Possession of something is, if you take a little logical leap, advocating the person that made something to make more like it. Possession of child porn is advocating the person who took the pictures to make more child porn, which is a supremely illegal act.
I realize that this is at logical odds with some other things -- i.e., does possession of a beheading video mean that you advocate more beheadings? But consider that by our society's own rules we've recognized that children have not fully formed their decision-making processes and that we've placed them under the thumb of adults. The adults must then obey some additional rules vis-a-vis children to make sure they aren't taking advantage of their relative position of power. I hate limiting free speech and cheered when the virtual porn parts of the CPPA went down, but I do think that this is a pretty reasonable concession.
I'd imagine the most applicable case law would be from Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, when the Supreme Court took down the CPPA.
First they say that there are acts which contain obscenity that are artistic, so you can't put a total ban down on everything that contains a certain kind of obscenity. The second part is the court saying that you can't draw a causal relationship between pornography and crimes committed that are of the same nature as that pornography.
So what they'd have to do is create some sort of arbitrating committee that decides on a case-by-case basis if a work has significant literary or artistic merit. First, imagine how easy that is to overturn, and second, all that would do is to require the pornography to be elevated to a bit higher of an artistic standard. You'd basically just be mandating higher quality porn and bogging down the legal system even more.
I've been thinking for a while that it's about time for laws about obscenity in private possession to get the axe altogether.
Many women's groups in the US argue that any pornography is violent and demeaning to women by its very nature.
Many women enjoy pornography. Pornography itself includes both men and women. A group of girls at my alma mater had Pornapalooza, which was just a kinky holiday celebrating the absurdity of it all. Mature adults that are comfortable with their sexuality, of either gender, are capable of watching a fictious rendering, enjoying the idea, or even acting out something that they would never actually do in reality. It's okay for two consenting adults to roleplay a violent situation, but it'll land them three years in jail if they videotape it? Gyuh-huh?
Doesn't anybody bother to look at the source data before flaming? Or is this news "too good to check"?
Not unless news bits about the PS3, various Apple rumors, and random internet sites are "too good to check." Meaning, welcome to Slashdot:P
The sad part is that people fact check when it's something they disagree with, assume it's some sort of special case when it turns out to be a gross misrepresentation, and then use that to feed their persecution complex. Partisan politics lives on. Yay America!
If they didn't agree with the country's opinion they have two choices: outmuscle them or give it up. In this case they'd either need to change the law, get full U.S. backing, or, I dunno, lead a military charge on the head of state to change regimes. In Britain I think they have a shot at the former, but only if enough Brits are really concerned about it -- I doubt an article censored in the NYT is going to be what spurs them to action. In Iran, North Korea, China... fogeddaboudit, unless the U.S. starts dropping Freedom Bombs on them.
And this all assumes that they don't agree. The law seems reasonable on the face of it.
It might be interesting, but it'd need probably as much work as it takes to just balance the game out by hand to get it up and running though. I mean, you need to know how often you'd expect each individual skill to get used for it to be effective, which varies every time you add or tweak any content in the game (monster hit harder => more heal spells get used => heal spells go down in effectiveness). Furthermore, a lot of strategies depend on skills in ways that are hard to nerf. If an attack has enough range to trivially kite a mob, you might see more people using that attack, and the system will probably nerf its damage instead of its range I'd imagine.
I don't get the impression that Sony asked them - it was more likely a fan at the con. I think it was just written like Sony executives might be hearing the question and hoping for the "right" answer."
Bingo. Reading comprehension FTW.
If someone meets all the above criteria and still isn't interested in getting a PS3 this year because of the price, then Sony has reason to be worried.
Not exactly. The Penny Arcade kind of "hardcore" is all about the games and very little about the system. HDTV is pretty, but it's a perk. Sony, in creating such a steep price and focus on the hardware, has tried to carve out an elitist niche for themselves. Will it fail? Probably. Am I going to buy one? Hell no. Is it surprising that a lot of people don't like it? No.
