Ah, the endless capacity of apologists to BS themselves by postulating what's not actually in the text. How cute.
Well, no. In Ezekiel 4:13 so sayeth God: "And the LORD said, Even thus shall the children of Israel eat their defiled bread among the Gentiles, whither I will drive them." My emphasis. Clearly either that bread recipe from 4:9 is already defiled from the start, or that human shit is defiling it. Either way, it's not some wholesome recipe for good bread, but for defiled bread. No matter how you separate which step is defiling it, it's still not given a recipe for good nutrition.
But more telling is the exchange in 4:14-15:
14. Then said I, Ah Lord GOD! behold, my soul hath not been polluted: for from my youth up even till now have I not eaten of that which dieth of itself, or is torn in pieces; neither came there abominable flesh into my mouth.
15. Then he said unto me, Lo, I have given thee cow's dung for man's dung, and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith.
Ezekiel is clearly protesting that on account of his purity, and substituting cow dung is somehow making it better. It doesn't sound like he just has a problem with using briquettes.
But most importantly the choice of words in 4:15 makes it clearer what it's meant. "and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith" My emphasis again.
But again, regardless of how you use it, the fact remains that God gave a recipe for defiled bread. A fact that was completely lost on the cretins selling and buying Ezekiel 4:9 bread and actually believing (and some arguing) it's an example of good nutrition as prescribed by the Bible.
And basically that's what I meant by confusing fundies with the real bible. The average lemming doesn't know what's actually in it, and at best goes by some BS apology that has nothing to do with what's actually in there. The lemmings buying that bread and using it as an example of the bible prescribing good nutrition, haven't even read the couple of verses directly after it on the same page. They don't actually _know_ what that quote was actually for when in context.
Just read the real bible and you'll be confusing fundies left and right.
And you can go for even nastier than confusing if you want. For example, find someone who's a fan of that Ezekiel 4:9 bread, and tell them that the whole recipe given by God there continues all the way to Ezekiel 4:13: "and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man". Yep, God's recipe there actually calls for human shit as an ingredient for that bread. (Though Ezekiel himself, for being so faithful and kosher all his life, gets Gods dispensation in 4:15 to eat his with cow shit instead.)
Especially if you spring that on them after they ate some, honestly, no amount of lolcat bible can even start to compare:p
You know, the ancient Egyptians believed that basically the Ka (soul) can move back and forth between the underworld and real world, as long as a suitable support for the Ka is provided and if possible a spirit door. (Read the shape of a door carved on the wall.) You could literally write a letter to grandma and leave it in her tomb, for her to read when she drops by. In fact, it even makes more sense than just talking and expecting grandma to hear from wherever she may be.
Me, I plan to take it to the logical conclusion and be buried with a laptop and internet access. Screw scripts, I'll read my own emails and post my own updates;)
Unfortunately so far people tend to look funny when I ask about a crypt with electricity and ADSL;)
I don't think it's even that simple as dividing people into "techy" and "non-techy".
Ultimately everyone is interested in a different domain. The guy you lump in as non-techy because he isn't specifically getting a boner about computers, may be spending hours daily in his garage playing with his car's engine. I don't see why it would count as "non-techy": at some point it was even the apex of being interested in tech. Someone else may be toying with electronics, or making RC models, or experimenting with soundproofing their home-theatre room, or whatever.
Other domains may not qualify as technology, but they're nevertheless a direct equivalent. A doctor spending his afternoons reading about new medicines and illnesses, is really doing a very close equivalent of studying technology. If biology is the science, the medicine part is the applied science, i.e., technology. That guy is pretty much an engineer for the body. If a lawyer reads about legal precedents, again, that's a pretty darned close equivalent of technology. If the basic legal principles are the science, their application is, you guessed, pretty much the technology of that domain. Etc.
Other people are interested in yet other stuff, be it history, or debunking woo, or just social networking. Just because they're not studying the domain _I_ like, doesn't mean I should lump them into some "spectator" category. They're not particularly spectators in the game of life, if you get my drift.
And TBH I'm actually glad that they do study those things. Not as in "less competition for me", but rather as in, "I'd rather go to a doctor which reads about medicine, than to a doctor who's a Linux kernel wizard." It takes many thousands of hours to be good at something, and even more into just staying up to date. And there are only so many hours in a day. I'd rather they spend them being better at their actual job, than rationalize that only my shit is the only thing everyone should know.
And, yes, ultimately that's the impression I'm left with, reading through the thread. Some people are simply just self-centered enough to basically proclaim that only _their_ shit is worth learning, and everything else doesn't matter. And, yes, that includes the techno-fetishism of the previous generation, who thought that _their_ favourite toy will become the only thing worth knowing and the thing which will singlehandedly change the world. It strikes me as some self-aggrandizing fantasy. Actually, worse, it's ego masturbation by any other name.
Thanks for proving that Stella's defenders are a bunch of retards.
If that car doesn't have a cup holder, then use your fucking brains and get out or refrain from messing with it. That's why you have a brain: assess the situation, and refrain from doing what's unsafe. You're no more justified to spill coffee on you for lacking a cup holder, than you are to light a cigarette near a gas leak, or to play hopscotch on a bridge without handrails, or to try to hammer nails with your fist if you lack a hammer. That's why you have a brain, idiot. If circumstances X and Y of a particular place or situation makes it unsafe to do Z, it means you're supposed to use your brains and refrain from doing Z, idiot. Not that you should do it anyway and expect someone else to pay. If you choose to do something usafe anyway, you're to blame for your own misfortune.
If anything the only one I owe an apology is the GGP who was saying that nature produces bigger idiots. Yep, it looks like it does: the kind of idiot who thinks that the lack of a cup holder is not something they should have considered in their decision, but some excuse to be paid for their own stupidity. Because, you know, god forbid that they're actually responsible for _choosing_ to do something unsafe.
The McD coffee was at the temperature recommended by the National Coffee Association, and generally not that far off from what most chains serve. To wit, Burger King, Wendy's, and several other chains have been sued for similar burns. There's also the aspect that she was stupid enough to remove a safety feature (that tight lid) while holding the cup in an inherently unsafe way (by holding it between her legs.) So essentially it's like rewarding someone for doing a wheelie on the highway with the brakes removed.
But anyway if you can perform that maneuver without either tipping the cup or squeezing with the legs, please feel free to give a demonstration. I'm sure some jury will be more than happy to reward you for it, should it go wrong.
Also, if you think your coffee at home is at 134F-145F, you may have a nasty surprise. Most of the coffee machines squirt it at much more than that, a lot going all the way to 195F. See the lawsuit against Bunn, or the specs of several Starbucks coffee makers, etc.
Basically just because Stella's lawyer argued that lie and stupidity, and a jury was retarded enough to actually buy it, doesn't make it true. I mean, I'm not sure that they teach it in law schools, because it was effing brilliant. The guy should get an effing medal for basically going in front of a jury and arguing something that far off the mark... and probably some special pants to fit his elephant sized balls in. It take bowling-sized balls to pull a stunt like that with a straight face. But what is a good lesson for the fast food equivalent of an ambulance chaser (that guy basically made a name for himself by suing everyone in sight over hot coffee... and each time apparently everyone else was serving lower) isn't necessarily something good for the rest of society.
But even then, that lawyer argued for about 165F, not 134. There's no reason to push the lie even lower than that, you know?
Either way, usually the only thing more than meets the eye is simply that some people seem to want to believe that there must be a justification to arbitrarily take from the rich and give to the poor, Robin Hood style. Corporations are bad, the little guy deserves some money, watch cognitive dissonance build a rationalization from there.
Well, my point was merely why those warnings exist, rather than how to prevent them. I was just saying that nature didn't create better idiots, we just created a system that makes the existing kind of idiots more deadly. Sort of like mounting a frikken laser on a shark's head. It's not that nature made a better shark, it's the addition of the laser to existing ones;)
But for a solution... Actually, it seems to me like a simpler solution would exist, and one based on an established legal concept: you should be able to know beforehand if you're doing something wrong. It's one of the basic principles behind the rule of law, after all. A system where you find afterwards if your coffee was too hot, or if your beer shouldn't have been available to some bar you didn't know existed, is IMHO anything but.
