Seeing that you answered, I guess you care after all.
Or, wait, let me guess, you just needed your daily dose of "I'm smarter than someone else" ego masturbation, and that was the best you could find? Heh. Cretin.
Using Uranium 238 involves a breeder reactor turning it into Plutonium. Which is best known as nuke material, so it's a good way to get half the globe scared. So it's really only an option for the USA, USSR and other major nuclear power.
If you try even hinting at such a reactor, say, somewhere in the Middle East, I see some high explosives in your future. Lots of them, in fact. If the USA doesn't bomb you into oblivion, then the peace-loving folks in Israel will.
(Google it. It wouldn't be the first time they conducted air strikes against any neighbour even suspected of building a nuclear reactor. E.g., Operation Opera.)
Which by association makes Thorium scary too. Turning it into Uranium 233 involves a breeder reactor too, so people start thinking "Plutonium." So you're back to square one.
Now I didn't RTFA, but even the summary seems to say a bit more. For a start, that they can look through deleted drafts on your hard drive and see what the email looked like before you actually edited and sent it. Or even if you don't send it at all.
Plus, screw email, we've already seen this kind of thing happen with edited Word documents, Excel files, or PDFs. Stuff that was never actually sent or published in any way is dug out of the document and used against you.
E.g., I remember a somewhat recent story on The Register where a politician was under fire over a donation she originally said she knew nothing about, but a some looking through the document history later, it looked like she or maybe her husband had a note in the document at some point to check if that's ok.
And now I'm all for accountability in politics, but there's nothing to say that it can't apply to your joke mailing list just the same.
E.g., basically, if your client sues your company about bad support, any emails where you told a coleague that that client is an asshat and shouldn't be taken seriously, can get dug out and used against you. That much was probably clear to you too. But here's the more important part: even if you _didn't_ actually send that email, if at some point you saved a draft, that too can be dug out and used as hint about your thought processes.
So it seems to me like the danger is even more insidious. Even if you think thrice before thinking an email, well, computers got us trained that all sort of transient information can be stored there for later. Even stuff you never intended to send, or notes to self for later, or whatever. Even trivial stuff that people used to just hold in their head, is now somewhere on the computer because it's easy to do so. And stuff that people would first roll around in their head before writing on paper, now gets written anyway and edited later, because it's easy to do so.
And then used as some kind of proof of how your train of thought went. Which was a rather private thing before.
Worse yet, it's now all in one place. So even if previously you'd keep your private thoughts in a diary, chances are it wouldn't get shown in court unless your character makes any difference (e.g., if you pleaded entrapment.) Or they might want to see your letters to your accountant, but not your letters to your mistress. Nowadays that hard drive is one big pot with _everything_. (Again, even transient stuff you deleted long ago and forgot that it was ever on that computer.) Once you got ordered to hand it over, someone _will_ poke his/her nose through everything on it. From business stuff, to your reminders in Outlook to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, to joke lists you're on, to God knows what else.
Sure, most of it probably won't be allowed in court or even presented. But you never know what might anyway. E.g., if you were hit with a sexual harassment or discrimination lawsuit, your porn browsing history or subscription to some dumb blondes jokes list might be interesting after all.
At any rate, _someone_ out there might end up knowing more about you than you thought possible. Even if you think twice before hitting the Send button.
Before I get started, yes, I can't think of Dvorak as anything else than the infamous "why is my Idle process eating up 99% of my CPU cycles?" idiot. Yes, I think there may be some merit to OLPC. Still, just saying, reality isn't as simple as "The village idiot is against X, therefore X is the right thing to do."
The problem is that RL problems are almost never dichotomies. This is not a 2-choice RPG / Japanese dating sim / whatever. Sometimes when it looks like the choice is between X and Y, the real answer is actually Z. And there's a whole alphabet of answers A to V too, with various degrees of merit or lack thereof.
In other words, there for each one "right" answer there are a million of "wrong" answers, to various degrees of wrong.
Just because someone is an idiot, it doesn't mean that he'll always pick the opposite of the best answer. It just means that his logic is faulty, his facts dubious, and he can arrive at pretty much any point of the solution space without any reason. (Or rhyme.) He could even arrive at the right answer, by sheer random luck, in spite of the faulty logic. As they say, even a broken watch shows the right time twice a day.
What I'm saying is really a verbose and armchair philosophical version of this: A => B is not the same thing as !A => !B. _If_ A is true, then "A => B" says B must be true too. But if A is false, it doesn't say anything about B. It could be false, but it could just as well still be true anyway, for no fault or merit of A.
In this case we have, basically "if Dvorak has all the data and knows what he's talking about, then it's better to send food than OLPCs". That's your "A => B". Of course, we know that Dvorak is a professional troll, talks out of the arse, and couldn't tell his arse from his elbow. So we can say with some degree of confidence that the safe bet is !A. But that leaves us with no clue as to whether B is true or false. You'll need some other information and reasoning to determine B.
In most RL situations, even determining whether B is true or false, however, still is a bit short. As I was saying, RL problems have a lot of possible solutions, often a multi-dimensional continuum of them. Just knowing "an OLPC is better than a sack of rice" or viceversa doesn't say that either is the optimal solution yet. It could be that a third thing is far better bang-per-buck than both in the long run.
So to wrap this long rant up, well, you're still free to send them money if you want to. But use your own judgment and sources of information there. Don't do something just because the village idiot was against it.
Point taken, and I probably didn't explain well enough. Bully or not, the alpha cat can't really make any other cat _do_ anything. He (or she) may call dibs on this and that, but that's about the whole extent of it.
Wolves (and therefore dogs) have the concept of "I must do this because the alpha wants me to". Unless you want to challenge the alpha for leadership, you follow the gang, go hunt when the alpha wants to go hunt, etc. And if the alpha is pissed off at you, your options are appease him or challenge for leadership. Outside of a certain age and/or extraordinary circumstances, they tend to go with the former. The "I'll just stay out of his way" way out doesn't really exist, because the pack is hard-coded to stay together.
Cats don't have that concept, and are more likely to take ways out like "I'll just stay out of his way" or "screw this, I'll go find another gang" if things just don't work out. That's what I'm trying to say.
Basically, you can teach a dog tricks with punishments. You can't teach a cat anything that way.
It doesn't mean that cats simply can't be trained at all, it just means that the ever popular macho-retard way of "I'll show him who's boss" doesn't work that way with cats. That's all.
However, try teaching a house cat to play fetch sometime. Or rollover, play dead, stay, sit on command, beg...
My brother taught our parents' cat to play fetch. She loved it, in fact.
It's a bit harder than teaching tricks to a dog, because, well, the cat doesn't have the reflex to try to please the alpha at all cost. Although stray cats do form packs, they hunt separately and being the alpha is more like "first advisor" than anything like a "master."
So, well, the whole trick is that you have to keep the cat's attention by other means. Making it all a game is a good start, for example, because cats love to play. (But also eventually have enough of it, so you have to know when to stop. You don't want it to turn into torture.) Various kinds of rewards also help.
Punishment doesn't work well with cats, and doubly so when trying to make them do something. As I was saying, being the alpha is more of a first among equals status. So punishing a cat won't make it try harder to please you, it'll just nuke all interest in whatever you're trying to make it do.
Hmm... no offense, but this is almost as hard to read as my spam folder. I can't even tell what your point really is, there, so I'll just address bits and pieces that stand out at a quick eye-scan.
1. Barium. Barium itself is indeed very toxic, and not just by being a heavy metal. Barium carbonate is used as a rat poison.
The stuff they give you before X-rays, though, is Barium Sulphate. It's saving grace is that it's almost completely non-soluble and not absorbed by your body. So it just ends up going out the other end. (Or the same end if it was an enema.)
2. Nanotech in liquid format. Well,
A) almost all imaginable uses need it to be in _some_ kind of solution. (Even if colloidal.) A nanometre sized bot/agent/whatchamacallit isn't very useful dry, because it will just settle between fibers and the like.
B) which is just as well, because all these things hyped as nanotech today _are_ solutions or working in a solution or colloid. As I was saying, almost all of it is along the lines of either "wheee, we can make nanometre sized droplets" or "whee, we created a molecule which binds to another molecule, but we're suddenly calling it nanotech because we get bigger grants that way. And marketers love the buzzword too."
So, well, if liquid nanotech worries you, you can start worrying now:P
Well, to start with your concern, it's actually pretty easy to put a patient in a Farrady cage, isn't it?
That said, I'm getting tired of "nano" news whose only connection to the topic is that they too want the buzzword that bríngs in teh big grant bucks.
To it, a nano-bot was supposed to be a bit more complex a bit of hardware. You know, stuff that actually resembles -- in any form or shape -- a little autonomous robot.
The closest we have to a natural nano-bot is a Ribosome. It actually interprets a "tape" containing some instructions (messenger RNA) and assembles a protein according to those instructions. It's a tiny little machine tool. I'd take that as the threshold of what I'd consider a "nano-bot".
What we got instead being proclaimed as nano-technology, for no obvious reason other than that "nano" is the buzzword du jour, is:
- mayo. No, really, apparently an emulsion of droplets of substance A in substance B, is suddenly "nano-tech" if the particles are (several (tens of)) nanometres across. No, seriously, that's just too sad to make up.
- some sort of atomizer. (Ditto for droplets of liquid in air.)
- a molecule which happens to interact in some way with a target molecule. FFS, didn't we use to call that "organic chemistry" or "biotech"? I mean, seriously, when renet cleaves some milk proteins to make cheese, that's just that: a molecule interacts with a very specific other molecule. That's stuff we had for thousands of years. When your body processes fructose (e.g., the inverted corn syrup in your favourite soft drink) into glucose (which it can actually use), it's just that: a molecule (enzyme) interacts with another molecule in a well defined way. Etc.
