I don't think it works that way, though. There isn't evidence that using one's brain too much can cause the same kind of damage as pulling a muscle or twisting a knee does in more physical sports. On the contrary, there is a ton of evidence by now that it can actually delay the onset of the various forms of neuro-degeneration in the old age.
But it may be that you already have to be not entirely normal up there in the first place to make it that far in chess.
I think you gave your own answer there. The problem isn't with the number of hours per se, but basically with making a 10 hour game and padding it to 60 with 50 hours of dumb repetitive filler or with boss fights that you need to try 20 times to get to the next chunk of actual story.
Not all games are automatically that way just because they're 60 hours long. There are a rare few which can stay reasonably interesting. Unfortunately, a lot do just pad it so they can write a big number on the box.
If the overwhelming majority of gamers don't finish the game in the first place, how would replayability help? The problem is that people give up anyway, not that they don't start it once more.
If anything, this seems to confirm what I've been saying all along: Forget about replayability, just make it worth playing once. To even think about playing it again, you have to find it worth playing the first time. If people get to the end scene with a sensation of "man, I wish it had at least 5 more hours", they'll tend to replay it anyway. If they gave up in boredom or frustration before even getting to the first contagonist, they won't.
And it seems to me like ultimately too much focus on reserving stuff for the replay is self-defeating. You have the time and budget to put X quests / locations / dialogue lines / etc in the game. If you show the user only a quarter of those on the first run, because essentially for some he's not the right class, for some he took the wrong choice (e.g., in Fallout 3 it's possible to never even discover a quest hub by as little as skipping one side-quest and succeeding on a persuasion check on another), for some he didn't explore enough to find the secret quest giver locations, for some he explored too much (FO3 again, you could skip two thirds of the main quest by just going exploring and stumbling upon the "wrong" location), and some is bonus stuff to be unlocked, essentially what that user sees on the first run is a quarter of the fun. If that puts it below the fun threshold to play it the first time, there'll be no replay to find that extra stuff either.
Hmm, point taken and well made, but I should have mentioned that neither Hoshi nor Data seem to press more than one button at a time when using that "keyboard". So chorded it obviously isn't.
Besides, really, do you expect the kind of directors for whom computers explode when they crash, to actually know about chorded input? That kind of thing is still niche even among nerds like us.
I know. Believe it or not I'm a reserve AA sergeant. I'm not teh uber-soldat or anything, but I have some ideas of how you guide a missile to a target:p
And that a part of it is also not being a dumbass and tipping your hand when you don't need to:p
And I already answered this, but here goes again: for a missile, and for the kind of scenarios in those episodes (they already have each other on the screen, and we're not talking split second reactions), is there any reason to alert your enemy by painting it with your aiming signal minutes before actually firing a torpedo? Why? Just so he can turn sideways and deny you that clear shot to their reactor? Or so they can already adjust their counter-measures / redirect power to the shields over that spot / polarize hull / send engineering teams in advance / whatever? If you have your computers already tracking the enemy ship well enough so you have it kept centered on your viewscreen, is there any particular reason not to wait until actual launch before you turn on the missile guidance? I mean, whatever camera is already tracking that ship could have the laser or whatever attached and just turn it on when needed.
Heck, as I was saying before, I would launch the torpedo with image recognition. The technology exists already and, honestly, have you seen the size of the photonic torpedo casings on the NX-01? Adding that wouldn't even make a measurable difference to size or weight. Then only turn on the painting signal at the last possible moment so the missile can still hit the desired spot more accurately. If nothing else, it still then has the fallback that if they jam your signal, the missile can still have a plan B and still hit _something_. And you just gave them less time to react or jam your signal or whatever.
Basically I see your point that such a scenario is possible, but basically every single civilization out there, Klingons, Romulans, Vulcans, Ferengi, you name it, would need to be dumbasses who haven't figured the above out. And really, it's not rocket surgery;) It took me 5 minutes to figure out why I wouldn't do that in advance, and I'm not some modern day Sun Tzu or anything. I'm sure realistically some admiral or chief engineer out there would go, "wait, we're doing _what_ in advance?"
But at least those god-awful thumb keyboards have the excuse that they must fit on a pocket-sized device. That someone would have a touch-screen the size of a dinner table and not be arsed to even provide a full on-screen keyboard, but do that 6-button stupidity just for novelty sake... actually, you obviously have a better understanding of humanity than I have. Sir, I salute you.
I see no reason to paint the target with whatever beam they use before actually firing the torpedo, though.
If nothing else, it already tells the victim where to divert shields / polarize the hull / whatever, or in a less ST scenario to activate the counter-measures or take evasive action. I mean, heck, if I had a dish with the reactor inside the dish like in Enterprise, and I knew those guys pointed a laser at the dish top near the reactor, _I_ would turn so I'm sideways to them and that missile will have the whole dish radius between impact point and reactor.
And generally, given how hostile a gesture that is (both realistically and in ST whenever it happens), I'm not sure why anyone would want to give the enemy a minute of warning before even deciding if they actually fire that torpedo.
But, really, such a sensor must be turnable on and off. Or you'd start any first contacts on the awfully wrong foot. Why turn it on in advance?
If I were to design such a weapon, it would actually be launched programmed to target the enemy by image recognition with an onboard camera. The technology already exists for missiles in this century. Then I'd turn on the painting a given area -- if I really want that -- only when the missile already did 2/3 of the distance on its own. Gives the enemy much less time to react and maneuver.