Essentially there should be some place and way to go and say, "ok, this is our cup, this is our lid, this is the type of coffee machine we bought. Is this safe enough?" I realize that some kind of state agency would be about as popular with some americans as ass-rape, but I'm open to other agencies too. I dunno... a judge maybe? A jury? Suing yourself pre-emptively, so to speak? There should be _some_ way to rule in advance if something is OK or not, rather than just wait and see when a parasite with a sob story will make it sound like a product is inherently unsafe if "only" 23,999,999 people in 24,000,000 can use it without problems. (Numbers taken from the original McD coffee lawsuit, where not only that safety record was that ruled unsafe -- never mind that 6 times more americans die drowned in buckets each year, and nobody ruled buckets inherently unsafe -- but it actually caused the jury to increase the damages awarded.)
Actually, I'm under the impression that some of the bleeding obvious warning have little to do with "nature designing a bigger idiot" as with basically a law system where people can pretend to be idiots to sue for millions. And where juries of disgruntled anti-corporatist can actually decide to award an idiot that a company pays his medical bill, even when essentially ruling that the idiot is to blame for his own misfortune. Just because, you know, it would be somehow mean to tell a little old lady to pay for her own skin graft, when you can just take some money from a corporation to cover those costs.
E.g., "Wanda Hudson, 44, of Mobile, Ala. After Hudson lost her home to foreclosure, she moved her belongings to a storage unit. She says she was inside her unit one night "looking for some papers" when the storage yard manager found the door to her unit ajar -- and locked it. She denies that she was sleeping inside, but incredibly did not call for help or bang on the door to be let out! She was not found for 63 days and barely survived; the formerly "plump" 150-pound woman lived on food she just happened to have in the unit, and was a mere 83 pounds when she was found. She sued the storage yard for $10 million claiming negligence. Even though the jury was not allowed to learn that Hudson had previously diagnosed mental problems, it found Hudson was nearly 100 percent responsible for her own predicament -- but still awarded her $100,000."
Roll that around in your head. Even after ruling her responsible, they _still_ awarded her $100,000. God knows what for. Apparently just because it would be heartless _not_ to rob a company to pay for a trespasser's misfortune.
More worryingly, even warning signs really don't matter any more.
E.g., "Hornbeck volunteered for the Army and served a stint in Iraq. After getting home, he got drunk, wandered into a hotel's service area (passing "DANGER" warning signs), crawled into an air conditioning unit, and was severely cut when the machinery activated. Unable to care for himself due to his drunkenness, he bled to death. A tragedy, to be sure, but one solely caused by a supposedly responsible adult with military training. Despite his irresponsible behavior -- and his perhaps criminal trespassing -- Hornbeck's family sued the hotel for $10 million, as if it's reasonably foreseeable that some drunk fool would ignore warning signs and climb into its heavy duty machinery to sleep off his bender."
E.g., a woman sued Burger King after spilling the coffee onto her own lap, because, get this, although the cup did warn that the coffee is hot, the employee didn't also warn her verbally that it's dangerously hot. Because, you know, apparently otherwise it doesn't matter.
Worse yet, in some parts you can even get to pay big bucks for something you didn't personally cause or had any way to cause or prevent.
E.g., when a hare-brained pyrotechnics stunt went wrong in a bar and resulted in a deadly blaze, it wasn't just the owners that had to pay. The list of those who were made to pay millions or had to reach a settlement (again in the millions), included the radio channel which aired an ad for the event, and the manufacturer of the beer they served there (and literally had no other involvement with the event, and likely only heard of it when they got sued), and the importer of that beer, and Home Depot who sold the material they used as insulation and which was ignited by their hare-brained pyrotechnics. (Although Home Depot never sold it as fire-proof or anything.)
Windows is the most popular OS out there today, in several incarnations: Server, XP, Vista and 7.
Yet, have we ever seen the sourcecode. It is secret, isn't it?
Same here with every other proprietary software and hardware. We know the schematics, or we think we can figure it out at least. But the details is hidden in machine code and no sourcecode is ever released.
If Microsoft went out of business for some reason, we wouldn't know how to patch or upgrade Windows. It would be abandonded, just like all other abandonded software out there today. Some day, it will happen.
But they can patent the idea, which is really all a software patent is, since the sourcecode is not included, to stop other people implementing similar system.
That IS evil.
Well, it's not like patents are mandatory or anything, so, yes, there will still be things which are still just secret instead.
Also, that stereotype of software patents is simply not true. True, _some_ patents are just vague ideas, or even just something as silly as business uniforms. (And, really, why the _fuck_ is a pizzeria's uniform a patent and not, say, a trademark? what is the scientific or technology advance there?) But most of them actually include at least a working algorithm and, if applicable, the maths behind it. Even without source code to copy, someone even half-way competent should be able to implement it.
Generally there is only so much that you can patent in advance as some vague idea, and there's only so big a time window to do so. If you went to the patent office with some idea like "compressing images somehow", if it's already in widespread use, you get laughed out the door, and if it's more than 20-30 years ahead of its time, you won't make anything out of it. It's not as practical as you'd think. Most patents actually do have to describe an actual way of solving the problem, in a different way than anyone patented before.
Basically, don't fall for the Slashdot meme that all the patents are some trivial blanket idea and without any clue (or even useless) to the actual implementation. Yes, the average comment or even summary here is along the lines of someone reading about a patent on some new clockwork mechanism and going "OMG, they're trying to patent the cog". Because, you know, it's what gives lots of karma fast, and it doesn't even require actually knowing what he's talking about. Reality tends to not be quite that bleak.
Well, there is a downside too, but I would say it _did_ provide an advantage compared to ye olde days when (A) there wasn't much incentive to put too much money into new research, and (B) if you did, it was only if you could keep it secret.
Probably the best case that could be made is the Greek Fire, which gave the Byzantine armies and navies a major advantage. But they kept it so secret that a few centuries later they themselves didn't know how to make it any more. Probably a family business and once it went out of business, nobody knew how to make more. Suddenly a whole fleet of boats with flamethrowers was out of ammo. Yes, there is the recipe described by Anna Komnene, but it doesn't actually work. Even the royal family paying for that flamethrower fuel got a bogus recipe as what they're paying for.
I'd say it couldn't have hurt to let them patent it, ya know?
Another good case is Leonardo Da Vinci's tank which wouldn't actually work as designed. The schematic contains a simple flaw which Leonardo would probably know not to do that way, but anyone trying to steal his work would end up with a lot of work invested and monkey sunk into something that flat out can't move.
It's not the only one, btw. He hid flaws which would make the design non-functional even in such trivial stuff as his design of a trebuchet, which you have to wonder why. I mean, people had been building trebuchets for half a millennium at that point, so surely there'd be no point in trying to hide that knowledge. Oh, wait, except there totally was worth it. Engineers kept that kind of thing secret, so you'd have to pay them instead of just make your own copies, to the extent that for example Gengis Khan's armies made a point to capture the engineers from each city they took, and make them build siege engines for them.
Sometimes active disinformation went into protecting a trade secret too. E.g., why we got the noun "catgut". Violin strings were actually made of sheep gut, but the very few families who knew how, actively popularized a version which would be the wrong material, impractical, too expensive, and which most other people couldn't bring themselves to even try anyway.
Is a quick profit worse than that? I'm not that convinced.
I'm not sure where you got any of those ideas actually.
1. While graphics are a big selling point and much talked about, if it were the only one, there'd be no need to get an RPG instead of, dunno, just about anything else. Like an old-school mindless FPS where the whole plot is "kill everyone on the map."
Even for non-RPGs, ever heard of a game called Half Life? Yeah, that's around where having a story started to matter even in FPS.
That the graphics get the most hype is also an issue of it being the easiest to talk about without playing for more than an hour or two, which is what the average reviewer seems to do. Plus you can put a lot of screenshots on a review site, while discussing plot elements is actually frowned upon.
