorly for a few centuries, with competing schools including Arianism, Pelagianism, etc. Even just the major interpretations of Christianity were a battle royale between monophysitism (Jesus had only one nature, which in turn split into those who made him 100% human and those who made him 100% god), dyophysitism (natch, he had both natures), and miaphysitism (dude, he had two, but _inseparable_.) And if you think the last two are just splitting hairs, they had schisms and purges over that. In fact so severe was the purge done by the Byzantines in Armenia over such a hair-splitting issue that it basically removed any Armenian support or know-how in dealing with the Turks and, in a too long story for this message, it paved the road for Manzikert and the start of the fall of Byzantium.
And then political or nationalistic interests caused further splits. E.g., the Husites ravaged Germany in the name of their own interpretation of the bible, but that in turn was more fuelled by anti-German sentiment than by actually what was in the bible. E.g., earlier, the fight for religious hegemony between Rome and Byzantium ended up with something as ridiculous as the Pope and Byzantine Emperor excommunicating each other over whether the communion hosts (the Jesus-flavoured chips;) should be leavened or unleavened bread.
Really, nobody could have a monopoly on a religion like in Civ 4, much less a monopoly on a _type_ of religion. Inventing Monotheism didn't prevent someone else from inventing their own, much less keep it from splintering.
The whole culture of the west at this time expects or even legally demands that a corporation's _only_ goal or morals should be chasing the holy dollar, no matter who gets hurt. You can even be sued by shareholders if you didn't do a deal with the devil that would maximize their earnings. We're at a point where in a poll people even said they would dump toxic chemicals in a river if it meant more bucks for the shareholder.
So is it any surprise that they end up with a bunch of people who are capable of doing just that? I mean, corporate decisions are taken by humans at some point or another, and if you proclaim it good and desirable that a company has all the morals of a "stereotypical mustache twirling villain that steals the baby's candy just because they can" (and in fact can be sued by the investors if they purposefully failed to capitalize on the lucrative market of candy stolen from babies), is it surprising that it ends up using exactly the kind of people that would fit that stereotype? I mean, _someone_ has to do it or the shareholder doesn't get his extra cent on his stock value.
For a start I can tell you that those IRC chats tend to involve a keyboard. SMS messages on a phone keyboard are probably going to take a minute each to type, if they're longer than basically "LOLWUT??"
They also did tend to suck some attention and time, even with a keyboard and a big screen to track the discussions on. (Yes, I know some people like to pretend they're natural born multitaskers and they could do their research for an assignment while participating in three channels and five DCC private conversations, but... actually according to recent studies it turns out that nobody is very good at that, and actually people who think they're good at it, are in reality the worst at multitasking. They actually scored worse than the professed non-multitaskers at keeping track of multiple things at the same time.)
So, yes, especially for those mentioned as going over 200 a day, and presumably also reading a hundred or two, that would be a significant chunk of the day. Whether in a burst or interspersed with something else, that may vary, but the latter only means they're even more likely to come out of that class not remembering either what the teacher said _or_ much of the conversation they had.
Actually, I'm not sure you're seeing wasted capacity either.
Yes, at some point, people could recite the whole opus of Homer. Actually, some still do something comparable: remembering the Quran word for word. (And now that's one domain where it's a bit of a faux pas to remember even a word wrong.) You could too. But the downside is that that comes at the expense of a lot of repetitive memorizing just that, and less space in your head for something else.
We're at a point where really even in the course of your daily job you may have to remember a lot more than that. So you use your brain for that, not for memorizing a random book. I'm not sure you're actually seeing anything lost there.
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1. Except even then, the comparison to other minorities is still bogus. Other minorities are protected against discriminating or, as you call it mocking, to their face, but don't get to forbid you from playing something that might offend them. E.g., they don't get to tell the hilbillies reenacting Civil War fights that nobody should play the CSA troops because, you know, the CSA was all for slavery and offensive to blacks. E.g., they don't get to tell kids to stop playing cowboys and indians because it's insensitive to the natives.