Good call on that. But in the sequence I described, actual program code, complete with indentation and all, appears as Data is mashing a total of six buttons on the side of the touchscreen.
Bingo. It seems to me like the bigger "crime" is that he's not paying attention to doing his job. He'll then have to vote on that issue, and I'm hard pressed to imagine how watching bikini babes or dog videos is going to help him make an informed choice.
TBH, if I'm to wish for something from SF movies, it would include stuff like:
- Hoshi's universal translator from Enterprise. It can hear a few phrases in an alien language and then be able to translate back a response that includes words and semantic structures it never heard yet in that language. Note that it didn't even need to be told a translation for that original sample. It could just hear "bbzzt klick klickety-klick hrr bzzt" in some insectoid language and just figure out what it means and, for that matter, what the whole rest of the language is like.
Beats spending eternity to learn some foreign language.
- The magical interface that allows Data to type whole programs by pressing one of 6 buttons on the side of a touchscreen. No, really. Or for that matter, whatever system allowed Hoshi to type answers to be translated for the alien web-like entity by using only 4 buttons. Makes even the keypad of a cell phone look comfortable by comparison.
- the kind of programming language used by that precursor race on TNG which can not just be encoded in a few proteins and survive billions of years of mutations, and run on _any_ computer that it may be on after those billions of years, and could also actually just start itself after being stored on a tricorder... but can actually modify the tricorder to include a holographic projector
- the kind of interpolation software that allows them to go "captain, they're targetting their photon torpedoes at our warp core!" I mean, I could understand interpolating the direction a gun is pointing at, but to know where a torpedo will go after exitting a fixed launch tube, now that's serious magic.
- if you use any electronics, or wear shoes for that matter, you're partially responsible for the sweatshops in China. (I notice you didn't ask if he bought specifically from BP, so I'm not gonna cut you any such slack here either.)
- if you ever used anything cocoa-based, you're partially responsible for child slave labour in Africa. (Turns out even buying "Fair Trade" doesn't mean it can't be from those.)
- if you or any relative ever used opiates (e.g., as painkillers for a cancer), then you're at least partially responsible for funding the taliban in Afghanistan. (There is no opium poppy grown in the USA to the best of my knowledge, you know.)
- if you ever bought bread, whiskey, beer or anything made from grain, really, then you're at least partially responsible for the destruction of agriculture in third world countries and the extinction of several species because of pesticides.
Etc.
I could call you a monster for that, but in reality, it just shows how stupid that kind of argument is.
I know it's hard for you right-wing, corporate- and oil-baron-apologist crowd to comprehend, but really it isn't everyone else who's a hypocrite. It's just your limited brain power, sorry. The rest of us can distinguish between personal guilt and just not having other choices but trying to change society for the better in those aspects. But, don't worry if you can't understand it right away. Some day your children might evolve into something that does. And maybe can walk without getting bruised knuckles. Won't that be nice?
Or in other words, that's gotta be the lamest attempt at a guilt trip attempt ever.
All the talk about "cyberwar" is good and fine, but in the end it seems to me like it's already had a name: "security". In the end, there's very little difference between hardening a machine so chinese government blackhats don't get in, and hardening it so script kiddie asshats don't get in. Unlinke SF movies, there is no way to just type "retrieve password" on some terminal with big letters and get in a system that had no unpatched vulnerabilities to start with.
In the end, a buffer overflow is a buffer overflow, and an XSS exploit is still an XSS exploit, and files accessible by guessing the URL are still files accessible by guessing the URL. And so on. If that exploit is, well, actually exploited by a Russian government blackhat it's "cyberwar", if the exact same exploit is used by an asshat kiddie, it's just being pwned.
And it seems to me like security experts were already going to conferences and otherwise communicating with each other. Exactly what's the loss if they don't explicitly represent some government?
Easy to operate, technically yes. Easy to operate _effectively_, no. Otherwise we could just forget about training the troops that much. There's more to using that gun than knowing where to "click" so it shoots stuff. Someone whose only training was using a mouse in a FPS, sorry, I don't think they'll be particularly good at it. Or not before getting just about as much training as someone who hasn't played FPS.
Oh yeah, because sitting on a chair and moving a mouse around so teaches one how to handle a real assault rifle, and for that matter so prepares one to sprint with 60 pounds of equipment.
Not to mention other valuable lessons. While those dumb Russkies and Chinese go like sheep and run at the enemy with a gun, as ordered, our brave NATO troops will be where it matters: camping an airstrip so they can fly an airplane into a hill;)
I guess next thing you know they'll progress to other games, and the USA will have the first army who knows how to bunny-hop, grenade jump and spawn-camp. And woe to Osama once they learn where on the map are the BFG and quad damage;)
The problem is (speaking as someone who played eve online, wants open world pvp, always selects the pvp server, and evidently the only one on slashdot) is when you can't even get what you want on the pvp server. It shouldn't be possible to report someone for "ganking" on a pvp server, it means, you don't really want to be on a pvp server. That's the real issue. I don't understand why people come over to a server they don't really like and impose their idea of how a game should be run. If the developers made a server available for the "minority", then why don't you just avoid it and leave us in peace?