2. Speaking of which: if the story didn't matter, then why are spoilers frowned upon?
3. I'm pretty sure that the expansion of the games market in the last two decades straight was mainly due to making games increasingly _less_ challenging. From such stuff as Max Payne's decreasing the difficulty ever more without even asking if you die too much, to WoW basically increasing the MMO market size by an order of magnitude by being less challenging than any other MMO out there, to RPGs with scaled enemies so you don't end up with challenges above your level, to racing games with rubberband mechanics where essentially everyone drives around your position so you can still win even if you bounce in all the walls, etc, the history of the last decade can be summed up as basically "how can we make our games accessible to everyone short of a paraplegic and not challenge them much?"
The age of the die-hard nerds playing just to prove they can win against stupid odds in a game, has come and gone. It was an age where markets were measured in thousands of units sold, and selling 10,000 copies would make you a cult classic. The mass market just isn't there and never was.
But, heck, even way back, Lucas Arts was more popular than Sierra because their adventures didn't kill your character and make you reload for every mistake, nor let you do something that will make it impossible to win the game later. Lucas adventures literally let you try everything everywhere, with _zero_ repercussions for doing something wrong. So, why did people buy those if everyone wants a challenge?
4. As someone who dabbled into modding, I'm pretty sure that there's a huge number of people out there who'll explicitly look for basically god-mode items. That's not people playing for a challenge, that's people who basically just want to bonk that big-ass dragon on the head _once_ and move on to the next bit of the story. Basically, yes, they just want a "Press A to continue" instead of the whole challenge.
Plus, in the same vein, there's the issue of the thousands of sites dedicated to cheats, or the fact that on consoles there's actually money to be made by selling cheat programs like GameShark, Exploder, and whatever it is they use these days. Or save games that include every item in the game and a hacked character with all skills and 1,000,000 health. Roll that around in your head. There are people willing to actually pay extra money to remove the challenge, and there always were enough to support several vendors on any given console.
5. But to get back to story, funnily enough, your argument sounds to me like a rehash of Nintendo's arguments back in the N64 vs Playstation days. Nintendo was still The Big N, and when everyone who wanted to pack elaborate stories and FMV scenes (not to mention Nintendo's asshole attitude and delusions of being some kind of dictator back in those days) fled to Playstation and it's cheap CDs, Nintendo basically went on to give lots of speeches saying the same: story doesn't matter, people don't want RPGs, some kind of platformer is what everyone plays because gameplay is the only thing that matters. It even went for insulting statements like that those who play RPGs are just a handful of depressed people playing in a dark basement. Yeah, ask them how
1. For a start I'm not sure if government regulation in China is as much bowing to the general culture, as just basically trying to shape it into something that's not threatening the status quo.
Traditionalism and "we're holier than the West" has been the battlecry of just about every tin-horn dictator or clique/junta. E.g., you only have to look at Eastern Europe to see a bunch of countries who were on one hand chest-thumpingly secular, yet played the sanctity of the family card worse than the stereotypical bible-thumping fundies. The general idea when you want to keep a bunch of people in line, seems to be along the lines of (A) don't change what works, as long as "works" means us being at the top, (A1) new ideas are bad, (B) the West is actually a place of oppression and scary depravity and generally all the evils imaginable, and only a degenerate would take ideas from them. Because ultimately appeal to tradition and xenophobia is all anyone has to support why nobody should even think of newfangled stuff like multi-party elections or uncensored press.
(Well, other than "and we'll shoot you if you disagree", but that tends to make people unhappy if it's the official doctrine as opposed to just the subtext.)
So basically all I'm saying is that China really doesn't have much choice but to at least pretend it's against it. Because it has to be against just about everything the West does differently. It can't go and admit, "you know, America had a lot of good ideas. What a country!" because then it gives more people the idea "so why don't we try to be more like them?" And by now that wouldn't be just bad for the party at the top, but for the whole pyramid of corrupt kleptocrats bribing them too. I bet just the idea for example that those workers demanding rights instead of sticking to the Chinese way, is probably making a few sphincters clench so hard they turn shit into diamonds.
2. That something continues to exist in a corrupt system, well, I wouldn't necessarily take it as official acknowledgement that it's ok. The modus operandi in just about any corrupt system is that you can get away with just about anything if you bribe the right people or are related to them, and it doesn't directly piss off someone higher than them. (So political opposition is still basically out.) Occasionally they'll need to make a spectacular example of someone, but half the time it'll be of those who didn't bribe enough, and the other half it's just the cost of doing business.
So basically what the Chinese government may be really thinking about those sites might actually be more along the lines of "oh, that one is operated by comrade Chang's son-in-law, the other one is by Wang's best buddy, and that other one is paying the bribes fair and square." Occasionally some big speech will be made condemning them, a few of the small fish who thought it's ok for them too will be make a public example of, and life will continue. And occasionally Chang or Wang will fall from grace for other reasons and their protege will be made an example of too, just as a mean of extra revenge, or so Wang's or Chang's successor will seem all intransigent and tough on crime (which will almost invariably mean: to make some room for his own proteges.) And again life will continue like before.
I don't think any publisher ever hated the idea of digital distribution (if only it could be made pirate-proof enough for their taste.)
See, ever since the 90's or so, most of the profit has been made by the retailers. Those make money both from the few games that are a success, and from the complete flops. Even games like Daikatana or Aiken's Artefact (which got great reviews, but IIRC sold a total of 800 copies and nobody knowns why) actually made a bunch of retailers a bunch of money.
See, some of us learned a 17'th century version of capitalism (which is also the version in the game called Capitalism) where the merchant buys a barrel of wine in France for price X and tries to sell it in England for 10% more. (Or 50% or whatever.) And if it doesn't work, hey, the producer got his money anyway. Most of retail in today's post-scarcity economy doesn't work that way. Producing stuff is easy, selling it is hard, and basically as a producer you pay the retailers for shelf space to even carry your product at all. If you made an Aiken's Artefact and sold 800 copies total, congrats, you still pay all those retailers to have it on the shelves.
Worse yet, basically the retailers know how important they are and often get to directly or indirectly got to set the rules for you.
The most trivial example is the current brouhaha over ESRB ratings, which exists because of one single retailer: Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart doesn't carry Adults Only game, 'cause god forbid someone may think that means porn, and that would ruin their BS corporate image. Dumbly enough it's also the biggest retailer. Which left the industry in the pickle of simultaneously arguing (A) not all games are for kids, so fuck off, we can make a game with tits and gutting people like sardines because it's for adults, (B) but this particular set of tits and gutted people is good for 17 years old (or sometimes even 13) because otherwise Wal-Mart won't carry it and we'd, like, not make as much money. (And of course making money overrides and moral considerations. What are you, some kinda commie?)
But, heck, even the E3 exists only because at some point the industry figured out they need a way to woo the retailers. That's right. It never was meant to be a place where nerds get their photos taken with booth-babes, except as a further way to show the retailers "look how many people are interested in our next game."
But generally, you have an industry which for a long while has been squeezed by the balls by the retailers. It had to keep brown-nosing them and paying them for the privilege.
I believe that most publishers would have sold their soul to the devil to get out of that, not just tried digital distribution.
Of course, it also had to be enough of a market share, and give some reassurance that it won't get pirated right off your own servers. Piracy, now _that's_ a bigger scare than the retailers.
Yes and no. While trying to capture and ransom enemy nobles _was_ a staple of warfare, they also _did_ think they're more special than the plebs.
The medieval notions of "honour" are anywhere between non-intuitive to baffling, by modern standards. E.g., although it makes no sense if you only think in terms of ransom, it was actually fairly OK to execute even prisoners if it looked like too much a pain in the butt to keep them for ransom, and the English did just that. Killing wounded knights with a dagger thrust to the heart was even a virtuous thing to do. Although you'd think washing and bandaging them might be worth a try, just in case one actually recovers and can be ransomed. Killing unarmed children (even of nobles) who were with the baggage train when you ambush it, that was perfectly honourable, and the French did just that. Killing everyone because they rejected your first offer to surrender, that was chivalry gold. But send some lowly mercenaries or conscripted peasants to do any of those, and it would become something unthinkably villainous. (And it was the beginning of England's reputation of completely honourless bastards.)
Not only that, but they had to be pretty well fed and thus paid too. Not only those bows had a hideously high pull, but the archers had to shoot an arrow every 5 seconds for extended periods of time. And by extended I mean for example at Agincourt not only until they ran out of ammo, but actually advanced to pluck some arrows out of corpses and shoot some more. (All while fighting without pants and shitting like a firehose, since at Agincourt the whole army including the King had dysentery.) Not exactly a job for the untrained or malnourished.