So in effect even if you want to treat them as a real minority, it's still asking a bit more than any real minority actually does.
Yes, I'm all for extending the same courtesy as I extend to any other minorities. I definitely would be against a serviceman/servicewoman being denied service somewhere, and I'll be the first to frown at someone who calls him/her insulting names or stereotypes. But that's where it frigging stops. When they start dictating what units can be in my games so they're not insulted, I'll also be the first to tell them to take a hike. That's already way beyond non-discrimination, it's already that "minority" trying to elect itself the boss of someone else.
2. Well, then those families should have asked the guy/gal actually down there what he/she thinks, before whining at EA.
Because all I wrote before is based on my experience of actually being in the army. (Granted, thankfully never in actual combat.) We were trained all the time to deal with a real guy trying to really kill us. And he won't stop if you just go, "OMG, I'm so offended that you chose the side who hates me, I'm gonna sit in that corner and pout." You have to kill that motherfucker before he kills you and your mates. (Or more like pin him down until someone or something else can kill him.)
Even as simulations go, we didn't have to face some pixelated shape on a screen, but charge up a hill against real guys with real assault rifles and support weapons, (although thankfully not with live ammo.) How's that for realism? And you couldn't go "well, I'm offended that those guys from the other platoon are playing the side that hates us", because, well, none of us fancied explaining that to an officer, much less to a court martial.
I'd have been actually quite happy if that only happened on a computer screen. Heck, it would have saved me the bother of marching with all the gear and sprinting up a hill.
So if any family member of mine would be offended that someone else would play as the guy trying to kill me, well, they'd damn well better ask me about it. I'd be happy to tell them what I think of _that_ virtual threat.
3. Even more importantly, it still doesn't work. A rose by any other name is still a rose. Some renamed Taliban are still trying to shoot at the electronic effigy of those troops? So the difference is... what?
It would seem to me that the really offensive part in a war is that those guys are really trying to get you dead. Down in the ground with dirt on your head. That they're called Taliban or Red Army or "other side", WTH difference does it make?
Ditto for those families. Someone is still trying to shoot those guys in the game. You'd think that would be the main worry, not the exact name that they have in the game.
Actually, I have a tough time imagining that it's the soldiers who got offended by the thought of someone being able to play the Taliban. In fact, the posts I've seen from self-identified members of the armed forces in this thread, not a single one was along the lines of "whew, thank goodness they removed those!"
Not entirely surprising as someone who is actually shot at in real life, has bigger concerns than some pixelated other soldier being shot at in a video game. If you're the kind who'll actually lose his mental shit over a pimple-faced kid playing Taliban for lulz, you'll be a major liability (and probably a casualty) when you meet real Taliban who want you dead for real. Seriously, I can't imagine anyone trained to keep their wits about in a real combat situation, faced with real people who want him/her dead, and real deadly bullets, getting a major trauma over a few kids playing a video game.
The real minority complaining about this kind of shit are some puritans who probably only saw a weapon on TV, and who are all about protecting someone _else's_ sensibilities. You know, the "it's not about me, but OMG it might offend that other guy over there" kind. Even if that guy over there doesn't actually feel any need to be protected by such a knight in shiny armour.
So, really, quit doing that. If you yourself have something to complain about, complain, and if the army has anything to complain about, let the army do it. But inventing some other minority to protect is kinda getting silly.
You know, one thing I never get is such references to "wanting to pretend to be terrorists who hate your country." Why is that even worth mentioning anyway?
For most of the rest of the world, we're already used to the idea that someone somewhere hates our countries and that in the name of fun someone has to play that side too. Either because you wouldn't get much of a multiplayer if everyone is on the same team, or because that's the only single-player campaign there is. E.g., there never was any way to play either Wolfenstein game in Germany without basically pretending to be on the side of some guys who were really, really pissed off at Germany. And for good reason too. (Granted, they pussified it by changing the symbols and everything to some weird other war than WW2, but you're still fighting Germans and everyone knew what it's really about.)