- a molecule forms some kind of a capsid around another molecule. (Ditto. And that's how viruses work.)
- a molecule has a known resonance, and you can break it or activate it or detect it with a wave of that frequency. (Nothing new. Why do you think they feed you barium before taking an x-ray of your stomach or intestines?)
Etc, etc, etc.
And FFS, that's just not what nano-tech was supposed to mean. It's like seeing a bicycle presented as a TIE Fighter, or a laser-LED pointer presented as a lightsaber. It's just not the same fucking thing.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to hear about progresses in bio-chemistry, medicine, bio-tech, whatever you want to call it. I have Folding At Home grinding away happily in another thread as I write this.
But FFS, if it's "just" organic chemistry, just call it organic chemistry. I'm sick and tired of idiots redefining words just because they need a grant. I can even understand language evolving when we actually need a new meaning, or when inventing one word saves us from writing ten thousand other words (i.e., jargon.) But, ffs, shanghaiing a word just for a few bucks feels... lame. _That_ is my problem.
That's a somewhat moot point when you realize that many other game music tracks were reused in more than one game. E.g., Square has reused some of their tunes in half a dozen games. So while they might have been designed for _a_ game, they weren't likely designed for the game you're currently playing.
Also, it wouldn't be the first time that a song wasn't designed for a game, and ended up in a game anyway. E.g., the original (German) version of Gothic included an In Extremo concert. It was literally the other way around: they put some work into building and animating a game piece around a song.
You can even do it yourself in a lot of games. E.g., most Bethesda games let you drop your own MP3s into the music folders, and they'll actually get played. Metallica's Call of Ktulu works pretty darn nicely as exploration music, for example. Or if you're not into metal, you have quite a bit of choice of classical Russian music to invoke that feeling of wild wide-open spaces. And that's stuff, you know, written more than a century before video games.
Or I remember a WH40k video game (Chaos Gate?) which used the Confutatis Maledicti track to good effect. Really put one in the mood to go smack some chaos cultists, ya know? For the Emperor!;)
Paradox's games also come with songs from the apropriate era as tracks. So if you're playing Europa Universalis 2, you get to hear some folk music and the like from the late middle ages or renaissance, while Victoria gives you some music from the 18'th century.
Tropico used some latin american music, and it was as in-character as it gets for a city-building game set in that time and place. Plus a Lou Bega song which IIRC hadn't been written for the game.
Well, in _principle_ I'll agree with you. And when it comes to novels, it's usually like that indeed.
The problem with games and reviews is... often more one of perception than of genuine rage and loathing. Some people (fanboys) tend to act as if even mentioning any problem their favourite game has, is not only a sign of rage and loathing, but makes one an enemy of all humanity too.
The thing is, I haven't seen many reviews written from a position of rage and loathing. In fact, I can't remember any off the top of my head. Even as flames on boards go, genuine rage and loathing tends to be somewhat of a tiny minority of the messages, and easily identified as such. So, you know, you don't have to read it, if you don't like that kind of messages.
What I do see more often, though, are small posses of fanboys trying to lynch anyone who disagrees with them. And painting any post or review as some kind of irrational, evil, destructive, hatred of all humanity, if it even mentions any kind of problem.
I guess the root of all evil is that, well, a lot of people seem to assume that everyone else is a clone of them. If he likes X (e.g., jump puzzles), then by Jingo, everyone else is hard-coded to love X. And anyone saying otherwise must be in denial and/or an enemy of all humanity.
Which is kinda silly. It's like saying that if I like sweet wines, then everyone else must, and anyone who likes beer or dry wine is just in denial and driven by some irrational evil urge. Or if I like Pepsi and dislike Coca Cola, then only brainwashed sheep can possibly say they like Coca Cola. I hope you can see how silly that would seem. Yet people do just that kind of blanket generalization about games anyway.
At any rate, to get back on topic, well, your point is duly noted, but I haven't seen many reviews written from a position of rage and loathing. I see your point, but, nevertheless, I'd rather take the risk of those few proliferating, than be a part of the posse demanding only shiny-happy half-story reviews.
And to be honest, I'm interested to read the rage and loathing posts too anyway. If any game drove you nearly homicidal, I'd genuinely want to read about it. Exactly what about it was so enraging to you? No, seriously, I'm curious. I want to know exactly that kind of thing.
As I was saying, don't worry, it's not like I'll take it as gospel or anything. I'll do the sorting it into "because of this, this and this" myself, and compare it to my own tastes.
Without passing judgment over Bioshock itself, you illustrate a problem: assuming that what's not an issue for _you_ can't possibly be a legitimate issue for anything else. Which isn't just assuming that everyone is a clone of you (they aren't) and has exactly the same tastes (they don't), but also that their system necessarily is an identical clone of yours (again, it isn't.)
How much of a problem widescreen is, differs from TFT to TFT and from driver to driver.
A lot of early widescreens can't deal with a 4/3 image other than rescaling and deforming it to 16/9, for example. And I still have an Acer display for example, which ATI mis-detects and can't scale properly to.
A lot of TFTs do a piss-poor job of scaling any 4/3 image even if they keep it 4/3. E.g., if you have an 1680x1050 (which is what most wide-screen owners have), most of them insist on rescaling a resolution like 1280x1024 to something that has 1050 lines. And on a lot of them it's a piss-poor scaling too.
Etc.
There are very valid reasons why one could complain there. But nah, you've already decided that you're the judge and jurry of what everyone else should think.
I can see how he comes to such ideas, seeing that he's the writer. It's his work that those nasty reviewers are pissing all over. Yes, I'd _expect_ him to feel pretty strongly about it.
I, however, come from the angle of the consumer. I like to have the _whole_ picture before I decide whether I blow 50$ or more on a game.
There are entirely too many people who tell me only half the story. They tell me what they liked about a game. Or in the case of some reviewers, what the publisher's PR department told them to write. And I'm grateful for that info, too.
But that's just the problem: the "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" school of reviewing, only tells me half the picture. It's presenting a skewed picture, that serves no purpose except to try to help some vendor swindle me out of some money that they didn't deserve.
The purpose of a review isn't to be nice and friendly to the publisher. And that's a perversion of the whole idea. A review was never supposed to be just an extension of the publisher' marketing. A review is for the _consumer_. As a paying customer, I want enough information to decide if I'd genuinely like that game or not. If, according to _my_ tastes, it's worth _my_ money.
I'm actually grateful to the reviewers which give me the other half of the picture. Even if it's in the form of rage and loathing. We need more review sites like Something Awful, just for balance sake. Because God knows we already have too many who focus only on pleasing the publisher and being nice to the devs.
I don't hate games, I just like to know the _whole_ story. The good _and_ the bad. Only then I can make an informed choice.
And since there are already too many competing to tell me only the former, I'm genuinely grateful to the disgruntled folks who'll tell me the latter. I want to know every single bad detail. Everything that the reviewer didn't like. Every debatable aspect or design choice. Every glitch, every quest that feels unfinished, every moment when the reviewer's suspension of disbelief broke.
Don't worry, it doesn't mean I'll swallow the reviewer's opinion whole, as some Holy Truth, though. Trust me, I'll still use my own judgment there. If a reviewer goes "omg, it sucks because it's turn based" about a game, I'll probably just go, "hmm, that sounds good, actually." But now I'll have one more piece of information to base the decision on.
And if some some publisher, dev or fanboy ends up thinking along the lines of Mr Vonnegut's quote... well, they can consume excrement and expire, for all I care. I'm sure there would be a lot who'd like people's purchase decisions to be based only on corporate-approved PR and hype, but, see, that's exactly the thing I hope to avoid when I go to a review site.
Let me tell you a little story that my grandma kept telling me. Apparently at some point her father and a friend of his went to some clairvoyant to ask when they're going to die. So they got their vague predictions, laughed at them and went on to live their lives. I don't recall the exact predictions, but think something along the lines of "you'll die on a tuesday." Then the friend actually died on some date that would have sorta fit the prediction. And that's when great-grandfather's skepticism went down the toilet too. Supposedly he ended up living the rest of his life (which actually was a pretty long time from that point) like he's permanently on his last week on the death row.
Which is to say, pretty bloody depressed.
What's this got to do with genetic testing? Well here's what: the prediction you'll get there won't be any more accurate than that witch's prediction. There's noone who can tell you "you'll die in exactly 15 years, from exactly this disease." Your body doesn't work like that.
What it can tell you is that you _might_ at some point develop a certain problem. Or maybe not. (And doubly so in this case, since they're looking at sequences _near_ the ones that could actually cause the problem. There's a subtle difference there.) And maybe you'll die in 15 years. Or maybe in 15 months. Or maybe you'll die of old age without ever developing that condition.
Only now it's packaged in enough science to be believable from the start. You don't need to wait until your best buddy dies to start worrying.
And it doesn't tell you anything that's actually usable. If you knew "I'll die in 15 years, of cancer", ok, it's a depressing thought, but you can at least know you don't need to worry about your pension fund. It's something. But knowing something like "I have an 1% higher chance of getting testicle cancer" is something that will just make you worry, and you can't even use that information in any smart way. You don't even know if it will actually happen, nor when, nor whether it will be treatable, nor what the side-effects of that treatment will be. (E.g., currently at least one chemotherapy medicine used against testicle cancer tends to destroy the kidneys and leave you deaf too.) It's just stuff to helplessly worry about.
I think you've somewhat missed the point. Noone said that you _should_ keep your mouth shut. Kudos if you don't, in fact.