So, yeah, you're absolutely correct. Outside of England where practice was mandatory, longbowmen cost a mint to hire and were very hard to replace.
Well, actually a long ranged sword would have been less retarded. It explicitly upped melee accuracy, so that sword was still goo up to 5 ft or so.
Plus, as I was saying in another message, both that and the gun scope option of that reward, were actually just scope-shaped potions. (They came up with that idea around the time they removed equipment attachments, but some intrepid designer obviously wasn't deterred.) Really, think something that is called a gun (or sword) scope, is given to you as a scope, described roughly as a scope, but you're really supposed to unscrew the eyepiece and drink the contents. And discard the "scope" it was in.
So, yeah, it was the truly EPIC kind of retarded:p
Heh. Nope. It influenced melee accuracy, which kinda nails it.... well, except for the more damning part that they had eliminated attachment slots on equipment anyway, so there was no way to actually attach it to your lightsaber. Instead, it and the gun scope option of that quest were actually scope-shaped potions.
Yeah, when you hear people ranting about how retarded SWG was post-NGE, the sad thing it's that they're actually right. In fact, it's probably worse. Because there was so many major fuckups, more minor screw-ups like a sword-scope that's actually a potion aren't even worth bitching about. Unless you hit the 1-in-a-million jackpot of stumbling upon some thread where that's on topic for some other reason than NGE being retarded:p
Nevertheless, the point is that suppression works because you might be hit if you don't keep your nose down. To put fear into your enemies, you have to ask yourself: fear of _what_? In that case it's fear of being hit.
If the weapon is so ridiculously inaccurate that your chances of being hit at that distance are on par with the chances of being hit by a meteorite, there's no point in keeping your head down.
And we've essentially been at that point already. The reason armies simply walked to 100m of the enemies in the age of smoothbore muskets before shooting, was precisely that the musket was so inaccurate past 100m that there was no point to fear it much. If the enemy decided to shoot at you while you were calmly walking towards that 100m point, you'd just ignore it.
Yes, you're right. The "untrained peasant" modifier was only for the crossbow, not for the longbow. For the longbow you needed a peasant that trained weekly.
Eh, it was a joke about the point-and-click vs command-line flame wars we used to have. About 10 years ago you couldn't have a thread without a group bitching about how point-and-click is truly the spawn of Satan and a sign of the Apocalypse, and only drooling idiots would ever want to use a mouse... even if the topic was Natalie Portman naked and with hot grits;)
I was just poking fun at it by positing a debate about point-and-click crossbows vs (non-existent) command-line weapons in ye olde days of the 12'th century.
That said, I really don't think crossbows were more dangerous to people around than other weapons before them. Even the sling, a staple of ancient warfare and even mentioned in the Bible, it only took a slight mis-timing to shoot the stone (or a quite deadly lead sphere) at whoever was behind you or at your (squad mate's) foot. Even a simple javelin or later plumbata was trivial to throw wrong. Or god have mercy upon you if you were in the Byzantine navy, as even a slight malfunction or mis-use of their "Greek Fire" flamethrowers could set their own ship ablaze.
Sort of. While a crossbow did allow one to use any untrained peasant, a longbow could do the same thing at the time. Far more important IMHO was the advent of the bodkin tip, essentially a pencil-like narrow metal spike, as opposed to the more traditional triangular or broadhead arrow tips.
In tests, a bodkin tip has been show to go right through both sides of a chain hauberk (hoodie;)) mounted on a wooden pole, as well as quite a way into the pole. And in historical accounts a point blank shot was described as piercing even the early plate breastplates. (Bearing in mind that even as late as the 1400's a suit of plate would be only 45 pounds and relatively soft iron, as opposed to the 60 pounds of steel of later gothic armour.) Though even that wouldn't really be an issue when Pope Innocent II banned crossbow use against Christians in 1139, as the vast majority of nobles still wore chain in battle at the time.
And yes, being caught with bodkin arrows if you weren't a soldier was an instant hanging offense, precisely because any peasant could kill a noble with them.
Also, dunno, I'm answering to the ease of use point because that's what you mentioned. The behaviour of rockets or quantity of ammo carried is indeed funny, but a whole other topic than ease of use. A real rocket launcher would not shoot swirly bunches of missiles, but it would be easy enough to use that even a child could do it.
I'm using the term "spraying" because in most games that's really what you end up doing even if you fire 3-4 round bursts. The second round already leaves some ten degrees off, which frankly is bogus. Heck, in some games (e.g., Vampire Bloodlines) by the third round you're already looking at the freaking ceiling. In a lot even the first round will go somewhere in a wide circle (e.g., start a soldier in Alpha Protocol and go into _aimed_ mode with that starter tranquilizer pistol and see what a huge angle get painted as your "crosshair") and, really, spraying is what you _will_ do if you want to hit anything beyond point blank range.
Actually, as someone who's had at least the basic infantry training (our main role was to shoot down aircraft) it seems to me like it is indeed very very easy to handle. Ever since some guy tied a bow to a plank, weapons have been point and click basically.
And I imagine we'll probably find some parchments where the old guard argues that command line weapons were better, and how you should give lusers an IQ test before letting them anywhere near a weapon.;) Actually, that is only half joke. A pope actually treated the crossbow as some kind of WMD and prohibited its use against fellow Christians. But I digress.
Anyway, a non-guided anti-tank rocket launcher like the one in most games is the epitome of easy to use. You don't even have to compensate for distance as much as with an assault rifle. The only thing that's unlike the game is basically that you should be sure there's nothing behind you, and shooting most rocket launchers in a room is an awfully bad idea. When the rocket comes out the front end, a jet of flame comes out the back end, see? You don't even have much recoil to deal with, since the hot gas just goes out the back end instead of pushing against something. Truly point and click, really.
Now guided ones that can take down a low flying helicopter may need a tad more training, but the basic principle is the same.
As for the other point, while I'll concede the general point that too much realism kills the fun, there is a difference between lack of realism because you understand exactly why it would be less fun, and lack of realism because you have no clue how a weapon works. The latter can be unrealistic without gaining any fun, or even being less fun.
Heck, probably the most baffling weapon-related example comes from the post-NGE SWG, where one quest gives you a sniper scope for a sword. No, literally. I can't even imagine what they were thinking, what were they smoking, and what's the phone number of their dealer so I can get some of that good shit too;) And I can't even start to imagine why that would be more fun than a more believable (i.e., realistic) attachment like a mastercrafted grip or pommel.
Or take the meme that assault rifles kick so hard that you spray bullets in a 30 degree cone, or make that 45 degrees if it's an AK-47 or SAW. Such a weapon would be fracking useless. I once calculated that if a real SAW had the spread from counter-strike it would be useless even for suppression at its rated effective range, because you'd need to fire many many full belts and more ammo than a squad carries, to even put one bullet in the same square metre as the guy you're shooting at. Sorry, that won't make me keep my head down. I'll take that kind of chances.
And anyway trained soldier (most games pretend you're one) wouldn't spray lead like that. Except maybe if he's shooting from the hip while dancing the Macarena;)
And the AK-47 is actually a very manageable weapon, although the larger calibre tells the average clueless gamer nerd who never shot one "OMG, higher calibre must kick like a mule." The key there is that it really was designed as a mid-range weapon, in the same line of thinking as the German MP-43/STG-44 (the first assault rifle) it was trying to imitate. It has a shorter cartridge case and shoots a larger but slower bullet, which means you're not really putting more impulse in the bullet. It's also why its effectiveness takes a nose dive beyond 300 metres: the slow bullet needs a too curved trajectory to hit the target and increases the chance to estimate wrong and shoot over or too short. But even then (A) it's 300m, not the distances on the average game map, and (B) it's the ballistic problem described before, not some kind of spraying lead in all directions.
At any rate, exactly what fun does that inaccuracy bring? Games have been balanced just fine and had interesting weapons even in the "stone age" when guns were hitscan weapons. And games like WoW still are such a bad offshoot of hitscan that you can even see the projectile curving and even zig-zaging to its target, and sold more copies than a lot of the "but it's realistic!!" (if you don't know how guns work, that is) idiocies. _Someone_ must like that.