Or I don't think many people would go out of the way to apologize to Russians that such games as No One Lives Forever featured them as the bad guys, and it was only possible to play as someone who basically hates the USSR.
Most of us came to terms with the idea that someone somewhere hates or hated our respective country. Heck, down here in the old world we have about 5000 years of recorded history of everyone hating everyone else. We hated the Romans, the Romans hated us, then we were kinda friends with Rome and hated someone else, and they hated us in return, and so on. And the Mesopotamians were bashing each other's head in with bronze maces long before that, while both we and the ancestors of the Romans (and even Greeks) were running around in fur loincloths. And before even written history, we have finds like Ötzi who was killed in combat (presumably by someone who didn't like him or his tribe much), or prehistoric caves in France and Spain of stick figures shooting arrows at each other and bashing each other's heads in with clubs. (Again, I'm guessing it meant those tribes weren't particularly fond of each other.)
Why is the reality that someone out there doesn't like you something that the USA needs to frown upon?
And besides, again, it's a game. What's the difference between that and, dunno, playing an Orc attacking the Humans, or a Zerg doing the same, or really whatever? It's not like someone really wants to feel like he's really hating the USA or humanity, it's just playing an available role.
Both my grandfathers fought in WW2. One of them was crippled, and actually the other who was a decorated officer (ok, ok, only Iron Cross second class) had the most horror stories and never really ticked right ever after. So can we please remove the Americans, Brits and especially the fucking Russians from games too? (And I don't say "fucking" as just an expletive. Those guys raped even their own female soldiers when they liberated female POW camps.) It seems insensitive that people can buy games where they can play folks who shot at both my grandfathers and some who literally raped half of Europe.
The French can stay, though. Those never harmed anyone ;)
(Not entirely serious post. Just illustrating that there are more countries in the world than the USA, and the EU _is_ a major market for computer games. If we're going remove everything that could offend someone from the USA, then we're going to start the same over here, and there won't be much left which you _can_ put in a game.)
Since PNG compression is lossless, it doesn't matter at all for the purpose of quality. Whether you had their webkit in your browser and had the image decoded directly to screen, or have it compressed to PNG first, is basically irrelevant. It'll look exactly the same.
You'd be surprised what some use.
E.g., I remember one case from another board who was hearing differences in sound quality when playing MP3's off different hard drives in his computer. And no, he didn't mean the HDD's own noise. He was convinced that it's like on the old cassettes, where different kinds of tape (e.g., iron vs chrome) had different frequency responses. So it stood to reason to him that some HDD's have better bass than others.
Did you look at the full size images offered for download? Because the ones on the page are scaled down, and any artefacts will be inherently "antialised" out. But when you look at them at 1:1 zoom and flip between the two, it's not hard to notice small differences. E.g., the wood texture in picture 4 is notably different IMHO and the chairs in 9 look IMHO blurrier.
Think positively. It sounds like a business opportunity to me.
Think all the special power cables, wooden volume knobs, and the other BS that gets sold to "audiophiles" who don't, in fact, hear the difference, under the claim that it'll increase the fidelity when they listen to something off their iPod. You just need to add an organic, hand-tuned volume knob, and *wham* all those missing harmonics spring into place.
I for one welcome this new development and would like to offer videophiles an amazing DVI-D cable that removes such WebP imperfections. For the low price of 499.95$, plus VAT, shopping and handling.
So let's recap: you haven't, by your own confession, read more than about two sentences. Yet you feel qualified to comment about the post. And at that nothing bearing any relationship to what was in it.
So in effect you posted an "I'm too stupid to read more than two sentences, and too stupid to realize the inherent problem with commenting about what I haven't read" confession. Am I supposed to take it as some kind of winning move or something?