That's why I think this article is a bunch of hot air. Some shady tech rumors and a snippet from a convention that I could've told you months ago would be the mecca of the kinds of gamers that don't like the PS3.
PS3, win or lose, just doesn't matter enough to me or even the gaming industry for this amount of hype. Sega hardware declined and fell among all sorts of backtalk, it's gone now, the industry really hasn't changed. Systems and companies have come and gone, developers have disappeared and reformed, it's just not going to change the fundamentals of gaming. We've had enough time to know where everyone and their mother stands with the PS3, we don't need a daily update on what Pundit X thinks or if a shady guy in a back alley reports that a boondoggle on port 5 of the graphics configulator is down 10% efficiency. "I am so emphatic about not buying your upcoming product that I'm going to rant about it on my blog and post it to Slashdot!" Umm... okay?
Part of me almost thinks this is a backwards marketing scheme. Set PS3 expectations so low that when it finally comes out with some decent games that look real pretty, they'll get more credit than they deserve.
I think they're hillarious, personally, but I'm not entirely convinced that a blog entry about one of the guys behind Penny Arcade making an off-hand comment about how much something sucks is really worthwhile for anything. If Gabe or Tycho makes your decisions for you, sorry, but you're one of the sheeple.
There's decent articles on Slashdot, don't get me wrong, but there's also a billion stories along the lines of "friend-of-a-friend-of-a-pundit thinks X," where X is some arbitrary opinion or rumor. These articles are good for about one thing, which is instant, reactionary thought, which then fosters more of the same across all of Slashdot.
I mean, where's the angle on "PS3 sux rofl" that we haven't covered yet on Slashdot? What discussion is this article going to generate that hasn't already been generated? What information in this article is it important or even interesting to disseminate?
To translate into editorspeak, you bought tomatoes three months ago. They're rotten, they taste like shit, and they're attracting gnats. Why in god's name are you putting them into your omelette?
It is tough to say, but I would say you're probably part of a smaller demographic. "People that you know in real life that play WoW" is a drop in the bucket compared to even some larger guilds, let alone everyone in the game. Then again, I can't claim to know that many people out of the total number of players either.
Anyway, I think the point still stands that D&D isn't a hot MMO commodity. The basic settings and races of D&D are pretty much a page from the generic fantasy handbook. No one's going to be drawn in by a dwarf, halfling, or warforged the same way that people got drawn into SWG by Twi'leks and Zabraks. The gameplay mechanics are a bit different from most other MMOs, but not enough to make most non-diehards care.
The real draw of D&D these days would be the intimate setting and the open-endedness, in my opinion, and that is very hard to capture in an MMO. Something like Neverwinter Nights had the right idea as far as that goes. In addition, D&D hasn't seen much activity lately, at least not to draw a younger audience's attention. Compare to properties like Lord of the Rings that have experienced a revival recently.
Ya know I always find a strategy guide for things like Final Fantasy just because some puzzles are just ridiculous and I have no interest in trial & erroring for an hour when I'd rather kill monsters.
Are we talking about the same Final Fantasy? Because if you're playing for the combat and you think the "puzzles" are difficult... I think you're probably in a minority:P
Have you not experienced your classmates coming in and blabbering on and on about the puzzle they solved, or they boss they beat, only to ruin that part of the game for you?
Pop quiz: this has something to do with the discussion. True or false.
I thought it was actually a lot of fun. If they'd added more content and maybe made the engine a little bit smoother, I'd probably still be on board now.
D&D definitely isn't slam-dunk though. It and its licensed game are much less relevant to newer generations of gamers. The people who'd be likely to get into it are instead using fantasy MMOs or MUDs as an outlet, whether they're poor substitutes or not. When guilds I've in have had discussions about who plays D&D, usually it's only maybe 10% of the membership, max, and it's vastly skewed towards the 30+ demographic.
I run in very dorky circles, and I've only actually seen D&D played once when I stumbled into a group of acquaintances hiding in the community kitchen. Those are the only four people I know that have ever played a game of D&D. I'd say, bottom line, D&D is the granddaddy, and new gamers know that and have a bit of respect for it in that regard, but they're just not motivated to play it. Lord of the Rings has the potential to be the WoW killer, DDO just had the potential to be a solid niche game.