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Ah, the endless capacity of apologists to BS themselves by postulating what's not actually in the text. How cute.
Well, no. In Ezekiel 4:13 so sayeth God: "And the LORD said, Even thus shall the children of Israel eat their defiled bread among the Gentiles, whither I will drive them." My emphasis. Clearly either that bread recipe from 4:9 is already defiled from the start, or that human shit is defiling it. Either way, it's not some wholesome recipe for good bread, but for defiled bread. No matter how you separate which step is defiling it, it's still not given a recipe for good nutrition.
But more telling is the exchange in 4:14-15:
14. Then said I, Ah Lord GOD! behold, my soul hath not been polluted: for from my youth up even till now have I not eaten of that which dieth of itself, or is torn in pieces; neither came there abominable flesh into my mouth.
15. Then he said unto me, Lo, I have given thee cow's dung for man's dung, and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith.
Ezekiel is clearly protesting that on account of his purity, and substituting cow dung is somehow making it better. It doesn't sound like he just has a problem with using briquettes.
But most importantly the choice of words in 4:15 makes it clearer what it's meant. "and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith" My emphasis again.
But again, regardless of how you use it, the fact remains that God gave a recipe for defiled bread. A fact that was completely lost on the cretins selling and buying Ezekiel 4:9 bread and actually believing (and some arguing) it's an example of good nutrition as prescribed by the Bible.
And basically that's what I meant by confusing fundies with the real bible. The average lemming doesn't know what's actually in it, and at best goes by some BS apology that has nothing to do with what's actually in there. The lemmings buying that bread and using it as an example of the bible prescribing good nutrition, haven't even read the couple of verses directly after it on the same page. They don't actually _know_ what that quote was actually for when in context.
Erk, I mean Ezekiel 4:12, not 4:13. Awful place to hit the wrong key. Sorry.
Just read the real bible and you'll be confusing fundies left and right.
And you can go for even nastier than confusing if you want. For example, find someone who's a fan of that Ezekiel 4:9 bread, and tell them that the whole recipe given by God there continues all the way to Ezekiel 4:13: "and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man". Yep, God's recipe there actually calls for human shit as an ingredient for that bread. (Though Ezekiel himself, for being so faithful and kosher all his life, gets Gods dispensation in 4:15 to eat his with cow shit instead.)
Especially if you spring that on them after they ate some, honestly, no amount of lolcat bible can even start to compare :p
You know, the ancient Egyptians believed that basically the Ka (soul) can move back and forth between the underworld and real world, as long as a suitable support for the Ka is provided and if possible a spirit door. (Read the shape of a door carved on the wall.) You could literally write a letter to grandma and leave it in her tomb, for her to read when she drops by. In fact, it even makes more sense than just talking and expecting grandma to hear from wherever she may be.
Me, I plan to take it to the logical conclusion and be buried with a laptop and internet access. Screw scripts, I'll read my own emails and post my own updates ;)
Unfortunately so far people tend to look funny when I ask about a crypt with electricity and ADSL ;)
I don't think it's even that simple as dividing people into "techy" and "non-techy".
Ultimately everyone is interested in a different domain. The guy you lump in as non-techy because he isn't specifically getting a boner about computers, may be spending hours daily in his garage playing with his car's engine. I don't see why it would count as "non-techy": at some point it was even the apex of being interested in tech. Someone else may be toying with electronics, or making RC models, or experimenting with soundproofing their home-theatre room, or whatever.
Other domains may not qualify as technology, but they're nevertheless a direct equivalent. A doctor spending his afternoons reading about new medicines and illnesses, is really doing a very close equivalent of studying technology. If biology is the science, the medicine part is the applied science, i.e., technology. That guy is pretty much an engineer for the body. If a lawyer reads about legal precedents, again, that's a pretty darned close equivalent of technology. If the basic legal principles are the science, their application is, you guessed, pretty much the technology of that domain. Etc.
Other people are interested in yet other stuff, be it history, or debunking woo, or just social networking. Just because they're not studying the domain _I_ like, doesn't mean I should lump them into some "spectator" category. They're not particularly spectators in the game of life, if you get my drift.
And TBH I'm actually glad that they do study those things. Not as in "less competition for me", but rather as in, "I'd rather go to a doctor which reads about medicine, than to a doctor who's a Linux kernel wizard." It takes many thousands of hours to be good at something, and even more into just staying up to date. And there are only so many hours in a day. I'd rather they spend them being better at their actual job, than rationalize that only my shit is the only thing everyone should know.
And, yes, ultimately that's the impression I'm left with, reading through the thread. Some people are simply just self-centered enough to basically proclaim that only _their_ shit is worth learning, and everything else doesn't matter. And, yes, that includes the techno-fetishism of the previous generation, who thought that _their_ favourite toy will become the only thing worth knowing and the thing which will singlehandedly change the world. It strikes me as some self-aggrandizing fantasy. Actually, worse, it's ego masturbation by any other name.
Thanks for proving that Stella's defenders are a bunch of retards.
If that car doesn't have a cup holder, then use your fucking brains and get out or refrain from messing with it. That's why you have a brain: assess the situation, and refrain from doing what's unsafe. You're no more justified to spill coffee on you for lacking a cup holder, than you are to light a cigarette near a gas leak, or to play hopscotch on a bridge without handrails, or to try to hammer nails with your fist if you lack a hammer. That's why you have a brain, idiot. If circumstances X and Y of a particular place or situation makes it unsafe to do Z, it means you're supposed to use your brains and refrain from doing Z, idiot. Not that you should do it anyway and expect someone else to pay. If you choose to do something usafe anyway, you're to blame for your own misfortune.
If anything the only one I owe an apology is the GGP who was saying that nature produces bigger idiots. Yep, it looks like it does: the kind of idiot who thinks that the lack of a cup holder is not something they should have considered in their decision, but some excuse to be paid for their own stupidity. Because, you know, god forbid that they're actually responsible for _choosing_ to do something unsafe.
Geeze, what a cretin...
The McD coffee was at the temperature recommended by the National Coffee Association, and generally not that far off from what most chains serve. To wit, Burger King, Wendy's, and several other chains have been sued for similar burns. There's also the aspect that she was stupid enough to remove a safety feature (that tight lid) while holding the cup in an inherently unsafe way (by holding it between her legs.) So essentially it's like rewarding someone for doing a wheelie on the highway with the brakes removed.
But anyway if you can perform that maneuver without either tipping the cup or squeezing with the legs, please feel free to give a demonstration. I'm sure some jury will be more than happy to reward you for it, should it go wrong.
Also, if you think your coffee at home is at 134F-145F, you may have a nasty surprise. Most of the coffee machines squirt it at much more than that, a lot going all the way to 195F. See the lawsuit against Bunn, or the specs of several Starbucks coffee makers, etc.
Basically just because Stella's lawyer argued that lie and stupidity, and a jury was retarded enough to actually buy it, doesn't make it true. I mean, I'm not sure that they teach it in law schools, because it was effing brilliant. The guy should get an effing medal for basically going in front of a jury and arguing something that far off the mark... and probably some special pants to fit his elephant sized balls in. It take bowling-sized balls to pull a stunt like that with a straight face. But what is a good lesson for the fast food equivalent of an ambulance chaser (that guy basically made a name for himself by suing everyone in sight over hot coffee... and each time apparently everyone else was serving lower) isn't necessarily something good for the rest of society.
But even then, that lawyer argued for about 165F, not 134. There's no reason to push the lie even lower than that, you know?
Either way, usually the only thing more than meets the eye is simply that some people seem to want to believe that there must be a justification to arbitrarily take from the rich and give to the poor, Robin Hood style. Corporations are bad, the little guy deserves some money, watch cognitive dissonance build a rationalization from there.
Well, my point was merely why those warnings exist, rather than how to prevent them. I was just saying that nature didn't create better idiots, we just created a system that makes the existing kind of idiots more deadly. Sort of like mounting a frikken laser on a shark's head. It's not that nature made a better shark, it's the addition of the laser to existing ones ;)
But for a solution... Actually, it seems to me like a simpler solution would exist, and one based on an established legal concept: you should be able to know beforehand if you're doing something wrong. It's one of the basic principles behind the rule of law, after all. A system where you find afterwards if your coffee was too hot, or if your beer shouldn't have been available to some bar you didn't know existed, is IMHO anything but.