Lemme try: OMG, whatEVER will I do now? My life is meaningless if one cretin troll has stopped reading my message ;)
Sorry, I can't do that. Your being too stupid to read is your problem not mine.
1. That still is based on the false assumption that there are any players who actually asked for it. Blizzard's _stated_ goal all along for tying it into Facebook and whatnot was basically to try to get more players that way. They even called it "cross-polination". Whether or not it actually is beneficial for anyone, I believe that only started to be even considered when players got up in arms about it.
I.e., it has nothing to do with what _you_ want. It's the management at Activision being greedy fucktards. That's all.
2. Here's another clue, though, which I feel that too many people lack: 99% the friends which are interested in your (or my) WoW achievements, are on WoW too anyway. The rest fall somewhere between "don't give a fuck about your hobby" to "annoyed already to hear about it again."
Frankly, I don't know what kind of mental failure makes some people assume that every co-worker, acquaintance, and guy on the bus, is _dying_ to hear about their Counter-Strike score or WoW raiding gear or whatever. Heck, I even was a WoW player myself, and let me assure you, I don't give a flying fuck about half the things people seem to assume that I absolutely must hear in detail, and half the rest I find stupid.
Like that some guy is now training his dagger skill by hacking treants. Let me go on record saying that I don't give a flying fuck. And I'm not even talking about some idle conversation in a cigarette break, when you'd yap inane topics anyway, but the guy actually called me to tell me that. What. The. Fuck.
Do you think I'd genuinely be more interested to find it out via an online link?
Or some other guy coming over from the next building to tell me that he now has 99 mounts, 'cause he's bought the transparent mount for real money. I think he thought I'd be all thrilled, but all I could think was, "wtf, you're telling me you paid real cash for the sake of getting one notch closer to a stupid achievement title in a game? How retarded is that?"
You may be confused because we don't actually say stuff like that. Rest assured though that that tends to be the thought process behind that smile and "oh, wow, cheers. Hope you get the last one soon too." (Much as I know I'll hear about that one in detail too.)
Would I absolutely be thrilled to check that out online via his realID? Nope. Good grief, nope.
3. And it's not just a personal belief. If you've paid any attention to what has been said and drawn in comics about the CS-heads, you'll find a metric buttload (or about 0.63 British arseloads;)) of complaints about people who won't shut up about it. I've yet to see even one single complaint to the effect of "goddammit, my friend doesn't tell me enough about his CS score. I so wish I could check his score online."
4. But, yes, basically that is one factor that Blizzard is betting on. They just know that if you give fucktards a link to spam their friends and barely acquaintances on Facebook with it, a lot will do. They also hope that some of those will decide to check out the game... even at the exapense of annoying the heck out of the other 99% who get spammed that way.
Frankly, it smacks me of an antisocial business decision. It's not that far off from the spammer model. In this case it relies on people with poor judgment clicking to send the spam, instead of having an automated run, but in the end it still boils down to the same shotgun approach.
So, more idiotic scaremongering and ad-hominems. Boohoo, the guy debating you can be mis-represented as supporting TEH BIGOTS. Let me guess, you're just too stupid to form a coherent argument and that is genuinely the best you can do? Sure looks that way so far. The world must be nice and comfortable when instead of actual logic or facts you can just divide the world into the good guy (you) and TEH EVIL GUYS (whoever has opinions different from yours.)
So, yep, looks like I was right: you're a cretin. Enjoy.
Sure.
Discrimination by height: discrimination by height, already happening
Discrimination against people with a "black name": yep, it happens already
Oh, and something I predict will soon mean a lot less jobs for homosexuals: Project Gaydar. If you remember the Futurama episode where Bender makes pronouncements about who's gay, yep, now apparently datamining your Facebook page for stuff like who you're friends with and such can produce a gaydar score for how likely you are to be gay.