I'm just saying that most people do whatever works for them, in the short run, with the least effort. Most try to not end up martyrs for some ideological crusade. So I'll say that most _will_ learn to keep their mouth shut.
Since I've already mentioned the USSR, they had a bunch of dissidents, e.g., Andrei Sakharov. They refused to shut up or live in fear, but they didn't have any impact, actually. Simply because one guy or even 5 guys don't topple a regime. (Except in fairy tales and computer RPGs.) Once everyone else refuses to listen to you, you've already lost anyway.
And don't think it happens only in the USSR. E.g., you know that infamous AOL's giving away people's search strings? And how some search strings got linked to the actual people that used them? I'm betting already a bunch of people think twice about what they search for. That's one step on the road to conformism.
At any rate, I'm not saying you _should_ keep your mouth shut and live in fear. I'm saying quite the opposite, that we should see to it that noone else has to. Being a part of a tiny minority who'll speak their minds is brave, no doubt, but... ineffective.
Just because _you_ are not afraid, doesn't mean that you can ignore the problem. Because sooner or later you may get to live with the results anyway. Just because Sakharov, for example, wasn't afraid to speak against the Communist Party, didn't mean he was exempt from living in the USSR, nor from having to deal with their police.
Basically, yes, it's brave and commendable of you that you're willing to be the first against the wall. But maybe we should attack the problem early and at its source, so that there is no wall.
The problem with Soviet Russia, and currently in the U.S., is that the people are afraid to say things in public for fear of losing or not gaining employment, of being arrested, and just simply being blacklisted. That is how we lose our freedoms to begin with.
Essentially, yes. You've summarized my concerns better than my verbose roundabout style ever could. Thanks.
My only question was just how much such logging bots, "do no evil" Google, etc, just move us closer to... well, slavery. "Do no evil" Google has brought a lot of good, for example, but also brought us the reality where you _will_ be googled by your potential employer, and might suffer the consequences for some dumb thing you've said in freshman year.
Sometimes the road to hell can be paved with good intentions. Sometimes the government is just one of the possible evils.
Perhaps I'm still naive since I have a year left till I even have to worry about the world of graduate school, but I hope my potential employer is reasonable enough to hire me based on my qualifications and the opinions expressed by my colleagues over my silly behavior on IRC.
1. To start with the most important part: If you're a highly qualified expert -- I fancy myself one too -- you have that option. Most people don't. Most jobs involve interchangeable peons. Noone will lose any sleep over whether they hired someone uber-qualified to operate the cash register, or just the obedient peon who doesn't rock the boat. In fact, in most cases it can be argued that hiring the latter is the _better_ thing to do.
What I'm getting to is:
A) Most people don't have that option to be defiant. So if saying the wrong thing can spell even one extra month of unemployment, they'll rather say what a potential employer wants to hear.
B) A world where only the upper 1% experts can afford to speak their mind, is a world which has lost the battle. A small inteligentsia can be bought, arrested on trumped charges, discredited, whatever. Stalin did that too.
If everyone except you is too afraid to even listen to your crusade, you've already lost. You've just become the liability to a totalitarian regime -- either the totalitarian government kind, or the corporate-owned kind -- and they'll find a way to render you harmless.
2. In an ideal world, every employer would be logical like you describe.
In the real world, employers are swamped in resumes, and are just dying for a reason, any reason, no matter how arbitrary or lame, to discard some. Some will just mix them discard the bottom half of the pile. Some smart and successful people argued that you should discard anyone whose email address you don't like the sound of, or whose picture looks unprofessional, or whatever. At least one corporation is using numerology. Add the numbers for each letter in your name (where A=1, B=2, etc), add the digits of the result, repeat the last step until you have a single digit. If it matches the digit for the company's name, you're eligible, if not, noone will even read your resume. At all. Several corporations use tarot. Literally. Etc.
The only thing that matters is having a repeatable criterion, and one that doesn't fall afoul of discrimination laws. So even if you're not allowed to refuse employing someone because they're black, you can safely refuse to hire them because their name sums up to 3. Or because your HR department found something they dislike when googling them.
So even for the top experts, some will realize that they increase their chances of a better job, if they just keep their mouth shut. Even if it's a slight increase, hey, every bit helps. If keeping your big mouth shut gives you even a 1% chance of landing a better paying / more stable / better quality-of-life / etc job, there will be people who'll gladly take that advantage.
For the replaceable peons I've mentioned before? Doubly so. In fact, make it 10 times so.
Let me tell you my favourite "in Soviet Russia" kind of story. The story of how a handful of Party officials held some hundreds of millions of people in line.
Yes, everyone knows about Stalin's brutal mass executions and deportations. Very distasteful business, that. It also created so much resentment that it was unsustainable in the long run.
So it evolved into something more subtle: the idea that somewhere there's a dossier about you, containing a lot of the stupid things you've said in the past. You don't know exactly what or how much. (After all, they were the non-computer kind.) And you don't know when or how it will bite you in the arse later.
Maybe you can kiss any chance of traveling abroad goodbye. Maybe now your chances of promotion or of finding a better paid job, just became nil. Or maybe you're just this far from having to explain it all to the secret police and, if you're lucky, looking forward to a long career somewhere in Siberia. Or maybe it will bite your kid in the arse, if they can't get you. Etc.
In a nutshell, the idea was that you don't have an expectation of privacy. Anything you say, even nodding approvingly when comrade Piotr swears at the government at the pub, might become permanently attached to you and a factor in which way your future goes.
Worse yet, how do you know if comrade Piotr isn't an agent provocateur, trying to get you to say something you'll regret?
So people learned to think twice before opening their mouth, and avoid saying anything that might be used against them. It turned them into a mass of isolated (and thus vulnerable) individuals, because not many risked saying (or even listening to) anything that could have been the start of an organized resistance.
And now back to the topic, here's what I wonder: why the heck do we allow the same in the West, if it's done by corporate PHB's instead of the Communist Party?
The effects, way I see it, can be exactly the same: anything you ever say or do is recorded _somewhere_. Be it Google, or such recorder bots or whatever. And in an age where HR drone routinely google employees and prospective employees, it can come back to bite you in the arse.
And to get even more back on topic: even if you started a private conversation with comrade Piotr, how do you know if he's not just baiting you for something to post on Bash?
Yes, nicks are a privacy tool, but for most people it's not as unbreakable as they think. We already know that most ISPs would give away the owner of an IP address without even asking for a court order. Did you ever register that nick? Because if you did, now the IRC server has information linking that nick to an email address. If you think none can be bullied into giving it away, think twice.
Plus, are you paranoid enough to keep _all_ conversation at the level of "I'm evolvearth, you don't need to know my RL name and telephone number"? Well, kudos if you do, but most people don't. For most, online communication seems to be just an extension of RL communication. (And please don't imagine that said in a condemning tone or anything.)
So basically, all these attempts of recording everything we say or do... will they just turn us into some obedient serfs to our corporate overlords? You know, better not say anything that makes you sound like a maladjusted anarchist, because some HR drone will google you. That might be your job you're throwing away there. Better not say anything against the government too, because you don't know when your (current or future) company gets a chance at a government pork-barrel contract that requires a thorough background check. Etc.
Yes, you can password protect channels, do it all in private channels, etc, but I'd say even that might not help you much once enough people learned to just keep their mouth and fear strangers asking about certain matters.
Just some (admittedly pessimistic) stuff to think about, if you're bored enough;)
You know, being from continental Europe, I can't quite grasp the typical USA "OMG, it's the government, run for the hills!" attitude.
The fact is, the government is a tool, and a necessary one. Anything bigger than a small tribe ends up needing some form of organization, or it goes downhill fast.
During the history of humanity we have already tried anarchy several times, and it tends to not work well. It ends up in the biggest arseholes making everyone else very unhappy. Just because they can and there's noone to stop them.
We've also tried Wild-West-style, every-man-for-himself scenarios, and they don't scale.
1. It's a disproportionate waste of society's resources if, say, everyone has to leave one armed family/clan/whatever member at home to guard the farm, as opposed to having a much smaller police force to enforce the laws.
2. Divide et impera. Isolated individuals are easier to bully. In the above example, a merry band of bandits could pick off each farm one by one, if they stay each-man-for-himself. (And if not, congrats, they just created a local primitive form of government, army and police rolled in one.)
Even this Comcast example, is an example of what happens without laws and regulations: the biggest pricks _will_ shaft you because they can. And as long as the only recourse at the level of "but if enough isolated individual people decided to do something about it..." it will remain so. A prisoner's dilemma involving 300 million people just won't ever produce the result where they actually pressure the asshole to play nice.
So, yes, we know over here too that governments are dangerous and expensive things. That's why we try to control them to do what we want. Because that's the whole role of a government in a democratic society.
Throwing your hands up and admitting that your government already isn't under your control any more -- which is a pre-requisite for this "OMG, it's the government, run for the hills!" attitude to make any sense -- doesn't make it any less dangerous or expensive. It just means you've already failed and it will get more and more dangerous without control. And more expensive.
Basically, let me give you a metaphor. Let's say you have a big bad dog in your backyard.
The way I read it, the USA attitude seems to be "auugh, hide from it, don't let it get to your family, it could become rabid any time soon. Lock your doors and load your guns, just in case!"
The way we see it on this side of the pond is more like: so freakin' train it, take it to the vet, and make it work for you. Because it _is_ your dog. Might as well be a responsible owner.
So, anyway, please enlighten me: what am I missing there? Exactly how is a situation where we already know that the biggest shits are shafting millions of customers, actually better than having some laws there?
Before I start, no, I don't think that games turn people into criminals. So no need to explain to me that.