There actually are some neat shows on for kids, it's just that most of us aren't watching them. I've seen some neat shows that do have some adult humor in them on passing, but I'm a bit loathe to watch them because, well, it's Nickelodeon and I'm a twenty-something. I'd say shows like Spongebob, and a little while back, Cat Dog, are the newer answers to Ren and Stimpy, though that was a kind of humor I really didn't appreciate, to be honest.
As for other programming, it's not so terrible. Recently I've enjoyed It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia on FX, I guess Firefly's a couple years old now but it was good while it lasted, I've heard good things about Lost and 24, That 70's Show just went off the air a bit ago, Family Guy is still pretty good, Futurama is making its way back, Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Who, Stargate, Daily Show, Colbert Report, Charlie Rose, Bill Maher, The Office, Law and Order/SVU, etc. I enjoyed that Revolution series they're running on the History channel and a couple other things they do. I recently started picking up Discovery World or whatever that's called and I'm enjoying it immensely, it has some great stuff on other countries that you just don't get on the U.S. channels. You could go on about some of those shows being remakes or long-running, but let's be honest, Cheers and Mash didn't exactly have a short lifespan.
I think part of the problem is that the audience for these kinds of shows (including the kids) are moving towards on-demand computer content as a primary form of entertainment, and they aren't used to building their schedules around watching a show. The TV stations are still figuring out what to do, and in the interim, you get a lot of viewers who would normally be reading the book with an eye on the TV or something instead only tuning in if they catch a good show on in passing. I think that's why you see some shows doing great on DVD and sucking during the broadcast -- I knew about Firefly when it was on and just didn't care enough to build my schedule around catching it, but when it came out on DVD I snapped it up and enjoyed it at my own pace.
yes, and we can call that sword technique, Sword Tech Level 1. And then the next Sword Tech Level 2. All levels do is give a numerical representation to amount of skill that one has in any given skill.
Okay, you're making a pedantic semantical argument. Yeah, you can shoehorn the level terminology into any game. But the entire point of my example was that the ultimate system is one in which you gain skills in a non-linear manner, where one is only situationally better than the other. There is no Sword Tech Level 2 because which one you pick up second is different for everyone. If we assign levels to characters based on the number of skills that they have, your Level 500 character can be just as effective as my Level 5 character. If we assign levels to say how much customization you're allowed with each individual skill, level still does not tell me anything because you can manipulate that skill in a hundred different ways. I can't assign levels to monsters. Levels tell me absolutely no useful information besides roughly correlating to/played time.
The first sword attack you start with might just be a regular slash. It has 50% range, 50% recharge time, and 50% strength, just for argument's sake. As you use it more, you get the ability to customize it, but by a slider system that keeps it relatively within the same strength range. For example, maybe you've been using it for a year so that you have 50 levels of skill in that one attack. That lets you change the differentials by 50 percentage points while keeping the total the same. So maybe I tweak the skill so that it has 100% range, 25% recharge time, and 25% strength. So it's four times weaker in terms of DPS but it has twice the range -- and maybe this skill is more useful to me that way.
Now I start fighting flying creatures. Every time I fight a flying creature I accrue experience towards learning skills that are useful against them. I kill 100 of them or something, and boom, I've learned a jumping attack. This starts at 50% jump height, 50% range, 50% damage, 50% knockdown, or something like that. Once I use it enough, I can start tweaking it around. So I can give it let's say 25% height, 25% range, 100% damage, 50% knockdown. Which means it does twice the damage but I've lost half of the vertical range and half of the horizontal range. Or I could put the points into knockdown, which means it knocks the flying enemy down twice as far or keeps them stunned twice as long or something. After a while you'd develop so many different attacks that you can't even rotate them all in battle, which is the point -- more skills gives you more strategic options, not ++DPS. And there are some enemies that take more damage from the jump attack and some that take more damage from regular slash, and they're mixed in throughout the game. Maybe there's a flying creature that takes more damage from regular slash, so you want to knock them to the ground with jump attack and beat on them with regular slash.