And if you still think people won't do it, the best part is, racists never think they're racist. Think of all those "I'm not racist, but [insert horribly racist thing]" or "I'm not sexist, but [insert reasons why the bitch should be in the kitchen instead of having her own job]" and the sad thing is they actually believe it. They think their bigotry isn't bigotry but, why, almost pure science that blacks are dumb and criminal, and women working ruined the economy. And, oh, if you think the rest of the company or society wouldn't let them get away with it, yes, most proclaim they wouldn't, but actually more people choose to work with the white overt racist than with the black.
1. And you're answering that to a post which actually said it'll be used to do some covert racial or religious or political discrimination.
It already happens too. If you think someone surely can't just happen to find more flaws online for blacks or foreigners than for blacks without getting sued... guess what? It already happens. In a study, for the same resume they found out you had about 50% more chances to get called for a job interview with a name like John than a name like Ulambongo, and nobody gets sued for those uncannily non-uniform results. Welcome to the new world of online checking, where you don't even have to guess by name, and can just look on Facebook for whether that guy is a black or muslim or whatever you don't like.
But at any rate, the relationship to your retarded rant is... what? Are you willing to claim that racial and religious and political profiling (which are the kind of things the GP predicted) are actually necessary to predict who'll shoot up the place? Or did you have your canned rant and just had to use it whether it fits or not?
2. And your argument is... wait, what? The tiny percentage of workplace deaths? According to CDC data, that's an average of 800 per year, with the maximum being about 1000 in 1994, and the minimum just over 500 in 2006.
That's 500 in 310,000,000 people or roughly 1.5 per _million_ people.
So you're going to justify discrimination against literally tens of millions of people to maybe prevent a tiny percentage of 500 deaths a year? Even as scaremongering attempts to justify why someone else needs to bend over for the good of the corporate or government overlords, this has to take the cake for failed sense of proportions.
Cretin. Seriously, what a cretin.
From my experience with trying a lot of MMOs... yes it can. You don't even need to try hard to end up with something that sucks more ass than the toilets on the space station.
Add one of those "free to play" (but you need to pay a few hundred bucks just to get the same you'd get in the first month on WoW, and generally we'll try hard to make your character suck if you don't) setups, and it can really really suck.
And generally, don't underestimate how much room downwards there is in any domain. Just about any time I said "it can't be worse than that" or "nobody can be even more clueless", some altruistic soul promptly came along and showed him-/her-self as proof that I'm wrong. Be it MMOs or programming a simple web site or just about anything at all.
TBH, I'd hardly count using normal maps as fancy texturing. They've been standard stuff for years. And, heck, even if you somehow managed to get a graphics card which lacks that, simple lighting interpolation based on corner normals has been standard in, well, any hardware-accelerated card I know of. And even in ye olde days of doing it in software, Phong or Gouraud shading were rather run of the mill stuff.
But at any rate, as I was saying, I _have_ used polearms and maces with 16-sided or even 12-sided shafts before, and if you have any interpolation of the normals at all, it actually looks pretty ok. Even without normal maps.
Ultimately the key factor is that you're not looking at it head-on and magnified. A 16-sided polygon for a circle looks not very smooth when you just draw it on the screen. When you look at a 16-sided cylinder a bit sideways and with even basic lighting interpolation it's actually much harder to see those edges. Not the least because there's a gradient of lighting across them.
Granted, with normal maps it looks even better. But if you can't or won't use that, and have to have thousands of those cylinders on the screen at the same time, I'd say 16-sided is more than good enough.
'Course, that's my subjective taste. YMMV.
Actually, it still sounds stupid to me, although more in the way of whatever were they thinking when they based an MMO on that.
Even if you remove the bits used in connections, there will still be plenty which aren't. As a trivial example, any sloped roof made of Lego bricks will still be a huge brush of nubs.