That said, there have been a lot of changes since the 80's, and I've heard the correlation between crime decline and X argued, where X was:
- less lead ending up in kids' system (via banning lead-based additives in gasoline, etc.) We already know that lead damages the nervous system, so that correlation at least doesn't trip suspension of disbelief too hard.
- "3 strikes and you're out" kind of laws. Both via taking out the incorrigible recidivists (some people seem to be really that psychopathic and dumb), and by providing a scary escalation level to keep the ones in line who still have at least minimal logic capabilities
- stricter gun control laws
- the availability of porn on the internet. Don't laugh, it has argued that the kind who'd go out and mug or rape someone, is now busy stroking his own wookie in front of the computer.
- widespread availability of violent movies. Apparently the day a new splatter movie hits the cinemas, there's a sharp decline in people actually doing violent stuff. Just because they'll be seated there getting their jollies viewing violence on the screen, instead of out on the street actually doing it. (And I guess then in the same could then be argued about games. If it's the same kind of asshole in both, he can't be out mugging people at the same time as he's online ganking newbies.)
Etc, etc, etc.
Note that I'm not saying that all the above are true. Some probably _are_ bunk. Take your pick which.
I'm just saying that the waters are muddy enough. A _lot_ of things changed at the same time. So, well, how do you know which of them were the ones that actually lowered criminality.
It's easy to pick one factor, let's call it X, out of context, pretend that it's the only thing that changed, and present it as the one thing that's responsible for the whole effect. It's good for political agendas too, so each politician or lobbyist is picking the one which makes his group look good. But how do you know if X is really the one? Maybe X had nothing to do with lowering criminality.
Just as an example, watch me pull a similar maneuver and do the following correlation: use of Linux rose steadily in the late 90's and 2000's, criminality sunk during the same time, hence Linux is singlehandedly responsible for making the world safer. I guess the types which would go out and mug someone are now too busy recompiling all libraries to have any time left to do evil stuff. Or something. Does it sound ridiculous yet?
Or you know what else improved since the 80's? The quality of Japanese game translations. Nowadays you can get them actually translated and voiced by people who know English. As opposed to the traditional "All your base are belong to us" Engrish translations, and voice-overs by people who never actually spoke it and don't even know where the accent is supposed to go. Criminality declined in that time. Hmm, looks like a possible cause to me. I guess the former steady rise in criminality was caused by those Engrish translations driving people homicidal.
No, I don't believe those are the real culprits. It's just supposed to be random ridiculous examples.
To get back to the topic, we don't know if games have anything to do either way with that decline. We also can't use that to claim that games can't possibly cause violence.
For the sake of playing the devil's advocate, if factor X would actually increase criminality, but factors Y and Z lowered it more than X raised it, then you'd still see a decline. Just as a purely theoretical scenario, it _is_ possible that X = video games, while Y and Z are... well, take your pick from the list above.
Just because a function of a dozen variables declined on the whole, doesn't mean that none of a dozen factors would have the effect of rising the result if taken alone.
Just something to think about, if you're bored enough;)
Well, seriously, he AFAIK doesn't actually work as a lawyer, his wife works.
So it's basically sorta like taking my AA sergeant rank away. (Yeah, technically I'm a reserve one.) Who the fuck cares? I haven't had anything to do with that in just short of 20 years, it's not my source of income, and I never was that good a soldier to start with. Short of a world war starting, it will never make any difference. Yes, go ahead. Take it away. Please.
It's like that with Jack Thompson and lawyer work. He hasn't actually done anything lawyer-related in ages. He doesn't make a single cent out of _that_. Even if he were to go back to it, anyone with any money would want a lawyer with, you know, any experience at all in the last decade. So he'd have to work his way up from doing cases for broke drunk drivers, and have his... colourful reputation working against him at every step.
And, yes, all this being an arse-clown in public might actually work against him, if he goes back to working as a lawyer. I don't care what the shrink examination said, if I ever have a lawyer representing me, the _last_ one I'd want is the guy who's been faxing people his drivers' licence with Batman's head pasted as the photo. I can't be the only one.
Yes, I'll accept pot-smoking admins, schizophrenic coders, IT guys who never grew past the teenage rebellion years (even when they're in their 40's), etc. But if my freedom or life ever depended on a lawyer, I'd want a _sane_ one, dammit. Same as if I ever needed surgery, I wouldn't want the surgeon who's spent the last decade and a half running around with pencils up his nose thinking he's an airplane.
So what would it mean to him, if they disbar him? Well, great. His kid is eventually going to grow up, and his wife will ask him to resume working. As what? As the lawyer with a reputation for acting like a completely deranged lunatic that lives in his own funny world? Disbarring him might actually do him a favour.
All that pruning and merging branches and so on reminds me of Wing Commander 1. They actually had a branching graph, rather than a tree, so that limited the number of combination. With each node being a map and a set of 3 missions. The branch you took was determined by whether you won at least 2 out of 3 missions, or respectively lose at least 2 out of 3. It looked sorta like this:
1
/ \
2 3
/ \ / \
4 5 6
/ \ / \ / \ ...
The nice effect of that merging is that the increase in needed missions is "only" quadratic, instead of exponential.
And, yes, more than half the paths led to "you lost the game". Take too many arcs to the left, and nothing could save the outcome any more.
Sounds like sorta what you're proposing. The same idea _could_ be applied to good/evil choices.
Well... don't get me wrong, WC was a good game. I will say however that there must have been a reason why they dropped the idea in WC2. If I'm allowed to take wild guesses, I'd say:
1. Any player would see far fewer missions than the game contained. No matter if you're top ace or quadriplegic, you'll see only one arc. Ditto for applying the idea to good vs evil. Mr Pure or Darth Sidious, you'll see only a square root of the number of nodes. That's wasted programming and design effort.
Think in KOTOR terms. Let's say each node is a planet, and you want to visit 6 planets during the game. You start on Taris, and on the good side the next planets would be Dantooine, Tatooine, Manaan, Korriban and finally the Rakata world + starforge. That kind of a graph with 6 levels, would still contain 1+2+3+4+5+6=21 planets. Out of which you see 6. That's a major waste of money and talent.
I'll get to pruning them later.
2. It still doesn't scale well. If you want to lengthen the game, each level just adds disproportionately more worlds out of which only 1 will be present in any given campaign. E.g., adding a 7'th level makes it 7 planets seen out of 28. It increased the waste from 15 worlds to 21 worlds. And percentage-wise from 71.4% to 75%.
3. And again, it's actually worse than it sounds, because most people just reloaded until they won all battles even if they sucked at the game. There were disproportionately fewer people who saw the planets and story along the "lose" arcs.
It would be slightly more balanced if it were "win for the good" and "win for the evil" arcs, instead of "win" and "lose". But not by much. Basically now almost everyone will see the left and right edges of that triangle, but almost noone will see the centre.
4. The fact remains that, by your idea and Origin's too, a lot of paths will lead to a "lose" state. Whether you kill the player early or let him play to the end of the "you lost" arc, it's still giving people a camouflaged "shoot yourself in the foot" option. Which tends to be less fun than it sounds.
5. Especially killing off the player, you have to realize that it's just making the game linear again, only this time in a non-fun way. You've just turned the triangle into a pair of trousers, so to speak, instead of just one tube. Decisions taken early on will force him down one leg or the other, which is linear again. And being killed for not following the tube is one of the least fun ways to be forced along the tracks.
Some of the principles of good game design, at least according to Brian Reynolds (the author of Alpha Centauri) include:
- "bang, you're dead" choices are _not_ fun. If chosing the "good" answer will just get a previously evil player killed, with no recourse, that's just not fun. Even if you have to have an arc that leads to bad consequences, there should be ample warning and a possibility to take counter-measures at each step along that arc.
- choices along the lines of "a piano falls on top of you, jump to the si
But how do you handle level progression when you're supposed to start the game as a fully trained whatever-it-is?
Go after even tougher guys, and become even better trained.
Fact is, in most armies you'll have an inherent difference between recruits trained back at some boot camp, and guys who've already survived an enemy shelling and assault. Half of the latter will probably wake up screaming for the rest of their life, but be better soldiers while they're on the front line anyway.
You can see the same in all eras, really. From the Roman legions to Napoleon's guard regiment to WW2, there was always a distinction between veteran and fully trained recruits. When Germany in WW1 wanted to make a last ditch effort, it handpicked its best veterans for the special units, they didn't just fully train some new recruits.
So it seems to me that there's always room to evolve and grow.
In Mass Effect, you start out as a highly-trained uber-warrior who's supposed to be hard as nails, yet you can't shoot straight, your weapons are ineffectual shit, and you'll get beat down by just about anybody until you put some points into your combat skills.
In a RL firefight, involving highly trained professionals (e.g., SWAT), about 80% of the rounds miss, and some by a wide margin.
Why would you issue special forces soldiers with guns that overheat after firing three rounds?
Why would you issue your special forces soldiers different ammo than what the gun was designed for, and have it jam? It happened IRL.
Why would you give your troops a bolt action rifle when you know how to make a SMG? WW2 Germany, anyone? Because production capacity wasn't there.
Why would you give your squads a shitty BAR when you know how to make a machinegun? WW2 USA this time? Doctrines, that's why.
Why would you withhold AP ammo from your fucking tanks? WW2 USA again. Doctrines, that's why.
Why would your special troops have shitty one-shot rifles when even savages have repeaters? That's how Custer died.
It's been done. KOTOR 1 and 2 let you choose your own name, so did NWN 1 and NWN 2, etc.