The point, anyway, is that n00b_01 doesn't have the skill diversity of expert_1337, but they're still valuable as team members. Sword Tech 1 never gets replaced or becomes more powerful, it just gets adapted to the needs of the user. N00b_01 is the grunt that deals appreciable damage but can't do much else, while expert_1337 can knock enemies out of the air, or block their hits, or do a bunch of other things that help themselves and n00b_01 get the job done more expediently.
My favorite example of a weapon that has different kinds of settings like this is from Planetside, where there's a shotgun that lets you adjust the spread and refire rate on three settings: narrow spread and slow rate, medium spread and medium rate, wide spread and fast rate. In my example, you'd start with just medium spread and medium rate and get the ability to adjust it anywhere along the continuum as you "level."
Not that I think the rest of the post is particularly illuminating, but that last bit on Edison is just sort of incoherent. Zapping animals didn't help us invent electricity, it helped Edison push his business agenda. Our current power grids exist in spite of, not because of, Edison's little demonstrations.
Time between when the story was posted by the editors and someone blames $$president_of_the_US... blah blah blah. It doesn't help that this president has defined his administration with a War on Terror and the article is about domestic terrorism in his country.
It's true, usually after sitting there for two minutes going through options I need to get transferred around at least once, maybe even twice, to get to the person I really need to talk to. I actually found e-mail and those online tech support chats have faster and better turn-around then even using the phone these days.
So if some FBI/Hacker acts all sexy in IRC and then finally say: 'BTW, I'm 16, do you still wanna meet ?' where is the fault there ?
If you actually go ahead with the meeting or get into more explicit online contact? With you.
I respect that people have odd fetishes, just want to get their cyber on, or want to hook up with people they meet on the internet for whatever reason. But before you start slipping your virtual pants off, before the conversation even gets to addresses or phone numbers, before the first jpg gets sent out, whatever, make sure you ask what their age is and get it logged and timestamped however you can. You always see people that claim they're role playing or whatever. Well, before you start up, get a straightforward, clear-as-day, out-of-character agreement that what you're doing is just roleplaying and everyone's of consenting age.
who at worst are shown simply to possess an image of an act (not actually participated in the act) no more or less heinous than videotapes of the twin towers falling and killing 3,000 people. (i.e. the images themselves are just images, its the unprovable-without-confession arrousal that is the sick act.)
As far as I understand, the rationale behind child pornography laws isn't the arousal, it's the implicit support of child pornographers. The Supreme Court struck down the parts of COPA that made virtual child porn illegal, and I'm guessing that virtual child porn has pretty much the same "arousal factor" as the real stuff.
Real child pornography is illegal because it damages the child. Your possession of it has, in a sense, made you complicit in its creation by giving them motivation. Basically, I think it comes down to that they're really looking for the person abusing the kids, not the deviant jerking off to it, but they need some leverage over the deviant to get to the people producing the images. Also, possession of large quantities of said pornography probably has a pretty high correlation to people that directly supported the making of it with their money or have actually perpetrated such acts in reality.
I'm not sure I agree with that stance, but it is a real tricky issue since legal minors are involved. I honestly don't know how I'd fix it.
If the U.S. government is allowed to prosecute based on the fruits of information obtained by a circumvention of their laws (whether within or without their country), their laws become worthless. Absolute governmental power has the greatest potential for massive abuse, so we agree to give up some of their protection in exchange for protection from them. We take a couple negatives to mitigate the odds on huge negatives, in your language. A child molestor might abuse a couple children and scar them for life, but the government can frame an innocent man as a child pornographer, put his kids in foster homes, and lock him in jail for the rest of his life.
Slashdot Mirror
Possession of something is, if you take a little logical leap, advocating the person that made something to make more like it. Possession of child porn is advocating the person who took the pictures to make more child porn, which is a supremely illegal act.