Essentially there should be some place and way to go and say, "ok, this is our cup, this is our lid, this is the type of coffee machine we bought. Is this safe enough?" I realize that some kind of state agency would be about as popular with some americans as ass-rape, but I'm open to other agencies too. I dunno... a judge maybe? A jury? Suing yourself pre-emptively, so to speak? There should be _some_ way to rule in advance if something is OK or not, rather than just wait and see when a parasite with a sob story will make it sound like a product is inherently unsafe if "only" 23,999,999 people in 24,000,000 can use it without problems. (Numbers taken from the original McD coffee lawsuit, where not only that safety record was that ruled unsafe -- never mind that 6 times more americans die drowned in buckets each year, and nobody ruled buckets inherently unsafe -- but it actually caused the jury to increase the damages awarded.)
Actually, I'm under the impression that some of the bleeding obvious warning have little to do with "nature designing a bigger idiot" as with basically a law system where people can pretend to be idiots to sue for millions. And where juries of disgruntled anti-corporatist can actually decide to award an idiot that a company pays his medical bill, even when essentially ruling that the idiot is to blame for his own misfortune. Just because, you know, it would be somehow mean to tell a little old lady to pay for her own skin graft, when you can just take some money from a corporation to cover those costs.
E.g., "Wanda Hudson, 44, of Mobile, Ala. After Hudson lost her home to foreclosure, she moved her belongings to a storage unit. She says she was inside her unit one night "looking for some papers" when the storage yard manager found the door to her unit ajar -- and locked it. She denies that she was sleeping inside, but incredibly did not call for help or bang on the door to be let out! She was not found for 63 days and barely survived; the formerly "plump" 150-pound woman lived on food she just happened to have in the unit, and was a mere 83 pounds when she was found. She sued the storage yard for $10 million claiming negligence. Even though the jury was not allowed to learn that Hudson had previously diagnosed mental problems, it found Hudson was nearly 100 percent responsible for her own predicament -- but still awarded her $100,000."
Source: http://www.stellaawards.com/2003.html
Roll that around in your head. Even after ruling her responsible, they _still_ awarded her $100,000. God knows what for. Apparently just because it would be heartless _not_ to rob a company to pay for a trespasser's misfortune.
More worryingly, even warning signs really don't matter any more.
E.g., "Hornbeck volunteered for the Army and served a stint in Iraq. After getting home, he got drunk, wandered into a hotel's service area (passing "DANGER" warning signs), crawled into an air conditioning unit, and was severely cut when the machinery activated. Unable to care for himself due to his drunkenness, he bled to death. A tragedy, to be sure, but one solely caused by a supposedly responsible adult with military training. Despite his irresponsible behavior -- and his perhaps criminal trespassing -- Hornbeck's family sued the hotel for $10 million, as if it's reasonably foreseeable that some drunk fool would ignore warning signs and climb into its heavy duty machinery to sleep off his bender."
Source: http://www.stellaawards.com/2007.html
E.g., a woman sued Burger King after spilling the coffee onto her own lap, because, get this, although the cup did warn that the coffee is hot, the employee didn't also warn her verbally that it's dangerously hot. Because, you know, apparently otherwise it doesn't matter.
Source: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/806345/posts
Worse yet, in some parts you can even get to pay big bucks for something you didn't personally cause or had any way to cause or prevent.
E.g., when a hare-brained pyrotechnics stunt went wrong in a bar and resulted in a deadly blaze, it wasn't just the owners that had to pay. The list of those who were made to pay millions or had to reach a settlement (again in the millions), included the radio channel which aired an ad for the event, and the manufacturer of the beer they served there (and literally had no other involvement with the event, and likely only heard of it when they got sued), and the importer of that beer, and Home Depot who sold the material they used as insulation and which was ignited by their hare-brained pyrotechnics. (Although Home Depot never sold it as fire-proof or anything.)
Source, for example: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-02-13-540
Well, it's not like patents are mandatory or anything, so, yes, there will still be things which are still just secret instead.
Also, that stereotype of software patents is simply not true. True, _some_ patents are just vague ideas, or even just something as silly as business uniforms. (And, really, why the _fuck_ is a pizzeria's uniform a patent and not, say, a trademark? what is the scientific or technology advance there?) But most of them actually include at least a working algorithm and, if applicable, the maths behind it. Even without source code to copy, someone even half-way competent should be able to implement it.
Generally there is only so much that you can patent in advance as some vague idea, and there's only so big a time window to do so. If you went to the patent office with some idea like "compressing images somehow", if it's already in widespread use, you get laughed out the door, and if it's more than 20-30 years ahead of its time, you won't make anything out of it. It's not as practical as you'd think. Most patents actually do have to describe an actual way of solving the problem, in a different way than anyone patented before.
Basically, don't fall for the Slashdot meme that all the patents are some trivial blanket idea and without any clue (or even useless) to the actual implementation. Yes, the average comment or even summary here is along the lines of someone reading about a patent on some new clockwork mechanism and going "OMG, they're trying to patent the cog". Because, you know, it's what gives lots of karma fast, and it doesn't even require actually knowing what he's talking about. Reality tends to not be quite that bleak.
Well, there is a downside too, but I would say it _did_ provide an advantage compared to ye olde days when (A) there wasn't much incentive to put too much money into new research, and (B) if you did, it was only if you could keep it secret.
Probably the best case that could be made is the Greek Fire, which gave the Byzantine armies and navies a major advantage. But they kept it so secret that a few centuries later they themselves didn't know how to make it any more. Probably a family business and once it went out of business, nobody knew how to make more. Suddenly a whole fleet of boats with flamethrowers was out of ammo. Yes, there is the recipe described by Anna Komnene, but it doesn't actually work. Even the royal family paying for that flamethrower fuel got a bogus recipe as what they're paying for.
I'd say it couldn't have hurt to let them patent it, ya know?
Another good case is Leonardo Da Vinci's tank which wouldn't actually work as designed. The schematic contains a simple flaw which Leonardo would probably know not to do that way, but anyone trying to steal his work would end up with a lot of work invested and monkey sunk into something that flat out can't move.
It's not the only one, btw. He hid flaws which would make the design non-functional even in such trivial stuff as his design of a trebuchet, which you have to wonder why. I mean, people had been building trebuchets for half a millennium at that point, so surely there'd be no point in trying to hide that knowledge. Oh, wait, except there totally was worth it. Engineers kept that kind of thing secret, so you'd have to pay them instead of just make your own copies, to the extent that for example Gengis Khan's armies made a point to capture the engineers from each city they took, and make them build siege engines for them.
Sometimes active disinformation went into protecting a trade secret too. E.g., why we got the noun "catgut". Violin strings were actually made of sheep gut, but the very few families who knew how, actively popularized a version which would be the wrong material, impractical, too expensive, and which most other people couldn't bring themselves to even try anyway.
Is a quick profit worse than that? I'm not that convinced.
I'm not sure where you got any of those ideas actually.
1. While graphics are a big selling point and much talked about, if it were the only one, there'd be no need to get an RPG instead of, dunno, just about anything else. Like an old-school mindless FPS where the whole plot is "kill everyone on the map."
Even for non-RPGs, ever heard of a game called Half Life? Yeah, that's around where having a story started to matter even in FPS.
That the graphics get the most hype is also an issue of it being the easiest to talk about without playing for more than an hour or two, which is what the average reviewer seems to do. Plus you can put a lot of screenshots on a review site, while discussing plot elements is actually frowned upon.
2. Speaking of which: if the story didn't matter, then why are spoilers frowned upon?
3. I'm pretty sure that the expansion of the games market in the last two decades straight was mainly due to making games increasingly _less_ challenging. From such stuff as Max Payne's decreasing the difficulty ever more without even asking if you die too much, to WoW basically increasing the MMO market size by an order of magnitude by being less challenging than any other MMO out there, to RPGs with scaled enemies so you don't end up with challenges above your level, to racing games with rubberband mechanics where essentially everyone drives around your position so you can still win even if you bounce in all the walls, etc, the history of the last decade can be summed up as basically "how can we make our games accessible to everyone short of a paraplegic and not challenge them much?"