The trick is that basically people seem to not mind it much if their name only appears in the subtitles. The subtitle can say "I thank you Master Jedi Shawn Cplus, saviour of the universe" while the voice over just says "I thank you Master Jedi, saviour of the universe." Noone seemed to mind it that much.
But as a counterpoint, you could even pull a Gothic 1, where noone asked for your name at all. IIRC the opening conversation with Diego went something like,
Me: "Hi, I'm..." Diego: "I'm not interested in who you are."
Slashdot Mirror
Seeing that you answered, I guess you care after all.
Or, wait, let me guess, you just needed your daily dose of "I'm smarter than someone else" ego masturbation, and that was the best you could find? Heh. Cretin.
Using Uranium 238 involves a breeder reactor turning it into Plutonium. Which is best known as nuke material, so it's a good way to get half the globe scared. So it's really only an option for the USA, USSR and other major nuclear power.
If you try even hinting at such a reactor, say, somewhere in the Middle East, I see some high explosives in your future. Lots of them, in fact. If the USA doesn't bomb you into oblivion, then the peace-loving folks in Israel will.
(Google it. It wouldn't be the first time they conducted air strikes against any neighbour even suspected of building a nuclear reactor. E.g., Operation Opera.)
Which by association makes Thorium scary too. Turning it into Uranium 233 involves a breeder reactor too, so people start thinking "Plutonium." So you're back to square one.
Now I didn't RTFA, but even the summary seems to say a bit more. For a start, that they can look through deleted drafts on your hard drive and see what the email looked like before you actually edited and sent it. Or even if you don't send it at all.
Plus, screw email, we've already seen this kind of thing happen with edited Word documents, Excel files, or PDFs. Stuff that was never actually sent or published in any way is dug out of the document and used against you.
E.g., I remember a somewhat recent story on The Register where a politician was under fire over a donation she originally said she knew nothing about, but a some looking through the document history later, it looked like she or maybe her husband had a note in the document at some point to check if that's ok.
And now I'm all for accountability in politics, but there's nothing to say that it can't apply to your joke mailing list just the same.
E.g., basically, if your client sues your company about bad support, any emails where you told a coleague that that client is an asshat and shouldn't be taken seriously, can get dug out and used against you. That much was probably clear to you too. But here's the more important part: even if you _didn't_ actually send that email, if at some point you saved a draft, that too can be dug out and used as hint about your thought processes.
So it seems to me like the danger is even more insidious. Even if you think thrice before thinking an email, well, computers got us trained that all sort of transient information can be stored there for later. Even stuff you never intended to send, or notes to self for later, or whatever. Even trivial stuff that people used to just hold in their head, is now somewhere on the computer because it's easy to do so. And stuff that people would first roll around in their head before writing on paper, now gets written anyway and edited later, because it's easy to do so.
And then used as some kind of proof of how your train of thought went. Which was a rather private thing before.
Worse yet, it's now all in one place. So even if previously you'd keep your private thoughts in a diary, chances are it wouldn't get shown in court unless your character makes any difference (e.g., if you pleaded entrapment.) Or they might want to see your letters to your accountant, but not your letters to your mistress. Nowadays that hard drive is one big pot with _everything_. (Again, even transient stuff you deleted long ago and forgot that it was ever on that computer.) Once you got ordered to hand it over, someone _will_ poke his/her nose through everything on it. From business stuff, to your reminders in Outlook to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, to joke lists you're on, to God knows what else.
Sure, most of it probably won't be allowed in court or even presented. But you never know what might anyway. E.g., if you were hit with a sexual harassment or discrimination lawsuit, your porn browsing history or subscription to some dumb blondes jokes list might be interesting after all.
At any rate, _someone_ out there might end up knowing more about you than you thought possible. Even if you think twice before hitting the Send button.
I wish it were that simple.
Before I get started, yes, I can't think of Dvorak as anything else than the infamous "why is my Idle process eating up 99% of my CPU cycles?" idiot. Yes, I think there may be some merit to OLPC. Still, just saying, reality isn't as simple as "The village idiot is against X, therefore X is the right thing to do."
The problem is that RL problems are almost never dichotomies. This is not a 2-choice RPG / Japanese dating sim / whatever. Sometimes when it looks like the choice is between X and Y, the real answer is actually Z. And there's a whole alphabet of answers A to V too, with various degrees of merit or lack thereof.
In other words, there for each one "right" answer there are a million of "wrong" answers, to various degrees of wrong.
Just because someone is an idiot, it doesn't mean that he'll always pick the opposite of the best answer. It just means that his logic is faulty, his facts dubious, and he can arrive at pretty much any point of the solution space without any reason. (Or rhyme.) He could even arrive at the right answer, by sheer random luck, in spite of the faulty logic. As they say, even a broken watch shows the right time twice a day.
What I'm saying is really a verbose and armchair philosophical version of this: A => B is not the same thing as !A => !B. _If_ A is true, then "A => B" says B must be true too. But if A is false, it doesn't say anything about B. It could be false, but it could just as well still be true anyway, for no fault or merit of A.
In this case we have, basically "if Dvorak has all the data and knows what he's talking about, then it's better to send food than OLPCs". That's your "A => B". Of course, we know that Dvorak is a professional troll, talks out of the arse, and couldn't tell his arse from his elbow. So we can say with some degree of confidence that the safe bet is !A. But that leaves us with no clue as to whether B is true or false. You'll need some other information and reasoning to determine B.
In most RL situations, even determining whether B is true or false, however, still is a bit short. As I was saying, RL problems have a lot of possible solutions, often a multi-dimensional continuum of them. Just knowing "an OLPC is better than a sack of rice" or viceversa doesn't say that either is the optimal solution yet. It could be that a third thing is far better bang-per-buck than both in the long run.
So to wrap this long rant up, well, you're still free to send them money if you want to. But use your own judgment and sources of information there. Don't do something just because the village idiot was against it.
Point taken, and I probably didn't explain well enough. Bully or not, the alpha cat can't really make any other cat _do_ anything. He (or she) may call dibs on this and that, but that's about the whole extent of it.
Wolves (and therefore dogs) have the concept of "I must do this because the alpha wants me to". Unless you want to challenge the alpha for leadership, you follow the gang, go hunt when the alpha wants to go hunt, etc. And if the alpha is pissed off at you, your options are appease him or challenge for leadership. Outside of a certain age and/or extraordinary circumstances, they tend to go with the former. The "I'll just stay out of his way" way out doesn't really exist, because the pack is hard-coded to stay together.
Cats don't have that concept, and are more likely to take ways out like "I'll just stay out of his way" or "screw this, I'll go find another gang" if things just don't work out. That's what I'm trying to say.
Basically, you can teach a dog tricks with punishments. You can't teach a cat anything that way.
It doesn't mean that cats simply can't be trained at all, it just means that the ever popular macho-retard way of "I'll show him who's boss" doesn't work that way with cats. That's all.
My brother taught our parents' cat to play fetch. She loved it, in fact.
It's a bit harder than teaching tricks to a dog, because, well, the cat doesn't have the reflex to try to please the alpha at all cost. Although stray cats do form packs, they hunt separately and being the alpha is more like "first advisor" than anything like a "master."
So, well, the whole trick is that you have to keep the cat's attention by other means. Making it all a game is a good start, for example, because cats love to play. (But also eventually have enough of it, so you have to know when to stop. You don't want it to turn into torture.) Various kinds of rewards also help.
Punishment doesn't work well with cats, and doubly so when trying to make them do something. As I was saying, being the alpha is more of a first among equals status. So punishing a cat won't make it try harder to please you, it'll just nuke all interest in whatever you're trying to make it do.
Try with cats. They can eventually teach you to respond to a word or two in their language ;)
Hmm... no offense, but this is almost as hard to read as my spam folder. I can't even tell what your point really is, there, so I'll just address bits and pieces that stand out at a quick eye-scan.
:P
1. Barium. Barium itself is indeed very toxic, and not just by being a heavy metal. Barium carbonate is used as a rat poison.
The stuff they give you before X-rays, though, is Barium Sulphate. It's saving grace is that it's almost completely non-soluble and not absorbed by your body. So it just ends up going out the other end. (Or the same end if it was an enema.)
2. Nanotech in liquid format. Well,
A) almost all imaginable uses need it to be in _some_ kind of solution. (Even if colloidal.) A nanometre sized bot/agent/whatchamacallit isn't very useful dry, because it will just settle between fibers and the like.
B) which is just as well, because all these things hyped as nanotech today _are_ solutions or working in a solution or colloid. As I was saying, almost all of it is along the lines of either "wheee, we can make nanometre sized droplets" or "whee, we created a molecule which binds to another molecule, but we're suddenly calling it nanotech because we get bigger grants that way. And marketers love the buzzword too."
So, well, if liquid nanotech worries you, you can start worrying now
Well, to start with your concern, it's actually pretty easy to put a patient in a Farrady cage, isn't it?
That said, I'm getting tired of "nano" news whose only connection to the topic is that they too want the buzzword that bríngs in teh big grant bucks.
To it, a nano-bot was supposed to be a bit more complex a bit of hardware. You know, stuff that actually resembles -- in any form or shape -- a little autonomous robot.
The closest we have to a natural nano-bot is a Ribosome. It actually interprets a "tape" containing some instructions (messenger RNA) and assembles a protein according to those instructions. It's a tiny little machine tool. I'd take that as the threshold of what I'd consider a "nano-bot".
What we got instead being proclaimed as nano-technology, for no obvious reason other than that "nano" is the buzzword du jour, is:
- mayo. No, really, apparently an emulsion of droplets of substance A in substance B, is suddenly "nano-tech" if the particles are (several (tens of)) nanometres across. No, seriously, that's just too sad to make up.