That goes both ways, though. The bigger problem is by now that you can't even be in a PvE game by now, or even a game with PvE servers, without a horde of idiots coming and whining about how it totally sucks if it isn't turned into full unrestricted PvP, and how everyone needs some ridiculous penalties for the smallest mistake. STO for example almost had a rebellion and counter-rebellion over that. Plus, here we are in a game where they don't follow the Eve philosophy and we already have hordes of idiots whining about how much fun it is to ruin someone else's instance, and how it sucks if the game allows anyone to not be their unwilling victims.
So I could tell you your exact words in return: You obviously don't want to be on that PvE server. So why don't you just avoid it and leave us in peace?
You found Eve and obviously like it there. Fine by me. In fact, by now I'm happy that it exists. It keeps a certain kind of people there instead of ruining the other games I play. Huzzah. But then kindly stay there. I don't come over to demand that Eve sprouts a non-PvP flag, return the favour and don't come demanding that every single game out there be turned into a griefer paradise.
Well, you have to remember (or scroll a bit up) that said remedy was supposed to make it fun for those being ganked in their home areas. And more specifically in a context boiling down to, basically, "how to make uncontrolled PvP ok for the victims."
The option to at least not be shanghaied into more PvP would of course be better than making it mandatory to take it. But refusing it still won't do anything to remedy the fact that I was ganked in my home area, when I didn't want to take part into PvP at all in the first place. Basically being able to opt out of the second kick in the nuts doesn't make the first kick in the nuts any more fun.
Look, I don't want PvP at all. Give me that PvE flag and I won't mind what the rest of all y'all are doing to each other.
There is no magic bullet that would make me happy to be in an uncontrolled PvP environment. That's all I'm saying. Giving me an option to be the ganker for a change (which is the kind of proposal we're discussing) isn't going to change the fact that, well, if I wanted to be a ganker, I'd already know how and where to go for that. E.g., I could already park a level 80 hordie rogue near that NPC near Theramore which turns level 35 alliance people PvP without warning. I know how it's done. I just don't want to have anything to do with it at all. Tacking that on top of an uncontrolled PvP setup, optional or not, won't make me go "it may be uncontrolled PvP but it's fun", but still more like "it's uncontrolled PvP and it can go fuck itself sideways, I'm not supporting that with my money."
Actually, WH40K doesn't pretend to be both medieval and SF at the same time, does it? I mean, sure, it has power armours and chain swords and whatnot, but, really, those are just as much SF props.
I wouldn't mind a WH40K MMO, to be honest. It has a metric buttload of lore and character by now.
Oh, nothing against the way WoW implemented it. What I was ranting against was the whole idea of being shanghaied into a PvP minigame, as advocated by the post I was answering to.
The fact is that nevertheless some of us don't want to have anything to do with PvP at all. It's not a question of feeling stronger or weaker, it's simply a question of it not being what I want to do in a game. Conscripting me into some group that _has_ to do PvP is just going to piss me off more and make me cancel the subscription.
That's the kind of solution that presumes that everyone else too is a complexed idiot who's just there to feel powerful by ganking someone weaker. Some of us play for entirely different goals and reasons, though.
Oh, that griefers want to be famous badasses isn't what I'm disputing. What I'm saying is that for the badass-vs-posse scenario you've proposed, someone has to play the posse. And it's there I'm seeing a problem. Most people don't want to play a posse to start with. And most people couldn't give a damn that there's a posse somewhere, when they're still getting their open instance event ruined by a jackass. That someone will then go and play cops-and-robbers with the jackass doesn't really do anything for them.
The obvious problem is that if everyone else actually liked hunting someone down in PvP, they'd already be on a PvP server anyway. You're proposing a system which basically asks some people to play the game how they don't like it, and not pursue the goals _they_ want, just to give some sad loser the attention he craves.
I suggest you start with reading Bartle's paper.
The achiever segment (those who'll just have to have more gold and reputation) and the killer segment are actually very distinct categories and natural enemies. They like different things in a game, play for different goals, and both tend to despise each other. Asking an achiever to play a killer role in that pose isn't giving him fun stuff to do, it's trying to convince him to do unfun (for him) stuff and ultimately conclude that the game sucks (he hasn't been doing what he likes, after all) and leave. It's akin to trying to make some gazelles hunt lions. Even if they could, they're not going to enjoy it.
It also does nothing whatsoever for the other categories. The socializers aren't even going to be motivated by that gold and fame to take a role they despise. The explorers won't find anything to discover in it either.
So essentially all that would happen is that some killers might be convinced to play with other killers... but that's something that's not much fun for them. Unwilling victims are where their fun is at.
And in the process you gave both free hand to ruin everyone else's fun.
Besides, the "player run justice" idiocy has been done to death before, and never worked. Letting the players deal with "bandits" so you don't have to, has been not just tried and failed on UO, it's been the holy grail on MUDs too and it failed abjectly there each time. As Benjamin Franklin once said, "Madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." I fail to see why an experiment which failed every single time before, should be hailed as _the_ solution that'll work this time.
And finally, well, I've heard the "provide some colour" excuse before. And the "I can't RP if I can't gank" and the "it's unrealistic" and "without someone ganking them those players will lack a challenge and leave in droves!!!!11eleventeen" In my brief days of coding for a MUD, you'd be surprised how many people felt a need to whine about why they should be allowed to drive others off the game, and how limited a repertoire of excuses they had.