I realize that this is at logical odds with some other things -- i.e., does possession of a beheading video mean that you advocate more beheadings? But consider that by our society's own rules we've recognized that children have not fully formed their decision-making processes and that we've placed them under the thumb of adults. The adults must then obey some additional rules vis-a-vis children to make sure they aren't taking advantage of their relative position of power. I hate limiting free speech and cheered when the virtual porn parts of the CPPA went down, but I do think that this is a pretty reasonable concession.
They had a similar law in the US that got sensibly shot down by the Supreme Court -- maybe you guys will get lucky too :P
I'd imagine the most applicable case law would be from Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, when the Supreme Court took down the CPPA.
First they say that there are acts which contain obscenity that are artistic, so you can't put a total ban down on everything that contains a certain kind of obscenity. The second part is the court saying that you can't draw a causal relationship between pornography and crimes committed that are of the same nature as that pornography.
So what they'd have to do is create some sort of arbitrating committee that decides on a case-by-case basis if a work has significant literary or artistic merit. First, imagine how easy that is to overturn, and second, all that would do is to require the pornography to be elevated to a bit higher of an artistic standard. You'd basically just be mandating higher quality porn and bogging down the legal system even more.
I've been thinking for a while that it's about time for laws about obscenity in private possession to get the axe altogether.
Many women's groups in the US argue that any pornography is violent and demeaning to women by its very nature.
Many women enjoy pornography. Pornography itself includes both men and women. A group of girls at my alma mater had Pornapalooza, which was just a kinky holiday celebrating the absurdity of it all. Mature adults that are comfortable with their sexuality, of either gender, are capable of watching a fictious rendering, enjoying the idea, or even acting out something that they would never actually do in reality. It's okay for two consenting adults to roleplay a violent situation, but it'll land them three years in jail if they videotape it? Gyuh-huh?
The real winners in the Sony-Nintendo-Microsoft battle for console supremacy: on-line advertisers and opinion columnists.
No shit. And the websites that repost their drivel.
My life for Aiur!
Doesn't anybody bother to look at the source data before flaming? Or is this news "too good to check"?
:P
Not unless news bits about the PS3, various Apple rumors, and random internet sites are "too good to check." Meaning, welcome to Slashdot
The sad part is that people fact check when it's something they disagree with, assume it's some sort of special case when it turns out to be a gross misrepresentation, and then use that to feed their persecution complex. Partisan politics lives on. Yay America!
If they didn't agree with the country's opinion they have two choices: outmuscle them or give it up. In this case they'd either need to change the law, get full U.S. backing, or, I dunno, lead a military charge on the head of state to change regimes. In Britain I think they have a shot at the former, but only if enough Brits are really concerned about it -- I doubt an article censored in the NYT is going to be what spurs them to action. In Iran, North Korea, China... fogeddaboudit, unless the U.S. starts dropping Freedom Bombs on them.
And this all assumes that they don't agree. The law seems reasonable on the face of it.
It might be interesting, but it'd need probably as much work as it takes to just balance the game out by hand to get it up and running though. I mean, you need to know how often you'd expect each individual skill to get used for it to be effective, which varies every time you add or tweak any content in the game (monster hit harder => more heal spells get used => heal spells go down in effectiveness). Furthermore, a lot of strategies depend on skills in ways that are hard to nerf. If an attack has enough range to trivially kite a mob, you might see more people using that attack, and the system will probably nerf its damage instead of its range I'd imagine.
I don't get the impression that Sony asked them - it was more likely a fan at the con. I think it was just written like Sony executives might be hearing the question and hoping for the "right" answer."
Bingo. Reading comprehension FTW.
If someone meets all the above criteria and still isn't interested in getting a PS3 this year because of the price, then Sony has reason to be worried.
Not exactly. The Penny Arcade kind of "hardcore" is all about the games and very little about the system. HDTV is pretty, but it's a perk. Sony, in creating such a steep price and focus on the hardware, has tried to carve out an elitist niche for themselves. Will it fail? Probably. Am I going to buy one? Hell no. Is it surprising that a lot of people don't like it? No.