- some sort of atomizer. (Ditto for droplets of liquid in air.)
- a molecule which happens to interact in some way with a target molecule. FFS, didn't we use to call that "organic chemistry" or "biotech"? I mean, seriously, when renet cleaves some milk proteins to make cheese, that's just that: a molecule interacts with a very specific other molecule. That's stuff we had for thousands of years. When your body processes fructose (e.g., the inverted corn syrup in your favourite soft drink) into glucose (which it can actually use), it's just that: a molecule (enzyme) interacts with another molecule in a well defined way. Etc.
- a molecule forms some kind of a capsid around another molecule. (Ditto. And that's how viruses work.)
- a molecule has a known resonance, and you can break it or activate it or detect it with a wave of that frequency. (Nothing new. Why do you think they feed you barium before taking an x-ray of your stomach or intestines?)
Etc, etc, etc.
And FFS, that's just not what nano-tech was supposed to mean. It's like seeing a bicycle presented as a TIE Fighter, or a laser-LED pointer presented as a lightsaber. It's just not the same fucking thing.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to hear about progresses in bio-chemistry, medicine, bio-tech, whatever you want to call it. I have Folding At Home grinding away happily in another thread as I write this.
But FFS, if it's "just" organic chemistry, just call it organic chemistry. I'm sick and tired of idiots redefining words just because they need a grant. I can even understand language evolving when we actually need a new meaning, or when inventing one word saves us from writing ten thousand other words (i.e., jargon.) But, ffs, shanghaiing a word just for a few bucks feels... lame. _That_ is my problem.
That's a somewhat moot point when you realize that many other game music tracks were reused in more than one game. E.g., Square has reused some of their tunes in half a dozen games. So while they might have been designed for _a_ game, they weren't likely designed for the game you're currently playing.
;)
Also, it wouldn't be the first time that a song wasn't designed for a game, and ended up in a game anyway. E.g., the original (German) version of Gothic included an In Extremo concert. It was literally the other way around: they put some work into building and animating a game piece around a song.
You can even do it yourself in a lot of games. E.g., most Bethesda games let you drop your own MP3s into the music folders, and they'll actually get played. Metallica's Call of Ktulu works pretty darn nicely as exploration music, for example. Or if you're not into metal, you have quite a bit of choice of classical Russian music to invoke that feeling of wild wide-open spaces. And that's stuff, you know, written more than a century before video games.
Or I remember a WH40k video game (Chaos Gate?) which used the Confutatis Maledicti track to good effect. Really put one in the mood to go smack some chaos cultists, ya know? For the Emperor!
Paradox's games also come with songs from the apropriate era as tracks. So if you're playing Europa Universalis 2, you get to hear some folk music and the like from the late middle ages or renaissance, while Victoria gives you some music from the 18'th century.
Tropico used some latin american music, and it was as in-character as it gets for a city-building game set in that time and place. Plus a Lou Bega song which IIRC hadn't been written for the game.
Etc.
Well, in _principle_ I'll agree with you. And when it comes to novels, it's usually like that indeed.
The problem with games and reviews is... often more one of perception than of genuine rage and loathing. Some people (fanboys) tend to act as if even mentioning any problem their favourite game has, is not only a sign of rage and loathing, but makes one an enemy of all humanity too.
The thing is, I haven't seen many reviews written from a position of rage and loathing. In fact, I can't remember any off the top of my head. Even as flames on boards go, genuine rage and loathing tends to be somewhat of a tiny minority of the messages, and easily identified as such. So, you know, you don't have to read it, if you don't like that kind of messages.
What I do see more often, though, are small posses of fanboys trying to lynch anyone who disagrees with them. And painting any post or review as some kind of irrational, evil, destructive, hatred of all humanity, if it even mentions any kind of problem.
I guess the root of all evil is that, well, a lot of people seem to assume that everyone else is a clone of them. If he likes X (e.g., jump puzzles), then by Jingo, everyone else is hard-coded to love X. And anyone saying otherwise must be in denial and/or an enemy of all humanity.
Which is kinda silly. It's like saying that if I like sweet wines, then everyone else must, and anyone who likes beer or dry wine is just in denial and driven by some irrational evil urge. Or if I like Pepsi and dislike Coca Cola, then only brainwashed sheep can possibly say they like Coca Cola. I hope you can see how silly that would seem. Yet people do just that kind of blanket generalization about games anyway.
At any rate, to get back on topic, well, your point is duly noted, but I haven't seen many reviews written from a position of rage and loathing. I see your point, but, nevertheless, I'd rather take the risk of those few proliferating, than be a part of the posse demanding only shiny-happy half-story reviews.
And to be honest, I'm interested to read the rage and loathing posts too anyway. If any game drove you nearly homicidal, I'd genuinely want to read about it. Exactly what about it was so enraging to you? No, seriously, I'm curious. I want to know exactly that kind of thing.
As I was saying, don't worry, it's not like I'll take it as gospel or anything. I'll do the sorting it into "because of this, this and this" myself, and compare it to my own tastes.
Without passing judgment over Bioshock itself, you illustrate a problem: assuming that what's not an issue for _you_ can't possibly be a legitimate issue for anything else. Which isn't just assuming that everyone is a clone of you (they aren't) and has exactly the same tastes (they don't), but also that their system necessarily is an identical clone of yours (again, it isn't.)
How much of a problem widescreen is, differs from TFT to TFT and from driver to driver.
A lot of early widescreens can't deal with a 4/3 image other than rescaling and deforming it to 16/9, for example. And I still have an Acer display for example, which ATI mis-detects and can't scale properly to.
A lot of TFTs do a piss-poor job of scaling any 4/3 image even if they keep it 4/3. E.g., if you have an 1680x1050 (which is what most wide-screen owners have), most of them insist on rescaling a resolution like 1280x1024 to something that has 1050 lines. And on a lot of them it's a piss-poor scaling too.
Etc.
There are very valid reasons why one could complain there. But nah, you've already decided that you're the judge and jurry of what everyone else should think.
Heh.
I'll disagree with Kurt Vonnegut, there.
I can see how he comes to such ideas, seeing that he's the writer. It's his work that those nasty reviewers are pissing all over. Yes, I'd _expect_ him to feel pretty strongly about it.
I, however, come from the angle of the consumer. I like to have the _whole_ picture before I decide whether I blow 50$ or more on a game.
There are entirely too many people who tell me only half the story. They tell me what they liked about a game. Or in the case of some reviewers, what the publisher's PR department told them to write. And I'm grateful for that info, too.
But that's just the problem: the "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" school of reviewing, only tells me half the picture. It's presenting a skewed picture, that serves no purpose except to try to help some vendor swindle me out of some money that they didn't deserve.
The purpose of a review isn't to be nice and friendly to the publisher. And that's a perversion of the whole idea. A review was never supposed to be just an extension of the publisher' marketing. A review is for the _consumer_. As a paying customer, I want enough information to decide if I'd genuinely like that game or not. If, according to _my_ tastes, it's worth _my_ money.
I'm actually grateful to the reviewers which give me the other half of the picture. Even if it's in the form of rage and loathing. We need more review sites like Something Awful, just for balance sake. Because God knows we already have too many who focus only on pleasing the publisher and being nice to the devs.
I don't hate games, I just like to know the _whole_ story. The good _and_ the bad. Only then I can make an informed choice.
And since there are already too many competing to tell me only the former, I'm genuinely grateful to the disgruntled folks who'll tell me the latter. I want to know every single bad detail. Everything that the reviewer didn't like. Every debatable aspect or design choice. Every glitch, every quest that feels unfinished, every moment when the reviewer's suspension of disbelief broke.
Don't worry, it doesn't mean I'll swallow the reviewer's opinion whole, as some Holy Truth, though. Trust me, I'll still use my own judgment there. If a reviewer goes "omg, it sucks because it's turn based" about a game, I'll probably just go, "hmm, that sounds good, actually." But now I'll have one more piece of information to base the decision on.
And if some some publisher, dev or fanboy ends up thinking along the lines of Mr Vonnegut's quote... well, they can consume excrement and expire, for all I care. I'm sure there would be a lot who'd like people's purchase decisions to be based only on corporate-approved PR and hype, but, see, that's exactly the thing I hope to avoid when I go to a review site.
Let me tell you a little story that my grandma kept telling me. Apparently at some point her father and a friend of his went to some clairvoyant to ask when they're going to die. So they got their vague predictions, laughed at them and went on to live their lives. I don't recall the exact predictions, but think something along the lines of "you'll die on a tuesday." Then the friend actually died on some date that would have sorta fit the prediction. And that's when great-grandfather's skepticism went down the toilet too. Supposedly he ended up living the rest of his life (which actually was a pretty long time from that point) like he's permanently on his last week on the death row.
Which is to say, pretty bloody depressed.
What's this got to do with genetic testing? Well here's what: the prediction you'll get there won't be any more accurate than that witch's prediction. There's noone who can tell you "you'll die in exactly 15 years, from exactly this disease." Your body doesn't work like that.
What it can tell you is that you _might_ at some point develop a certain problem. Or maybe not. (And doubly so in this case, since they're looking at sequences _near_ the ones that could actually cause the problem. There's a subtle difference there.) And maybe you'll die in 15 years. Or maybe in 15 months. Or maybe you'll die of old age without ever developing that condition.
Only now it's packaged in enough science to be believable from the start. You don't need to wait until your best buddy dies to start worrying.