In the end it's a non-sequitur. What matters isn't "colour" for its own sake. Nor "realism", nor "challenge", nor "RP" for their own sakes, for that matter. What matters is whether enough players like it or not. If the larger mass doesn't, well, take your colour somewhere else, really.
To each their own. I realize that some people thrive on ganking and being an ass, but then a lot of people don't. And each game can choose their own niche, and decide if they want to cater to one category at the expense of losing another.
The griefer segment is kind of an easy choice, though, since you mention taking it to the point where you're trying to get people out of the game. A single unchecked griefer can lose them a hundred subscription of other people, so basically they're actually losing money by catering to those. They're not any sleep if you leave for lack of that kind of fun.
But, at any rate, each dev team and publisher ultimately makes choices to cater to market A at the expense of market B. E.g., Blizzard chose to cater to the medieval fantasy fans, at the expense of being less fun for some of us who'd have preferred a good SF MMO. (Say, World Of Starcraft;) E.g., they chose to have guns and explosives and helicopters, which actually was at the expense of losing some purists who'd have preferred a more Dark Ages kinda setting where the highest tech is maybe a crossbow. (Heck, much as I'm otherwise for SF, I'd prefer to keep medieval stuff medieval, if it had to be medieval in the first place.) E.g., they chose to have no xp penalty for death, even though that made some people cry bloody murder. E.g., they chose to have cartoonish graphics, even though for some people it causes them to cancel the subscription. Heck, it's still the #1 stated reason for not playing WoW. E.g., they chose to have separate servers, which some of us like, but then it made the fans of a more Guild Wars style instancing say it sucks. Etc.
Ultimately you can't please everyone. To make player group X happier, you have to make player group Y unhappier. You get to choose which group you want more.
E.g., to make medieval fantasy fans happier, you have to make strictly SF fans a lot less interested in the game. And, again, you can't please everyone. You can't make a game that's high fantasy with elves and horses _and_ SF with warp drives and tricorders, because you'll just annoy both groups instead of catering to both. (Though using SF as a backstory for a medieval game sometimes works.)
To some extent you can try to give group Y something else to do. But sometimes it's not easy to reconcile. You can't give griefers something else to do, because they need those unwilling victims. At some point you just have to just let go of group Y.
Nobody said it'll be the only cure, lemming. If all else fails, once you pinned those tumours so they don't spread all over, you can just extract them surgically when they start to grow.
But metastases are _the_ major killer in any treatment we've developped so far. Whether it's surgical, radiological, chemotherapy, you name it. You can't irradiate the patient all over, without killing him.
It doesn't help that all those are basically just based on the idea that healthy cells have better DNA repairs than cancer cells, and cells currently dividing (which includes cancerous ones) have their DNA unspooled for copying, so they're more likely to get DNA breaks. So basically they just cause a bunch of DNA breaks everywhere, and hope they got more cancerous cells than healthy ones. It's basically akin to trying to stop a plague by shooting a shotgun into the crowd and hoping that healthy people will have more chances to survive the wounds. No, seriously, that's exactly what it does to your cells. It's a very nasty treatment for anyone who's been through it, and has the side effect of also killing any other cells which are continuously dividing, like those that give you hair or fingernails or sperm.
Being able to stop metastasizing instead of that destructive treatment may actually be a more fun alternative. In the process you shaved less years off your life expectancy than normal treatments do.
But breaking DNA randomly is very carcinogenic in itself, and may cause other cancers down the line. It's very possible to just postpone the inevitable that way. A treatment that at least stops those new cancers from spreading and killing you, may well be a life saver. That's in addition to the conventional treatment, pretty much by definition.
Honestly, I usually am the first to lay the blame on developers for doing half-arsed jobs, but in this case... really, why would I blame a site for a modification a third party plugin does to their HTML code? As per the specs, their code is secure. Then someone comes and changes it to something insecure. Why would you hold the former responsible for something done by the latter.
I mean, let's say you write some program, and check your array bounds and everything. Then a year later I'm brought in as a consultant and, perhaps in the name of optimizing speed, inadvertently bypass one of your checks and introduce a buffer overflow vulnerability. Would you say that you should be held responsible for my changes? Would you say your code was simply insecure if it allowed that? Why? By what definition of "insecure"?
Plus, I always believed that responsibility should also come with enough power to do what you're responsible for. E.g., if you're responsible that a project finishes on time, then you should also have the power and budget to make sure it does. Responsibility without any power is IMHO just a name for "scapegoat."
In this case, the IE code and its modifications are completely outside the web designer's control. If Microsoft introduces a new vulnerability next month, which turns a whole other chunk of perfectly good web programming into an XSS exploit vector, the web designer can't do anything to prevent them. It's exactly that scapegoat scenario. You're proposing to hold someone responsible for something they can't prevent or even influence at all.
Plus, it's not like MS's code is public domain or even has an open and detailed specification. You can work around Javascript or HTML problems because you can know exactly what they are, what that code does, what does it output for a given input, etc. (Well, that is, if the browsers actually implemented the specs;)) In this case to work around MS's bug du jour, someone has to keep basically reverse-engineering whatever idiocy MS implemented this time. It seems to me like an undue burden.
Plus, honestly, writing stuff that only works because of a bug in another module (in this case the browser) is bad practice. Now I'm aware that it can't always be avoided. But at least in an ideal world, it should be MS's job to fix MS's bugs, not the devs job to work around it. The devs job should be to write stuff that is correct and secure by the Javascript/HTML/whatever standards, not code that works with the IE bug of the day.