That's why I think this article is a bunch of hot air. Some shady tech rumors and a snippet from a convention that I could've told you months ago would be the mecca of the kinds of gamers that don't like the PS3.
PS3, win or lose, just doesn't matter enough to me or even the gaming industry for this amount of hype. Sega hardware declined and fell among all sorts of backtalk, it's gone now, the industry really hasn't changed. Systems and companies have come and gone, developers have disappeared and reformed, it's just not going to change the fundamentals of gaming. We've had enough time to know where everyone and their mother stands with the PS3, we don't need a daily update on what Pundit X thinks or if a shady guy in a back alley reports that a boondoggle on port 5 of the graphics configulator is down 10% efficiency. "I am so emphatic about not buying your upcoming product that I'm going to rant about it on my blog and post it to Slashdot!" Umm... okay?
Part of me almost thinks this is a backwards marketing scheme. Set PS3 expectations so low that when it finally comes out with some decent games that look real pretty, they'll get more credit than they deserve.
I think they're hillarious, personally, but I'm not entirely convinced that a blog entry about one of the guys behind Penny Arcade making an off-hand comment about how much something sucks is really worthwhile for anything. If Gabe or Tycho makes your decisions for you, sorry, but you're one of the sheeple.
There's decent articles on Slashdot, don't get me wrong, but there's also a billion stories along the lines of "friend-of-a-friend-of-a-pundit thinks X," where X is some arbitrary opinion or rumor. These articles are good for about one thing, which is instant, reactionary thought, which then fosters more of the same across all of Slashdot.
I mean, where's the angle on "PS3 sux rofl" that we haven't covered yet on Slashdot? What discussion is this article going to generate that hasn't already been generated? What information in this article is it important or even interesting to disseminate?
To translate into editorspeak, you bought tomatoes three months ago. They're rotten, they taste like shit, and they're attracting gnats. Why in god's name are you putting them into your omelette?
It is tough to say, but I would say you're probably part of a smaller demographic. "People that you know in real life that play WoW" is a drop in the bucket compared to even some larger guilds, let alone everyone in the game. Then again, I can't claim to know that many people out of the total number of players either.
Anyway, I think the point still stands that D&D isn't a hot MMO commodity. The basic settings and races of D&D are pretty much a page from the generic fantasy handbook. No one's going to be drawn in by a dwarf, halfling, or warforged the same way that people got drawn into SWG by Twi'leks and Zabraks. The gameplay mechanics are a bit different from most other MMOs, but not enough to make most non-diehards care.
The real draw of D&D these days would be the intimate setting and the open-endedness, in my opinion, and that is very hard to capture in an MMO. Something like Neverwinter Nights had the right idea as far as that goes. In addition, D&D hasn't seen much activity lately, at least not to draw a younger audience's attention. Compare to properties like Lord of the Rings that have experienced a revival recently.
Ya know I always find a strategy guide for things like Final Fantasy just because some puzzles are just ridiculous and I have no interest in trial & erroring for an hour when I'd rather kill monsters.
:P
Are we talking about the same Final Fantasy? Because if you're playing for the combat and you think the "puzzles" are difficult... I think you're probably in a minority
Have you not experienced your classmates coming in and blabbering on and on about the puzzle they solved, or they boss they beat, only to ruin that part of the game for you?
Pop quiz: this has something to do with the discussion. True or false.
I thought it was actually a lot of fun. If they'd added more content and maybe made the engine a little bit smoother, I'd probably still be on board now.
D&D definitely isn't slam-dunk though. It and its licensed game are much less relevant to newer generations of gamers. The people who'd be likely to get into it are instead using fantasy MMOs or MUDs as an outlet, whether they're poor substitutes or not. When guilds I've in have had discussions about who plays D&D, usually it's only maybe 10% of the membership, max, and it's vastly skewed towards the 30+ demographic.
I run in very dorky circles, and I've only actually seen D&D played once when I stumbled into a group of acquaintances hiding in the community kitchen. Those are the only four people I know that have ever played a game of D&D. I'd say, bottom line, D&D is the granddaddy, and new gamers know that and have a bit of respect for it in that regard, but they're just not motivated to play it. Lord of the Rings has the potential to be the WoW killer, DDO just had the potential to be a solid niche game.