The age of the die-hard nerds playing just to prove they can win against stupid odds in a game, has come and gone. It was an age where markets were measured in thousands of units sold, and selling 10,000 copies would make you a cult classic. The mass market just isn't there and never was.
But, heck, even way back, Lucas Arts was more popular than Sierra because their adventures didn't kill your character and make you reload for every mistake, nor let you do something that will make it impossible to win the game later. Lucas adventures literally let you try everything everywhere, with _zero_ repercussions for doing something wrong. So, why did people buy those if everyone wants a challenge?
4. As someone who dabbled into modding, I'm pretty sure that there's a huge number of people out there who'll explicitly look for basically god-mode items. That's not people playing for a challenge, that's people who basically just want to bonk that big-ass dragon on the head _once_ and move on to the next bit of the story. Basically, yes, they just want a "Press A to continue" instead of the whole challenge.
Plus, in the same vein, there's the issue of the thousands of sites dedicated to cheats, or the fact that on consoles there's actually money to be made by selling cheat programs like GameShark, Exploder, and whatever it is they use these days. Or save games that include every item in the game and a hacked character with all skills and 1,000,000 health. Roll that around in your head. There are people willing to actually pay extra money to remove the challenge, and there always were enough to support several vendors on any given console.
5. But to get back to story, funnily enough, your argument sounds to me like a rehash of Nintendo's arguments back in the N64 vs Playstation days. Nintendo was still The Big N, and when everyone who wanted to pack elaborate stories and FMV scenes (not to mention Nintendo's asshole attitude and delusions of being some kind of dictator back in those days) fled to Playstation and it's cheap CDs, Nintendo basically went on to give lots of speeches saying the same: story doesn't matter, people don't want RPGs, some kind of platformer is what everyone plays because gameplay is the only thing that matters. It even went for insulting statements like that those who play RPGs are just a handful of depressed people playing in a dark basement. Yeah, ask them how
1. For a start I'm not sure if government regulation in China is as much bowing to the general culture, as just basically trying to shape it into something that's not threatening the status quo.
Traditionalism and "we're holier than the West" has been the battlecry of just about every tin-horn dictator or clique/junta. E.g., you only have to look at Eastern Europe to see a bunch of countries who were on one hand chest-thumpingly secular, yet played the sanctity of the family card worse than the stereotypical bible-thumping fundies. The general idea when you want to keep a bunch of people in line, seems to be along the lines of (A) don't change what works, as long as "works" means us being at the top, (A1) new ideas are bad, (B) the West is actually a place of oppression and scary depravity and generally all the evils imaginable, and only a degenerate would take ideas from them. Because ultimately appeal to tradition and xenophobia is all anyone has to support why nobody should even think of newfangled stuff like multi-party elections or uncensored press.
(Well, other than "and we'll shoot you if you disagree", but that tends to make people unhappy if it's the official doctrine as opposed to just the subtext.)
So basically all I'm saying is that China really doesn't have much choice but to at least pretend it's against it. Because it has to be against just about everything the West does differently. It can't go and admit, "you know, America had a lot of good ideas. What a country!" because then it gives more people the idea "so why don't we try to be more like them?" And by now that wouldn't be just bad for the party at the top, but for the whole pyramid of corrupt kleptocrats bribing them too. I bet just the idea for example that those workers demanding rights instead of sticking to the Chinese way, is probably making a few sphincters clench so hard they turn shit into diamonds.
2. That something continues to exist in a corrupt system, well, I wouldn't necessarily take it as official acknowledgement that it's ok. The modus operandi in just about any corrupt system is that you can get away with just about anything if you bribe the right people or are related to them, and it doesn't directly piss off someone higher than them. (So political opposition is still basically out.) Occasionally they'll need to make a spectacular example of someone, but half the time it'll be of those who didn't bribe enough, and the other half it's just the cost of doing business.
So basically what the Chinese government may be really thinking about those sites might actually be more along the lines of "oh, that one is operated by comrade Chang's son-in-law, the other one is by Wang's best buddy, and that other one is paying the bribes fair and square." Occasionally some big speech will be made condemning them, a few of the small fish who thought it's ok for them too will be make a public example of, and life will continue. And occasionally Chang or Wang will fall from grace for other reasons and their protege will be made an example of too, just as a mean of extra revenge, or so Wang's or Chang's successor will seem all intransigent and tough on crime (which will almost invariably mean: to make some room for his own proteges.) And again life will continue like before.
I don't think any publisher ever hated the idea of digital distribution (if only it could be made pirate-proof enough for their taste.)
See, ever since the 90's or so, most of the profit has been made by the retailers. Those make money both from the few games that are a success, and from the complete flops. Even games like Daikatana or Aiken's Artefact (which got great reviews, but IIRC sold a total of 800 copies and nobody knowns why) actually made a bunch of retailers a bunch of money.
See, some of us learned a 17'th century version of capitalism (which is also the version in the game called Capitalism) where the merchant buys a barrel of wine in France for price X and tries to sell it in England for 10% more. (Or 50% or whatever.) And if it doesn't work, hey, the producer got his money anyway. Most of retail in today's post-scarcity economy doesn't work that way. Producing stuff is easy, selling it is hard, and basically as a producer you pay the retailers for shelf space to even carry your product at all. If you made an Aiken's Artefact and sold 800 copies total, congrats, you still pay all those retailers to have it on the shelves.
Worse yet, basically the retailers know how important they are and often get to directly or indirectly got to set the rules for you.
The most trivial example is the current brouhaha over ESRB ratings, which exists because of one single retailer: Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart doesn't carry Adults Only game, 'cause god forbid someone may think that means porn, and that would ruin their BS corporate image. Dumbly enough it's also the biggest retailer. Which left the industry in the pickle of simultaneously arguing (A) not all games are for kids, so fuck off, we can make a game with tits and gutting people like sardines because it's for adults, (B) but this particular set of tits and gutted people is good for 17 years old (or sometimes even 13) because otherwise Wal-Mart won't carry it and we'd, like, not make as much money. (And of course making money overrides and moral considerations. What are you, some kinda commie?)
But, heck, even the E3 exists only because at some point the industry figured out they need a way to woo the retailers. That's right. It never was meant to be a place where nerds get their photos taken with booth-babes, except as a further way to show the retailers "look how many people are interested in our next game."
But generally, you have an industry which for a long while has been squeezed by the balls by the retailers. It had to keep brown-nosing them and paying them for the privilege.
I believe that most publishers would have sold their soul to the devil to get out of that, not just tried digital distribution.
Of course, it also had to be enough of a market share, and give some reassurance that it won't get pirated right off your own servers. Piracy, now _that's_ a bigger scare than the retailers.
Yes and no. While trying to capture and ransom enemy nobles _was_ a staple of warfare, they also _did_ think they're more special than the plebs.
The medieval notions of "honour" are anywhere between non-intuitive to baffling, by modern standards. E.g., although it makes no sense if you only think in terms of ransom, it was actually fairly OK to execute even prisoners if it looked like too much a pain in the butt to keep them for ransom, and the English did just that. Killing wounded knights with a dagger thrust to the heart was even a virtuous thing to do. Although you'd think washing and bandaging them might be worth a try, just in case one actually recovers and can be ransomed. Killing unarmed children (even of nobles) who were with the baggage train when you ambush it, that was perfectly honourable, and the French did just that. Killing everyone because they rejected your first offer to surrender, that was chivalry gold. But send some lowly mercenaries or conscripted peasants to do any of those, and it would become something unthinkably villainous. (And it was the beginning of England's reputation of completely honourless bastards.)
Not only that, but they had to be pretty well fed and thus paid too. Not only those bows had a hideously high pull, but the archers had to shoot an arrow every 5 seconds for extended periods of time. And by extended I mean for example at Agincourt not only until they ran out of ammo, but actually advanced to pluck some arrows out of corpses and shoot some more. (All while fighting without pants and shitting like a firehose, since at Agincourt the whole army including the King had dysentery.) Not exactly a job for the untrained or malnourished.