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I don't think it works that way, though. There isn't evidence that using one's brain too much can cause the same kind of damage as pulling a muscle or twisting a knee does in more physical sports. On the contrary, there is a ton of evidence by now that it can actually delay the onset of the various forms of neuro-degeneration in the old age.
But it may be that you already have to be not entirely normal up there in the first place to make it that far in chess.
Mostly I agree with you, but just to play silly:
That's easy. Elite. I don't even think it can be "won" as such.
Daikatana. Hey, was curious, you know?
I think you gave your own answer there. The problem isn't with the number of hours per se, but basically with making a 10 hour game and padding it to 60 with 50 hours of dumb repetitive filler or with boss fights that you need to try 20 times to get to the next chunk of actual story.
Not all games are automatically that way just because they're 60 hours long. There are a rare few which can stay reasonably interesting. Unfortunately, a lot do just pad it so they can write a big number on the box.
If the overwhelming majority of gamers don't finish the game in the first place, how would replayability help? The problem is that people give up anyway, not that they don't start it once more.
If anything, this seems to confirm what I've been saying all along: Forget about replayability, just make it worth playing once. To even think about playing it again, you have to find it worth playing the first time. If people get to the end scene with a sensation of "man, I wish it had at least 5 more hours", they'll tend to replay it anyway. If they gave up in boredom or frustration before even getting to the first contagonist, they won't.
And it seems to me like ultimately too much focus on reserving stuff for the replay is self-defeating. You have the time and budget to put X quests / locations / dialogue lines / etc in the game. If you show the user only a quarter of those on the first run, because essentially for some he's not the right class, for some he took the wrong choice (e.g., in Fallout 3 it's possible to never even discover a quest hub by as little as skipping one side-quest and succeeding on a persuasion check on another), for some he didn't explore enough to find the secret quest giver locations, for some he explored too much (FO3 again, you could skip two thirds of the main quest by just going exploring and stumbling upon the "wrong" location), and some is bonus stuff to be unlocked, essentially what that user sees on the first run is a quarter of the fun. If that puts it below the fun threshold to play it the first time, there'll be no replay to find that extra stuff either.
Hmm, point taken and well made, but I should have mentioned that neither Hoshi nor Data seem to press more than one button at a time when using that "keyboard". So chorded it obviously isn't.
Besides, really, do you expect the kind of directors for whom computers explode when they crash, to actually know about chorded input? That kind of thing is still niche even among nerds like us.
I know. Believe it or not I'm a reserve AA sergeant. I'm not teh uber-soldat or anything, but I have some ideas of how you guide a missile to a target :p
And that a part of it is also not being a dumbass and tipping your hand when you don't need to :p
And I already answered this, but here goes again: for a missile, and for the kind of scenarios in those episodes (they already have each other on the screen, and we're not talking split second reactions), is there any reason to alert your enemy by painting it with your aiming signal minutes before actually firing a torpedo? Why? Just so he can turn sideways and deny you that clear shot to their reactor? Or so they can already adjust their counter-measures / redirect power to the shields over that spot / polarize hull / send engineering teams in advance / whatever? If you have your computers already tracking the enemy ship well enough so you have it kept centered on your viewscreen, is there any particular reason not to wait until actual launch before you turn on the missile guidance? I mean, whatever camera is already tracking that ship could have the laser or whatever attached and just turn it on when needed.
Heck, as I was saying before, I would launch the torpedo with image recognition. The technology exists already and, honestly, have you seen the size of the photonic torpedo casings on the NX-01? Adding that wouldn't even make a measurable difference to size or weight. Then only turn on the painting signal at the last possible moment so the missile can still hit the desired spot more accurately. If nothing else, it still then has the fallback that if they jam your signal, the missile can still have a plan B and still hit _something_. And you just gave them less time to react or jam your signal or whatever.
Basically I see your point that such a scenario is possible, but basically every single civilization out there, Klingons, Romulans, Vulcans, Ferengi, you name it, would need to be dumbasses who haven't figured the above out. And really, it's not rocket surgery ;) It took me 5 minutes to figure out why I wouldn't do that in advance, and I'm not some modern day Sun Tzu or anything. I'm sure realistically some admiral or chief engineer out there would go, "wait, we're doing _what_ in advance?"
But at least those god-awful thumb keyboards have the excuse that they must fit on a pocket-sized device. That someone would have a touch-screen the size of a dinner table and not be arsed to even provide a full on-screen keyboard, but do that 6-button stupidity just for novelty sake... actually, you obviously have a better understanding of humanity than I have. Sir, I salute you.
I see no reason to paint the target with whatever beam they use before actually firing the torpedo, though.
If nothing else, it already tells the victim where to divert shields / polarize the hull / whatever, or in a less ST scenario to activate the counter-measures or take evasive action. I mean, heck, if I had a dish with the reactor inside the dish like in Enterprise, and I knew those guys pointed a laser at the dish top near the reactor, _I_ would turn so I'm sideways to them and that missile will have the whole dish radius between impact point and reactor.
And generally, given how hostile a gesture that is (both realistically and in ST whenever it happens), I'm not sure why anyone would want to give the enemy a minute of warning before even deciding if they actually fire that torpedo.