And it doesn't tell you anything that's actually usable. If you knew "I'll die in 15 years, of cancer", ok, it's a depressing thought, but you can at least know you don't need to worry about your pension fund. It's something. But knowing something like "I have an 1% higher chance of getting testicle cancer" is something that will just make you worry, and you can't even use that information in any smart way. You don't even know if it will actually happen, nor when, nor whether it will be treatable, nor what the side-effects of that treatment will be. (E.g., currently at least one chemotherapy medicine used against testicle cancer tends to destroy the kidneys and leave you deaf too.) It's just stuff to helplessly worry about.
It could be worse.
For example, take "Square Enix". It always just made me wonder what other shapes of Enixes are out there. Is there a round Enix too, for example?
I think you've somewhat missed the point. Noone said that you _should_ keep your mouth shut. Kudos if you don't, in fact.
I'm just saying that most people do whatever works for them, in the short run, with the least effort. Most try to not end up martyrs for some ideological crusade. So I'll say that most _will_ learn to keep their mouth shut.
Since I've already mentioned the USSR, they had a bunch of dissidents, e.g., Andrei Sakharov. They refused to shut up or live in fear, but they didn't have any impact, actually. Simply because one guy or even 5 guys don't topple a regime. (Except in fairy tales and computer RPGs.) Once everyone else refuses to listen to you, you've already lost anyway.
And don't think it happens only in the USSR. E.g., you know that infamous AOL's giving away people's search strings? And how some search strings got linked to the actual people that used them? I'm betting already a bunch of people think twice about what they search for. That's one step on the road to conformism.
At any rate, I'm not saying you _should_ keep your mouth shut and live in fear. I'm saying quite the opposite, that we should see to it that noone else has to. Being a part of a tiny minority who'll speak their minds is brave, no doubt, but... ineffective.
Just because _you_ are not afraid, doesn't mean that you can ignore the problem. Because sooner or later you may get to live with the results anyway. Just because Sakharov, for example, wasn't afraid to speak against the Communist Party, didn't mean he was exempt from living in the USSR, nor from having to deal with their police.
Basically, yes, it's brave and commendable of you that you're willing to be the first against the wall. But maybe we should attack the problem early and at its source, so that there is no wall.
Essentially, yes. You've summarized my concerns better than my verbose roundabout style ever could. Thanks.
My only question was just how much such logging bots, "do no evil" Google, etc, just move us closer to... well, slavery. "Do no evil" Google has brought a lot of good, for example, but also brought us the reality where you _will_ be googled by your potential employer, and might suffer the consequences for some dumb thing you've said in freshman year.
Sometimes the road to hell can be paved with good intentions. Sometimes the government is just one of the possible evils.
1. To start with the most important part: If you're a highly qualified expert -- I fancy myself one too -- you have that option. Most people don't. Most jobs involve interchangeable peons. Noone will lose any sleep over whether they hired someone uber-qualified to operate the cash register, or just the obedient peon who doesn't rock the boat. In fact, in most cases it can be argued that hiring the latter is the _better_ thing to do.
What I'm getting to is:
A) Most people don't have that option to be defiant. So if saying the wrong thing can spell even one extra month of unemployment, they'll rather say what a potential employer wants to hear.
B) A world where only the upper 1% experts can afford to speak their mind, is a world which has lost the battle. A small inteligentsia can be bought, arrested on trumped charges, discredited, whatever. Stalin did that too.
If everyone except you is too afraid to even listen to your crusade, you've already lost. You've just become the liability to a totalitarian regime -- either the totalitarian government kind, or the corporate-owned kind -- and they'll find a way to render you harmless.
2. In an ideal world, every employer would be logical like you describe.
In the real world, employers are swamped in resumes, and are just dying for a reason, any reason, no matter how arbitrary or lame, to discard some. Some will just mix them discard the bottom half of the pile. Some smart and successful people argued that you should discard anyone whose email address you don't like the sound of, or whose picture looks unprofessional, or whatever. At least one corporation is using numerology. Add the numbers for each letter in your name (where A=1, B=2, etc), add the digits of the result, repeat the last step until you have a single digit. If it matches the digit for the company's name, you're eligible, if not, noone will even read your resume. At all. Several corporations use tarot. Literally. Etc.
The only thing that matters is having a repeatable criterion, and one that doesn't fall afoul of discrimination laws. So even if you're not allowed to refuse employing someone because they're black, you can safely refuse to hire them because their name sums up to 3. Or because your HR department found something they dislike when googling them.
So even for the top experts, some will realize that they increase their chances of a better job, if they just keep their mouth shut. Even if it's a slight increase, hey, every bit helps. If keeping your big mouth shut gives you even a 1% chance of landing a better paying / more stable / better quality-of-life / etc job, there will be people who'll gladly take that advantage.
For the replaceable peons I've mentioned before? Doubly so. In fact, make it 10 times so.
Let me tell you my favourite "in Soviet Russia" kind of story. The story of how a handful of Party officials held some hundreds of millions of people in line.
;)
Yes, everyone knows about Stalin's brutal mass executions and deportations. Very distasteful business, that. It also created so much resentment that it was unsustainable in the long run.
So it evolved into something more subtle: the idea that somewhere there's a dossier about you, containing a lot of the stupid things you've said in the past. You don't know exactly what or how much. (After all, they were the non-computer kind.) And you don't know when or how it will bite you in the arse later.
Maybe you can kiss any chance of traveling abroad goodbye. Maybe now your chances of promotion or of finding a better paid job, just became nil. Or maybe you're just this far from having to explain it all to the secret police and, if you're lucky, looking forward to a long career somewhere in Siberia. Or maybe it will bite your kid in the arse, if they can't get you. Etc.
In a nutshell, the idea was that you don't have an expectation of privacy. Anything you say, even nodding approvingly when comrade Piotr swears at the government at the pub, might become permanently attached to you and a factor in which way your future goes.
Worse yet, how do you know if comrade Piotr isn't an agent provocateur, trying to get you to say something you'll regret?
So people learned to think twice before opening their mouth, and avoid saying anything that might be used against them. It turned them into a mass of isolated (and thus vulnerable) individuals, because not many risked saying (or even listening to) anything that could have been the start of an organized resistance.
And now back to the topic, here's what I wonder: why the heck do we allow the same in the West, if it's done by corporate PHB's instead of the Communist Party?
The effects, way I see it, can be exactly the same: anything you ever say or do is recorded _somewhere_. Be it Google, or such recorder bots or whatever. And in an age where HR drone routinely google employees and prospective employees, it can come back to bite you in the arse.
And to get even more back on topic: even if you started a private conversation with comrade Piotr, how do you know if he's not just baiting you for something to post on Bash?
Yes, nicks are a privacy tool, but for most people it's not as unbreakable as they think. We already know that most ISPs would give away the owner of an IP address without even asking for a court order. Did you ever register that nick? Because if you did, now the IRC server has information linking that nick to an email address. If you think none can be bullied into giving it away, think twice.
Plus, are you paranoid enough to keep _all_ conversation at the level of "I'm evolvearth, you don't need to know my RL name and telephone number"? Well, kudos if you do, but most people don't. For most, online communication seems to be just an extension of RL communication. (And please don't imagine that said in a condemning tone or anything.)
So basically, all these attempts of recording everything we say or do... will they just turn us into some obedient serfs to our corporate overlords? You know, better not say anything that makes you sound like a maladjusted anarchist, because some HR drone will google you. That might be your job you're throwing away there. Better not say anything against the government too, because you don't know when your (current or future) company gets a chance at a government pork-barrel contract that requires a thorough background check. Etc.
Yes, you can password protect channels, do it all in private channels, etc, but I'd say even that might not help you much once enough people learned to just keep their mouth and fear strangers asking about certain matters.
Just some (admittedly pessimistic) stuff to think about, if you're bored enough
You know, being from continental Europe, I can't quite grasp the typical USA "OMG, it's the government, run for the hills!" attitude.
The fact is, the government is a tool, and a necessary one. Anything bigger than a small tribe ends up needing some form of organization, or it goes downhill fast.
During the history of humanity we have already tried anarchy several times, and it tends to not work well. It ends up in the biggest arseholes making everyone else very unhappy. Just because they can and there's noone to stop them.
We've also tried Wild-West-style, every-man-for-himself scenarios, and they don't scale.
1. It's a disproportionate waste of society's resources if, say, everyone has to leave one armed family/clan/whatever member at home to guard the farm, as opposed to having a much smaller police force to enforce the laws.
2. Divide et impera. Isolated individuals are easier to bully. In the above example, a merry band of bandits could pick off each farm one by one, if they stay each-man-for-himself. (And if not, congrats, they just created a local primitive form of government, army and police rolled in one.)
Even this Comcast example, is an example of what happens without laws and regulations: the biggest pricks _will_ shaft you because they can. And as long as the only recourse at the level of "but if enough isolated individual people decided to do something about it..." it will remain so. A prisoner's dilemma involving 300 million people just won't ever produce the result where they actually pressure the asshole to play nice.
So, yes, we know over here too that governments are dangerous and expensive things. That's why we try to control them to do what we want. Because that's the whole role of a government in a democratic society.
Throwing your hands up and admitting that your government already isn't under your control any more -- which is a pre-requisite for this "OMG, it's the government, run for the hills!" attitude to make any sense -- doesn't make it any less dangerous or expensive. It just means you've already failed and it will get more and more dangerous without control. And more expensive.
Basically, let me give you a metaphor. Let's say you have a big bad dog in your backyard.
The way I read it, the USA attitude seems to be "auugh, hide from it, don't let it get to your family, it could become rabid any time soon. Lock your doors and load your guns, just in case!"
The way we see it on this side of the pond is more like: so freakin' train it, take it to the vet, and make it work for you. Because it _is_ your dog. Might as well be a responsible owner.