So, yeah, you're absolutely correct. Outside of England where practice was mandatory, longbowmen cost a mint to hire and were very hard to replace.
Well, actually a long ranged sword would have been less retarded. It explicitly upped melee accuracy, so that sword was still goo up to 5 ft or so.
Plus, as I was saying in another message, both that and the gun scope option of that reward, were actually just scope-shaped potions. (They came up with that idea around the time they removed equipment attachments, but some intrepid designer obviously wasn't deterred.) Really, think something that is called a gun (or sword) scope, is given to you as a scope, described roughly as a scope, but you're really supposed to unscrew the eyepiece and drink the contents. And discard the "scope" it was in.
So, yeah, it was the truly EPIC kind of retarded :p
Heh. Nope. It influenced melee accuracy, which kinda nails it. ... well, except for the more damning part that they had eliminated attachment slots on equipment anyway, so there was no way to actually attach it to your lightsaber. Instead, it and the gun scope option of that quest were actually scope-shaped potions.
Yeah, when you hear people ranting about how retarded SWG was post-NGE, the sad thing it's that they're actually right. In fact, it's probably worse. Because there was so many major fuckups, more minor screw-ups like a sword-scope that's actually a potion aren't even worth bitching about. Unless you hit the 1-in-a-million jackpot of stumbling upon some thread where that's on topic for some other reason than NGE being retarded :p
Nevertheless, the point is that suppression works because you might be hit if you don't keep your nose down. To put fear into your enemies, you have to ask yourself: fear of _what_? In that case it's fear of being hit.
If the weapon is so ridiculously inaccurate that your chances of being hit at that distance are on par with the chances of being hit by a meteorite, there's no point in keeping your head down.
And we've essentially been at that point already. The reason armies simply walked to 100m of the enemies in the age of smoothbore muskets before shooting, was precisely that the musket was so inaccurate past 100m that there was no point to fear it much. If the enemy decided to shoot at you while you were calmly walking towards that 100m point, you'd just ignore it.
Yes, you're right. The "untrained peasant" modifier was only for the crossbow, not for the longbow. For the longbow you needed a peasant that trained weekly.
Eh, it was a joke about the point-and-click vs command-line flame wars we used to have. About 10 years ago you couldn't have a thread without a group bitching about how point-and-click is truly the spawn of Satan and a sign of the Apocalypse, and only drooling idiots would ever want to use a mouse... even if the topic was Natalie Portman naked and with hot grits ;)
I was just poking fun at it by positing a debate about point-and-click crossbows vs (non-existent) command-line weapons in ye olde days of the 12'th century.
That said, I really don't think crossbows were more dangerous to people around than other weapons before them. Even the sling, a staple of ancient warfare and even mentioned in the Bible, it only took a slight mis-timing to shoot the stone (or a quite deadly lead sphere) at whoever was behind you or at your (squad mate's) foot. Even a simple javelin or later plumbata was trivial to throw wrong. Or god have mercy upon you if you were in the Byzantine navy, as even a slight malfunction or mis-use of their "Greek Fire" flamethrowers could set their own ship ablaze.
Sort of. While a crossbow did allow one to use any untrained peasant, a longbow could do the same thing at the time. Far more important IMHO was the advent of the bodkin tip, essentially a pencil-like narrow metal spike, as opposed to the more traditional triangular or broadhead arrow tips.
In tests, a bodkin tip has been show to go right through both sides of a chain hauberk (hoodie;)) mounted on a wooden pole, as well as quite a way into the pole. And in historical accounts a point blank shot was described as piercing even the early plate breastplates. (Bearing in mind that even as late as the 1400's a suit of plate would be only 45 pounds and relatively soft iron, as opposed to the 60 pounds of steel of later gothic armour.) Though even that wouldn't really be an issue when Pope Innocent II banned crossbow use against Christians in 1139, as the vast majority of nobles still wore chain in battle at the time.
And yes, being caught with bodkin arrows if you weren't a soldier was an instant hanging offense, precisely because any peasant could kill a noble with them.
Also, dunno, I'm answering to the ease of use point because that's what you mentioned. The behaviour of rockets or quantity of ammo carried is indeed funny, but a whole other topic than ease of use. A real rocket launcher would not shoot swirly bunches of missiles, but it would be easy enough to use that even a child could do it.
I'm using the term "spraying" because in most games that's really what you end up doing even if you fire 3-4 round bursts. The second round already leaves some ten degrees off, which frankly is bogus. Heck, in some games (e.g., Vampire Bloodlines) by the third round you're already looking at the freaking ceiling. In a lot even the first round will go somewhere in a wide circle (e.g., start a soldier in Alpha Protocol and go into _aimed_ mode with that starter tranquilizer pistol and see what a huge angle get painted as your "crosshair") and, really, spraying is what you _will_ do if you want to hit anything beyond point blank range.
Actually, as someone who's had at least the basic infantry training (our main role was to shoot down aircraft) it seems to me like it is indeed very very easy to handle. Ever since some guy tied a bow to a plank, weapons have been point and click basically.
And I imagine we'll probably find some parchments where the old guard argues that command line weapons were better, and how you should give lusers an IQ test before letting them anywhere near a weapon. ;) Actually, that is only half joke. A pope actually treated the crossbow as some kind of WMD and prohibited its use against fellow Christians. But I digress.
Anyway, a non-guided anti-tank rocket launcher like the one in most games is the epitome of easy to use. You don't even have to compensate for distance as much as with an assault rifle. The only thing that's unlike the game is basically that you should be sure there's nothing behind you, and shooting most rocket launchers in a room is an awfully bad idea. When the rocket comes out the front end, a jet of flame comes out the back end, see? You don't even have much recoil to deal with, since the hot gas just goes out the back end instead of pushing against something. Truly point and click, really.
Now guided ones that can take down a low flying helicopter may need a tad more training, but the basic principle is the same.
As for the other point, while I'll concede the general point that too much realism kills the fun, there is a difference between lack of realism because you understand exactly why it would be less fun, and lack of realism because you have no clue how a weapon works. The latter can be unrealistic without gaining any fun, or even being less fun.
Heck, probably the most baffling weapon-related example comes from the post-NGE SWG, where one quest gives you a sniper scope for a sword. No, literally. I can't even imagine what they were thinking, what were they smoking, and what's the phone number of their dealer so I can get some of that good shit too ;) And I can't even start to imagine why that would be more fun than a more believable (i.e., realistic) attachment like a mastercrafted grip or pommel.
Or take the meme that assault rifles kick so hard that you spray bullets in a 30 degree cone, or make that 45 degrees if it's an AK-47 or SAW. Such a weapon would be fracking useless. I once calculated that if a real SAW had the spread from counter-strike it would be useless even for suppression at its rated effective range, because you'd need to fire many many full belts and more ammo than a squad carries, to even put one bullet in the same square metre as the guy you're shooting at. Sorry, that won't make me keep my head down. I'll take that kind of chances.
And anyway trained soldier (most games pretend you're one) wouldn't spray lead like that. Except maybe if he's shooting from the hip while dancing the Macarena ;)
And the AK-47 is actually a very manageable weapon, although the larger calibre tells the average clueless gamer nerd who never shot one "OMG, higher calibre must kick like a mule." The key there is that it really was designed as a mid-range weapon, in the same line of thinking as the German MP-43/STG-44 (the first assault rifle) it was trying to imitate. It has a shorter cartridge case and shoots a larger but slower bullet, which means you're not really putting more impulse in the bullet. It's also why its effectiveness takes a nose dive beyond 300 metres: the slow bullet needs a too curved trajectory to hit the target and increases the chance to estimate wrong and shoot over or too short. But even then (A) it's 300m, not the distances on the average game map, and (B) it's the ballistic problem described before, not some kind of spraying lead in all directions.
At any rate, exactly what fun does that inaccuracy bring? Games have been balanced just fine and had interesting weapons even in the "stone age" when guns were hitscan weapons. And games like WoW still are such a bad offshoot of hitscan that you can even see the projectile curving and even zig-zaging to its target, and sold more copies than a lot of the "but it's realistic!!" (if you don't know how guns work, that is) idiocies. _Someone_ must like that.