But, really, such a sensor must be turnable on and off. Or you'd start any first contacts on the awfully wrong foot. Why turn it on in advance?
If I were to design such a weapon, it would actually be launched programmed to target the enemy by image recognition with an onboard camera. The technology already exists for missiles in this century. Then I'd turn on the painting a given area -- if I really want that -- only when the missile already did 2/3 of the distance on its own. Gives the enemy much less time to react and maneuver.
Good call on that. But in the sequence I described, actual program code, complete with indentation and all, appears as Data is mashing a total of six buttons on the side of the touchscreen.
Bingo. It seems to me like the bigger "crime" is that he's not paying attention to doing his job. He'll then have to vote on that issue, and I'm hard pressed to imagine how watching bikini babes or dog videos is going to help him make an informed choice.
TBH, if I'm to wish for something from SF movies, it would include stuff like:
- Hoshi's universal translator from Enterprise. It can hear a few phrases in an alien language and then be able to translate back a response that includes words and semantic structures it never heard yet in that language. Note that it didn't even need to be told a translation for that original sample. It could just hear "bbzzt klick klickety-klick hrr bzzt" in some insectoid language and just figure out what it means and, for that matter, what the whole rest of the language is like.
Beats spending eternity to learn some foreign language.
- The magical interface that allows Data to type whole programs by pressing one of 6 buttons on the side of a touchscreen. No, really. Or for that matter, whatever system allowed Hoshi to type answers to be translated for the alien web-like entity by using only 4 buttons. Makes even the keypad of a cell phone look comfortable by comparison.
- the kind of programming language used by that precursor race on TNG which can not just be encoded in a few proteins and survive billions of years of mutations, and run on _any_ computer that it may be on after those billions of years, and could also actually just start itself after being stored on a tricorder... but can actually modify the tricorder to include a holographic projector
- the kind of interpolation software that allows them to go "captain, they're targetting their photon torpedoes at our warp core!" I mean, I could understand interpolating the direction a gun is pointing at, but to know where a torpedo will go after exitting a fixed launch tube, now that's serious magic.
Really? By that logic,
- if you use any electronics, or wear shoes for that matter, you're partially responsible for the sweatshops in China. (I notice you didn't ask if he bought specifically from BP, so I'm not gonna cut you any such slack here either.)
- if you ever used anything cocoa-based, you're partially responsible for child slave labour in Africa. (Turns out even buying "Fair Trade" doesn't mean it can't be from those.)
- if you or any relative ever used opiates (e.g., as painkillers for a cancer), then you're at least partially responsible for funding the taliban in Afghanistan. (There is no opium poppy grown in the USA to the best of my knowledge, you know.)
- if you ever bought bread, whiskey, beer or anything made from grain, really, then you're at least partially responsible for the destruction of agriculture in third world countries and the extinction of several species because of pesticides.
Etc.
I could call you a monster for that, but in reality, it just shows how stupid that kind of argument is.
I know it's hard for you right-wing, corporate- and oil-baron-apologist crowd to comprehend, but really it isn't everyone else who's a hypocrite. It's just your limited brain power, sorry. The rest of us can distinguish between personal guilt and just not having other choices but trying to change society for the better in those aspects. But, don't worry if you can't understand it right away. Some day your children might evolve into something that does. And maybe can walk without getting bruised knuckles. Won't that be nice?
Or in other words, that's gotta be the lamest attempt at a guilt trip attempt ever.
All the talk about "cyberwar" is good and fine, but in the end it seems to me like it's already had a name: "security". In the end, there's very little difference between hardening a machine so chinese government blackhats don't get in, and hardening it so script kiddie asshats don't get in. Unlinke SF movies, there is no way to just type "retrieve password" on some terminal with big letters and get in a system that had no unpatched vulnerabilities to start with.
In the end, a buffer overflow is a buffer overflow, and an XSS exploit is still an XSS exploit, and files accessible by guessing the URL are still files accessible by guessing the URL. And so on. If that exploit is, well, actually exploited by a Russian government blackhat it's "cyberwar", if the exact same exploit is used by an asshat kiddie, it's just being pwned.
And it seems to me like security experts were already going to conferences and otherwise communicating with each other. Exactly what's the loss if they don't explicitly represent some government?
Easy to operate, technically yes. Easy to operate _effectively_, no. Otherwise we could just forget about training the troops that much. There's more to using that gun than knowing where to "click" so it shoots stuff. Someone whose only training was using a mouse in a FPS, sorry, I don't think they'll be particularly good at it. Or not before getting just about as much training as someone who hasn't played FPS.
Oh yeah, because sitting on a chair and moving a mouse around so teaches one how to handle a real assault rifle, and for that matter so prepares one to sprint with 60 pounds of equipment.
Not to mention other valuable lessons. While those dumb Russkies and Chinese go like sheep and run at the enemy with a gun, as ordered, our brave NATO troops will be where it matters: camping an airstrip so they can fly an airplane into a hill ;)
I guess next thing you know they'll progress to other games, and the USA will have the first army who knows how to bunny-hop, grenade jump and spawn-camp. And woe to Osama once they learn where on the map are the BFG and quad damage ;)
That goes both ways, though. The bigger problem is by now that you can't even be in a PvE game by now, or even a game with PvE servers, without a horde of idiots coming and whining about how it totally sucks if it isn't turned into full unrestricted PvP, and how everyone needs some ridiculous penalties for the smallest mistake. STO for example almost had a rebellion and counter-rebellion over that. Plus, here we are in a game where they don't follow the Eve philosophy and we already have hordes of idiots whining about how much fun it is to ruin someone else's instance, and how it sucks if the game allows anyone to not be their unwilling victims.