So, anyway, please enlighten me: what am I missing there? Exactly how is a situation where we already know that the biggest shits are shafting millions of customers, actually better than having some laws there?
Well, it's not my hypothesis. As I was saying, some of those explanations are probably bunk, and that one indeed makes a good candidate.
Before I start, no, I don't think that games turn people into criminals. So no need to explain to me that.
;)
That said, there have been a lot of changes since the 80's, and I've heard the correlation between crime decline and X argued, where X was:
- less lead ending up in kids' system (via banning lead-based additives in gasoline, etc.) We already know that lead damages the nervous system, so that correlation at least doesn't trip suspension of disbelief too hard.
- "3 strikes and you're out" kind of laws. Both via taking out the incorrigible recidivists (some people seem to be really that psychopathic and dumb), and by providing a scary escalation level to keep the ones in line who still have at least minimal logic capabilities
- stricter gun control laws
- the availability of porn on the internet. Don't laugh, it has argued that the kind who'd go out and mug or rape someone, is now busy stroking his own wookie in front of the computer.
- widespread availability of violent movies. Apparently the day a new splatter movie hits the cinemas, there's a sharp decline in people actually doing violent stuff. Just because they'll be seated there getting their jollies viewing violence on the screen, instead of out on the street actually doing it. (And I guess then in the same could then be argued about games. If it's the same kind of asshole in both, he can't be out mugging people at the same time as he's online ganking newbies.)
Etc, etc, etc.
Note that I'm not saying that all the above are true. Some probably _are_ bunk. Take your pick which.
I'm just saying that the waters are muddy enough. A _lot_ of things changed at the same time. So, well, how do you know which of them were the ones that actually lowered criminality.
It's easy to pick one factor, let's call it X, out of context, pretend that it's the only thing that changed, and present it as the one thing that's responsible for the whole effect. It's good for political agendas too, so each politician or lobbyist is picking the one which makes his group look good. But how do you know if X is really the one? Maybe X had nothing to do with lowering criminality.
Just as an example, watch me pull a similar maneuver and do the following correlation: use of Linux rose steadily in the late 90's and 2000's, criminality sunk during the same time, hence Linux is singlehandedly responsible for making the world safer. I guess the types which would go out and mug someone are now too busy recompiling all libraries to have any time left to do evil stuff. Or something. Does it sound ridiculous yet?
Or you know what else improved since the 80's? The quality of Japanese game translations. Nowadays you can get them actually translated and voiced by people who know English. As opposed to the traditional "All your base are belong to us" Engrish translations, and voice-overs by people who never actually spoke it and don't even know where the accent is supposed to go. Criminality declined in that time. Hmm, looks like a possible cause to me. I guess the former steady rise in criminality was caused by those Engrish translations driving people homicidal.
No, I don't believe those are the real culprits. It's just supposed to be random ridiculous examples.
To get back to the topic, we don't know if games have anything to do either way with that decline. We also can't use that to claim that games can't possibly cause violence.
For the sake of playing the devil's advocate, if factor X would actually increase criminality, but factors Y and Z lowered it more than X raised it, then you'd still see a decline. Just as a purely theoretical scenario, it _is_ possible that X = video games, while Y and Z are... well, take your pick from the list above.
Just because a function of a dozen variables declined on the whole, doesn't mean that none of a dozen factors would have the effect of rising the result if taken alone.
Just something to think about, if you're bored enough
Well, seriously, he AFAIK doesn't actually work as a lawyer, his wife works.
So it's basically sorta like taking my AA sergeant rank away. (Yeah, technically I'm a reserve one.) Who the fuck cares? I haven't had anything to do with that in just short of 20 years, it's not my source of income, and I never was that good a soldier to start with. Short of a world war starting, it will never make any difference. Yes, go ahead. Take it away. Please.
It's like that with Jack Thompson and lawyer work. He hasn't actually done anything lawyer-related in ages. He doesn't make a single cent out of _that_. Even if he were to go back to it, anyone with any money would want a lawyer with, you know, any experience at all in the last decade. So he'd have to work his way up from doing cases for broke drunk drivers, and have his... colourful reputation working against him at every step.
And, yes, all this being an arse-clown in public might actually work against him, if he goes back to working as a lawyer. I don't care what the shrink examination said, if I ever have a lawyer representing me, the _last_ one I'd want is the guy who's been faxing people his drivers' licence with Batman's head pasted as the photo. I can't be the only one.
Yes, I'll accept pot-smoking admins, schizophrenic coders, IT guys who never grew past the teenage rebellion years (even when they're in their 40's), etc. But if my freedom or life ever depended on a lawyer, I'd want a _sane_ one, dammit. Same as if I ever needed surgery, I wouldn't want the surgeon who's spent the last decade and a half running around with pencils up his nose thinking he's an airplane.
So what would it mean to him, if they disbar him? Well, great. His kid is eventually going to grow up, and his wife will ask him to resume working. As what? As the lawyer with a reputation for acting like a completely deranged lunatic that lives in his own funny world? Disbarring him might actually do him a favour.
The nice effect of that merging is that the increase in needed missions is "only" quadratic, instead of exponential.
And, yes, more than half the paths led to "you lost the game". Take too many arcs to the left, and nothing could save the outcome any more.
Sounds like sorta what you're proposing. The same idea _could_ be applied to good/evil choices.
Well... don't get me wrong, WC was a good game. I will say however that there must have been a reason why they dropped the idea in WC2. If I'm allowed to take wild guesses, I'd say:
1. Any player would see far fewer missions than the game contained. No matter if you're top ace or quadriplegic, you'll see only one arc. Ditto for applying the idea to good vs evil. Mr Pure or Darth Sidious, you'll see only a square root of the number of nodes. That's wasted programming and design effort.
Think in KOTOR terms. Let's say each node is a planet, and you want to visit 6 planets during the game. You start on Taris, and on the good side the next planets would be Dantooine, Tatooine, Manaan, Korriban and finally the Rakata world + starforge. That kind of a graph with 6 levels, would still contain 1+2+3+4+5+6=21 planets. Out of which you see 6. That's a major waste of money and talent.
I'll get to pruning them later.
2. It still doesn't scale well. If you want to lengthen the game, each level just adds disproportionately more worlds out of which only 1 will be present in any given campaign. E.g., adding a 7'th level makes it 7 planets seen out of 28. It increased the waste from 15 worlds to 21 worlds. And percentage-wise from 71.4% to 75%.
3. And again, it's actually worse than it sounds, because most people just reloaded until they won all battles even if they sucked at the game. There were disproportionately fewer people who saw the planets and story along the "lose" arcs.
It would be slightly more balanced if it were "win for the good" and "win for the evil" arcs, instead of "win" and "lose". But not by much. Basically now almost everyone will see the left and right edges of that triangle, but almost noone will see the centre.
4. The fact remains that, by your idea and Origin's too, a lot of paths will lead to a "lose" state. Whether you kill the player early or let him play to the end of the "you lost" arc, it's still giving people a camouflaged "shoot yourself in the foot" option. Which tends to be less fun than it sounds.
5. Especially killing off the player, you have to realize that it's just making the game linear again, only this time in a non-fun way. You've just turned the triangle into a pair of trousers, so to speak, instead of just one tube. Decisions taken early on will force him down one leg or the other, which is linear again. And being killed for not following the tube is one of the least fun ways to be forced along the tracks.
Some of the principles of good game design, at least according to Brian Reynolds (the author of Alpha Centauri) include:
- "bang, you're dead" choices are _not_ fun. If chosing the "good" answer will just get a previously evil player killed, with no recourse, that's just not fun. Even if you have to have an arc that leads to bad consequences, there should be ample warning and a possibility to take counter-measures at each step along that arc.
- choices along the lines of "a piano falls on top of you, jump to the si
Go after even tougher guys, and become even better trained.
Fact is, in most armies you'll have an inherent difference between recruits trained back at some boot camp, and guys who've already survived an enemy shelling and assault. Half of the latter will probably wake up screaming for the rest of their life, but be better soldiers while they're on the front line anyway.
You can see the same in all eras, really. From the Roman legions to Napoleon's guard regiment to WW2, there was always a distinction between veteran and fully trained recruits. When Germany in WW1 wanted to make a last ditch effort, it handpicked its best veterans for the special units, they didn't just fully train some new recruits.
So it seems to me that there's always room to evolve and grow.
In a RL firefight, involving highly trained professionals (e.g., SWAT), about 80% of the rounds miss, and some by a wide margin.
Why would you issue your special forces soldiers different ammo than what the gun was designed for, and have it jam? It happened IRL.
Why would you give your troops a bolt action rifle when you know how to make a SMG? WW2 Germany, anyone? Because production capacity wasn't there.
Why would you give your squads a shitty BAR when you know how to make a machinegun? WW2 USA this time? Doctrines, that's why.
Why would you withhold AP ammo from your fucking tanks? WW2 USA again. Doctrines, that's why.
Why would your special troops have shitty one-shot rifles when even savages have repeaters? That's how Custer died.
It's been done. KOTOR 1 and 2 let you choose your own name, so did NWN 1 and NWN 2, etc.
:)
The trick is that basically people seem to not mind it much if their name only appears in the subtitles. The subtitle can say "I thank you Master Jedi Shawn Cplus, saviour of the universe" while the voice over just says "I thank you Master Jedi, saviour of the universe." Noone seemed to mind it that much.
But as a counterpoint, you could even pull a Gothic 1, where noone asked for your name at all. IIRC the opening conversation with Diego went something like,
Me: "Hi, I'm..."
Diego: "I'm not interested in who you are."
And that was that