Basically think even a small city like Stormwind, if it were made of Lego. Even after removing the bits used in actual connections, you're still left with several million polygons just in nubs and cylinders, on top of what the same city would have if built otherwise.
1. As someone who's dabbled into 3D modelling, you'd be surprised how fast the polygons go into something that actually doesn't look all that detailed. Especially if you make it for 1920x1200 screens, not for ye olde 320x200 VGA mode. You can sink a few hundreds into a face alone just so it doesn't look offensive, much less look good.
Then comes even the basic equipment a WoW character has. I'm not even talking about epic equipment. Just your basic curved blade can east up anywhere between a hundred and a couple hundred polygons just so it doesn't look like it's made of abrupt angles. Etc.
And generally, while the WoW characters do look cartoonish, they're not particularly low detail by my guess. Sure, they're not Doom 4 class, but they're not Quake 1 either, if you get my drift. At a wild guess, I'm guessing even a newbie avatar would have a couple thousand triangles.
Which brings me to the point:
2. How do you actually reach twice that with a freaking basic lego brick, other than sheer incompetence? I mean, Jesus Haploid Christ, I was feeling like a noob because my detailed weapons were in the several hundreds range, and these guys are talking several thousands for a freaking lego brick. How does one _do_ that?
I mean, let's do some maths. The bulk probably goes into the nubs on the brick. Let's make the cylinder actually a 16 sided prism, which from my experience looks smoothly round even for a gun barrel or polearm shaft you're seeing in first person. That's 32 triangles for the cylinder. The top is 16 triangles (think dividing by lines from the centre to the corners.) Let's round the transition nicely from sides to top, for which actually three steps of increasing slope is more than enough. (Heck, at the size of those even one is enough, but let's be generous.) That's 3x32 more triangles for that. Grand total: 80 triangles.
But wait, we have to do the hole on the other side too, and let's do it at the same level of detail. (Although here that rounded transition is really overkill with 3 segments, but ok.) So it's another 80, for a total of 160 per nub.
A two by eight brick is 16 such nubs, for a total of 16, which needs 2560 triangles. Add a few more for the plate and you're still under 3000.
Note that so far it's just assuming the most basic 3d rendering engine. With normal maps you can make things look equally round with half that number of polygons. You just model it in this high polycount, generate the normal map, then reduce the count of the actual model.
So, really, how does one reach twice the polycount of a WoW avatar other than sheer cluelessness? It reminds me of the daikatana story where a newbie artist was asked to draw an arrow for the crossbow, and painted an IIRC 2048 pixel wide bitmap for it.
3. And, really, anyone who's played WoW or any other MMO can tell you that things can get really annoying when you have 1000 characters on your screen. Think the old Ironforge, back when it had the only auction house. There were people who had a slideshow there or their computer crashed. Or I remember an event on Anarchy Online, waay back, when they actually told people to look at the ground to avoid a crash because of too many people. (Yeah, smart idea to have a major event where everyone only sees their own feet.)
The prospect of having several creations made of thousands of bricks, each of which has several thousand triangles, on the screen should make anyone who has a clue wonder if they're doing it right.
Now that you mention it, don't most of those contacts also involve anal probing with dildo-shaped implements, mutilating cattle and apparently making crop circles for the heck of it?
I mean, I can imagine a thousand Martian redneck hillbilies going,
"Hey, Billy Joe Bob, it says here them Earthlings have a new ambers.. am... contact person."
"What's one of those do, Bubba?"
"Way I figures it, Billy Joe Bob, it means we gots to meet her when we goes down there."
"But we was gonna do some crop circling and mutilate some of those strange animals they keep around. Do ya figure she's gonna help us with that?"
"Nope, probably not."
"Right, I'll fire up the ol' anal probe then."
"Careful back there, Billy Joe Bob, I just bought us the Jackhammer probe upgrade. Don't wreck nuthing with it."
I mean, why not just get the goatse guy as the ambassador?