So I could tell you your exact words in return: You obviously don't want to be on that PvE server. So why don't you just avoid it and leave us in peace?
You found Eve and obviously like it there. Fine by me. In fact, by now I'm happy that it exists. It keeps a certain kind of people there instead of ruining the other games I play. Huzzah. But then kindly stay there. I don't come over to demand that Eve sprouts a non-PvP flag, return the favour and don't come demanding that every single game out there be turned into a griefer paradise.
Well, you have to remember (or scroll a bit up) that said remedy was supposed to make it fun for those being ganked in their home areas. And more specifically in a context boiling down to, basically, "how to make uncontrolled PvP ok for the victims."
The option to at least not be shanghaied into more PvP would of course be better than making it mandatory to take it. But refusing it still won't do anything to remedy the fact that I was ganked in my home area, when I didn't want to take part into PvP at all in the first place. Basically being able to opt out of the second kick in the nuts doesn't make the first kick in the nuts any more fun.
Look, I don't want PvP at all. Give me that PvE flag and I won't mind what the rest of all y'all are doing to each other.
There is no magic bullet that would make me happy to be in an uncontrolled PvP environment. That's all I'm saying. Giving me an option to be the ganker for a change (which is the kind of proposal we're discussing) isn't going to change the fact that, well, if I wanted to be a ganker, I'd already know how and where to go for that. E.g., I could already park a level 80 hordie rogue near that NPC near Theramore which turns level 35 alliance people PvP without warning. I know how it's done. I just don't want to have anything to do with it at all. Tacking that on top of an uncontrolled PvP setup, optional or not, won't make me go "it may be uncontrolled PvP but it's fun", but still more like "it's uncontrolled PvP and it can go fuck itself sideways, I'm not supporting that with my money."
Actually, WH40K doesn't pretend to be both medieval and SF at the same time, does it? I mean, sure, it has power armours and chain swords and whatnot, but, really, those are just as much SF props.
I wouldn't mind a WH40K MMO, to be honest. It has a metric buttload of lore and character by now.
Oh, nothing against the way WoW implemented it. What I was ranting against was the whole idea of being shanghaied into a PvP minigame, as advocated by the post I was answering to.
The fact is that nevertheless some of us don't want to have anything to do with PvP at all. It's not a question of feeling stronger or weaker, it's simply a question of it not being what I want to do in a game. Conscripting me into some group that _has_ to do PvP is just going to piss me off more and make me cancel the subscription.
That's the kind of solution that presumes that everyone else too is a complexed idiot who's just there to feel powerful by ganking someone weaker. Some of us play for entirely different goals and reasons, though.
Oh, that griefers want to be famous badasses isn't what I'm disputing. What I'm saying is that for the badass-vs-posse scenario you've proposed, someone has to play the posse. And it's there I'm seeing a problem. Most people don't want to play a posse to start with. And most people couldn't give a damn that there's a posse somewhere, when they're still getting their open instance event ruined by a jackass. That someone will then go and play cops-and-robbers with the jackass doesn't really do anything for them.
The obvious problem is that if everyone else actually liked hunting someone down in PvP, they'd already be on a PvP server anyway. You're proposing a system which basically asks some people to play the game how they don't like it, and not pursue the goals _they_ want, just to give some sad loser the attention he craves.
I suggest you start with reading Bartle's paper.
The achiever segment (those who'll just have to have more gold and reputation) and the killer segment are actually very distinct categories and natural enemies. They like different things in a game, play for different goals, and both tend to despise each other. Asking an achiever to play a killer role in that pose isn't giving him fun stuff to do, it's trying to convince him to do unfun (for him) stuff and ultimately conclude that the game sucks (he hasn't been doing what he likes, after all) and leave. It's akin to trying to make some gazelles hunt lions. Even if they could, they're not going to enjoy it.
It also does nothing whatsoever for the other categories. The socializers aren't even going to be motivated by that gold and fame to take a role they despise. The explorers won't find anything to discover in it either.
So essentially all that would happen is that some killers might be convinced to play with other killers... but that's something that's not much fun for them. Unwilling victims are where their fun is at.
And in the process you gave both free hand to ruin everyone else's fun.
Besides, the "player run justice" idiocy has been done to death before, and never worked. Letting the players deal with "bandits" so you don't have to, has been not just tried and failed on UO, it's been the holy grail on MUDs too and it failed abjectly there each time. As Benjamin Franklin once said, "Madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." I fail to see why an experiment which failed every single time before, should be hailed as _the_ solution that'll work this time.
And finally, well, I've heard the "provide some colour" excuse before. And the "I can't RP if I can't gank" and the "it's unrealistic" and "without someone ganking them those players will lack a challenge and leave in droves!!!!11eleventeen" In my brief days of coding for a MUD, you'd be surprised how many people felt a need to whine about why they should be allowed to drive others off the game, and how limited a repertoire of excuses they had.
In the end it's a non-sequitur. What matters isn't "colour" for its own sake. Nor "realism", nor "challenge", nor "RP" for their own sakes, for that matter. What matters is whether enough players like it or not. If the larger mass doesn't, well, take your colour somewhere else, really.
To each their own. I realize that some people thrive on ganking and being an ass, but then a lot of people don't. And each game can choose their own niche, and decide if they want to cater to one category at the expense of losing another.
The griefer segment is kind of an easy choice, though, since you mention taking it to the point where you're trying to get people out of the game. A single unchecked griefer can lose them a hundred subscription of other people, so basically they're actually losing money by catering to those. They're not any sleep if you leave for lack of that kind of fun.
But, at any rate, each dev team and publisher ultimately makes choices to cater to market A at the expense of market B. E.g., Blizzard chose to cater to the medieval fantasy fans, at the expense of being less fun for some of us who'd have preferred a good SF MMO. (Say, World Of Starcraft;) E.g., they chose to have guns and explosives and helicopters, which actually was at the expense of losing some purists who'd have preferred a more Dark Ages kinda setting where the highest tech is maybe a crossbow. (Heck, much as I'm otherwise for SF, I'd prefer to keep medieval stuff medieval, if it had to be medieval in the first place.) E.g., they chose to have no xp penalty for death, even though that made some people cry bloody murder. E.g., they chose to have cartoonish graphics, even though for some people it causes them to cancel the subscription. Heck, it's still the #1 stated reason for not playing WoW. E.g., they chose to have separate servers, which some of us like, but then it made the fans of a more Guild Wars style instancing say it sucks. Etc.
Ultimately you can't please everyone. To make player group X happier, you have to make player group Y unhappier. You get to choose which group you want more.
E.g., to make medieval fantasy fans happier, you have to make strictly SF fans a lot less interested in the game. And, again, you can't please everyone. You can't make a game that's high fantasy with elves and horses _and_ SF with warp drives and tricorders, because you'll just annoy both groups instead of catering to both. (Though using SF as a backstory for a medieval game sometimes works.)
To some extent you can try to give group Y something else to do. But sometimes it's not easy to reconcile. You can't give griefers something else to do, because they need those unwilling victims. At some point you just have to just let go of group Y.
Nobody said it'll be the only cure, lemming. If all else fails, once you pinned those tumours so they don't spread all over, you can just extract them surgically when they start to grow.
But metastases are _the_ major killer in any treatment we've developped so far. Whether it's surgical, radiological, chemotherapy, you name it. You can't irradiate the patient all over, without killing him.
It doesn't help that all those are basically just based on the idea that healthy cells have better DNA repairs than cancer cells, and cells currently dividing (which includes cancerous ones) have their DNA unspooled for copying, so they're more likely to get DNA breaks. So basically they just cause a bunch of DNA breaks everywhere, and hope they got more cancerous cells than healthy ones. It's basically akin to trying to stop a plague by shooting a shotgun into the crowd and hoping that healthy people will have more chances to survive the wounds. No, seriously, that's exactly what it does to your cells. It's a very nasty treatment for anyone who's been through it, and has the side effect of also killing any other cells which are continuously dividing, like those that give you hair or fingernails or sperm.
Being able to stop metastasizing instead of that destructive treatment may actually be a more fun alternative. In the process you shaved less years off your life expectancy than normal treatments do.
But breaking DNA randomly is very carcinogenic in itself, and may cause other cancers down the line. It's very possible to just postpone the inevitable that way. A treatment that at least stops those new cancers from spreading and killing you, may well be a life saver. That's in addition to the conventional treatment, pretty much by definition.
Honestly, I usually am the first to lay the blame on developers for doing half-arsed jobs, but in this case... really, why would I blame a site for a modification a third party plugin does to their HTML code? As per the specs, their code is secure. Then someone comes and changes it to something insecure. Why would you hold the former responsible for something done by the latter.
I mean, let's say you write some program, and check your array bounds and everything. Then a year later I'm brought in as a consultant and, perhaps in the name of optimizing speed, inadvertently bypass one of your checks and introduce a buffer overflow vulnerability. Would you say that you should be held responsible for my changes? Would you say your code was simply insecure if it allowed that? Why? By what definition of "insecure"?
Plus, I always believed that responsibility should also come with enough power to do what you're responsible for. E.g., if you're responsible that a project finishes on time, then you should also have the power and budget to make sure it does. Responsibility without any power is IMHO just a name for "scapegoat."
In this case, the IE code and its modifications are completely outside the web designer's control. If Microsoft introduces a new vulnerability next month, which turns a whole other chunk of perfectly good web programming into an XSS exploit vector, the web designer can't do anything to prevent them. It's exactly that scapegoat scenario. You're proposing to hold someone responsible for something they can't prevent or even influence at all.
Plus, it's not like MS's code is public domain or even has an open and detailed specification. You can work around Javascript or HTML problems because you can know exactly what they are, what that code does, what does it output for a given input, etc. (Well, that is, if the browsers actually implemented the specs;)) In this case to work around MS's bug du jour, someone has to keep basically reverse-engineering whatever idiocy MS implemented this time. It seems to me like an undue burden.
Plus, honestly, writing stuff that only works because of a bug in another module (in this case the browser) is bad practice. Now I'm aware that it can't always be avoided. But at least in an ideal world, it should be MS's job to fix MS's bugs, not the devs job to work around it. The devs job should be to write stuff that is correct and secure by the Javascript/HTML/whatever standards, not code that works with the IE bug of the day.