Actually, that seems to me like the perfect way to aim the flash at just someone's eyes :p
I kinda doubt that that was the _whole_ story though. All the photos I've seen of the disease, and someone with that kind of depigmentation I actually knew IRL, were cases of it happening in patches, rather than just becoming gradually uniformly whiter. The guy I knew was nicknamed "the dalmatian" because, really, that's what he looked like because of it.
It also tends to be disproportionally more pronounced around the eyes, nostrils and mouth, and often asymmetrically so.
Michael Jackson's face never showed any signs of that. Even if the final result of a really extreme version might conceivably be uniformly white, the intermediate stages would not. At some point in between he'd not as much need a glove to hide it, he'd need a mask.
Really, even if he had it, and assuming that no "bleaching" was involved, he would have to use makeup heavily to look relatively uniformly white. In which case, really, if he's ashamed of becoming white _and_ is using makeup for it anyway, then why not dark makeup? Something doesn't add up.
But... even in the link you provided, down the page it says they did find a lot of monobenzone and hydroquinone in his home, which, guess what? Is used to depigment the skin. It can be used to make someone with vitiligo uniformly white, but it does amount to "bleaching" the skin to remove the unaffected patches. Or, if I'm to be mean, it can also be used to depigment someone who doesn't have vitiligo at all. There is no difference there between killing the melanocites (pigmentation cells) in an unaffected skin patch on someone with vitiligo, and killing them in an unaffected skin patch in someone who just is unaffected.
But at any rate, if he wasn't using those to whiten his skin, WTH _did_ he have all those tubes of it for? We're not even talking one or two bought just in case. There was a total of 37 tubes, roughly evenly divided between the two.
It seems to me like, maybe because Vitiligo or maybe not, he did whiten his skin chemically too. And frankly I wouldn't hold it against him either way. But let's not invent some disease that's just, you know, totally natually uniform when that very likely wasn't the case.
Actually, yes they do. They filter out the attacks from that infected laptop that Johnny Marketting Guy takes outside the "secure" enclosure 90% of the time, and the tunnel from outside that Joe IT Guy and Jane Programmer apparently absolutely can't work without, and that smartphone that's rooted six way to Sunday that Jack Manager absolutely _demands_ to connect to the internal network because he supposedly can't work without that, etc.
Not really. Or rather, not really like in Civ 4. In Civ 4 you can basically have a monopoly on religion, so to speak. Historically that didn't work anywhere near that good.
E.g., sure, you can superficially say that the Egyptians did the same, but really they didn't. Each city has its own deity before Narmer even came along, and really mostly stuck with it. Even afterwards, there were several competing systems even inside the country, with the Ennead being severely at odds with the Ogdoad and both being at odds with Akhenaten's monotheism or with the Hyskos cult of Set.
And then Egyptians having polytheism didn't stop the Greeks from having their own different version, nor the Akkadian zone from having its own, nor the Mayans or Azteks across the ocean from having their own, and so on.
Even stuff like "Hinduism" or "Monotheism" that's in the game, really weren't anywhere near a monopoly.
E.g., Hinduism... which Hinduism? It's a blanket label applied to a multitude of religions in India ranging from polytheistic to monotheistic to technically atheistic. It's about as accurate as saying that everything from England to Persia is Abrahamic.
Monotheism? Which Monotheism? Judaism didn't prevent Zoroastrianism from existing in parallel (and while some versions were strictly dualist, some were really monotheistic), nor the monolatry of Marduk in Mesopotamia taken to near-monotheistic extremes, nor most of the Phoenician city-states from really having each their own monotheistic cult of Ba'al. Was it the same religion? Nope. Check out the whole Jezebel episode in the Old Testament for an example one monotheistic religion kicking out another.
Heck, even Judaism had splintered relatively early. Ever hear of the Good Samaritan? There's a reason a Samaritan is chosen there. Because Samaria had its own version of One True Judaism and were bitter religious enemies with Jerusalem over that. That parable chooses for "even he counts as your neighbour" an example as extreme as that. So there you have it. Two countries with their own version of it.
Even when technically there was one religion, having a grip on it world-wide proved to be a nigh impossible task. Christianity was splintered majorly for a few centuries, with competing schools including Arianism, Pelagianism, etc. Even just the major interpretations of Christianity were a battle royale between monophysitism (Jesus had only one nature, which in turn split into those who made him 100% human and those who made him 100% god), dyophysitism (natch, he had both natures), and miaphysitism (dude, he had two, but _inseparable_.) And if you think the last two are just splitting hairs, they had schisms and purges over that. In fact so severe was the purge done by the Byzantines in Armenia over such a hair-splitting issue that it basically removed any Armenian support or know-how in dealing with the Turks and, in a too long story for this message, it paved the road for Manzikert and the start of the fall of Byzantium.
And then political or nationalistic interests caused further splits. E.g., the Husites ravaged Germany in the name of their own interpretation of the bible, but that in turn was more fuelled by anti-German sentiment than by actually what was in the bible. E.g., earlier, the fight for religious hegemony between Rome and Byzantium ended up with something as ridiculous as the Pope and Byzantine Emperor excommunicating each other over whether the communion hosts (the Jesus-flavoured chips;) should be leavened or unleavened bread.
Really, nobody could have a monopoly on a religion like in Civ 4, much less a monopoly on a _type_ of religion. Inventing Monotheism didn't prevent someone else from inventing their own, much less keep it from splintering.
Actually, well, is this surprising?
The whole culture of the west at this time expects or even legally demands that a corporation's _only_ goal or morals should be chasing the holy dollar, no matter who gets hurt. You can even be sued by shareholders if you didn't do a deal with the devil that would maximize their earnings. We're at a point where in a poll people even said they would dump toxic chemicals in a river if it meant more bucks for the shareholder.
So is it any surprise that they end up with a bunch of people who are capable of doing just that? I mean, corporate decisions are taken by humans at some point or another, and if you proclaim it good and desirable that a company has all the morals of a "stereotypical mustache twirling villain that steals the baby's candy just because they can" (and in fact can be sued by the investors if they purposefully failed to capitalize on the lucrative market of candy stolen from babies), is it surprising that it ends up using exactly the kind of people that would fit that stereotype? I mean, _someone_ has to do it or the shareholder doesn't get his extra cent on his stock value.
Sort of.
For a start I can tell you that those IRC chats tend to involve a keyboard. SMS messages on a phone keyboard are probably going to take a minute each to type, if they're longer than basically "LOLWUT??"
They also did tend to suck some attention and time, even with a keyboard and a big screen to track the discussions on. (Yes, I know some people like to pretend they're natural born multitaskers and they could do their research for an assignment while participating in three channels and five DCC private conversations, but... actually according to recent studies it turns out that nobody is very good at that, and actually people who think they're good at it, are in reality the worst at multitasking. They actually scored worse than the professed non-multitaskers at keeping track of multiple things at the same time.)
So, yes, especially for those mentioned as going over 200 a day, and presumably also reading a hundred or two, that would be a significant chunk of the day. Whether in a burst or interspersed with something else, that may vary, but the latter only means they're even more likely to come out of that class not remembering either what the teacher said _or_ much of the conversation they had.
Actually, I'm not sure you're seeing wasted capacity either.
Yes, at some point, people could recite the whole opus of Homer. Actually, some still do something comparable: remembering the Quran word for word. (And now that's one domain where it's a bit of a faux pas to remember even a word wrong.) You could too. But the downside is that that comes at the expense of a lot of repetitive memorizing just that, and less space in your head for something else.
We're at a point where really even in the course of your daily job you may have to remember a lot more than that. So you use your brain for that, not for memorizing a random book. I'm not sure you're actually seeing anything lost there.