There actually are some neat shows on for kids, it's just that most of us aren't watching them. I've seen some neat shows that do have some adult humor in them on passing, but I'm a bit loathe to watch them because, well, it's Nickelodeon and I'm a twenty-something. I'd say shows like Spongebob, and a little while back, Cat Dog, are the newer answers to Ren and Stimpy, though that was a kind of humor I really didn't appreciate, to be honest.
As for other programming, it's not so terrible. Recently I've enjoyed It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia on FX, I guess Firefly's a couple years old now but it was good while it lasted, I've heard good things about Lost and 24, That 70's Show just went off the air a bit ago, Family Guy is still pretty good, Futurama is making its way back, Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Who, Stargate, Daily Show, Colbert Report, Charlie Rose, Bill Maher, The Office, Law and Order/SVU, etc. I enjoyed that Revolution series they're running on the History channel and a couple other things they do. I recently started picking up Discovery World or whatever that's called and I'm enjoying it immensely, it has some great stuff on other countries that you just don't get on the U.S. channels. You could go on about some of those shows being remakes or long-running, but let's be honest, Cheers and Mash didn't exactly have a short lifespan.
I think part of the problem is that the audience for these kinds of shows (including the kids) are moving towards on-demand computer content as a primary form of entertainment, and they aren't used to building their schedules around watching a show. The TV stations are still figuring out what to do, and in the interim, you get a lot of viewers who would normally be reading the book with an eye on the TV or something instead only tuning in if they catch a good show on in passing. I think that's why you see some shows doing great on DVD and sucking during the broadcast -- I knew about Firefly when it was on and just didn't care enough to build my schedule around catching it, but when it came out on DVD I snapped it up and enjoyed it at my own pace.
yes, and we can call that sword technique, Sword Tech Level 1. And then the next Sword Tech Level 2. All levels do is give a numerical representation to amount of skill that one has in any given skill.
/played time.
Okay, you're making a pedantic semantical argument. Yeah, you can shoehorn the level terminology into any game. But the entire point of my example was that the ultimate system is one in which you gain skills in a non-linear manner, where one is only situationally better than the other. There is no Sword Tech Level 2 because which one you pick up second is different for everyone. If we assign levels to characters based on the number of skills that they have, your Level 500 character can be just as effective as my Level 5 character. If we assign levels to say how much customization you're allowed with each individual skill, level still does not tell me anything because you can manipulate that skill in a hundred different ways. I can't assign levels to monsters. Levels tell me absolutely no useful information besides roughly correlating to
The first sword attack you start with might just be a regular slash. It has 50% range, 50% recharge time, and 50% strength, just for argument's sake. As you use it more, you get the ability to customize it, but by a slider system that keeps it relatively within the same strength range. For example, maybe you've been using it for a year so that you have 50 levels of skill in that one attack. That lets you change the differentials by 50 percentage points while keeping the total the same. So maybe I tweak the skill so that it has 100% range, 25% recharge time, and 25% strength. So it's four times weaker in terms of DPS but it has twice the range -- and maybe this skill is more useful to me that way.
Now I start fighting flying creatures. Every time I fight a flying creature I accrue experience towards learning skills that are useful against them. I kill 100 of them or something, and boom, I've learned a jumping attack. This starts at 50% jump height, 50% range, 50% damage, 50% knockdown, or something like that. Once I use it enough, I can start tweaking it around. So I can give it let's say 25% height, 25% range, 100% damage, 50% knockdown. Which means it does twice the damage but I've lost half of the vertical range and half of the horizontal range. Or I could put the points into knockdown, which means it knocks the flying enemy down twice as far or keeps them stunned twice as long or something. After a while you'd develop so many different attacks that you can't even rotate them all in battle, which is the point -- more skills gives you more strategic options, not ++DPS. And there are some enemies that take more damage from the jump attack and some that take more damage from regular slash, and they're mixed in throughout the game. Maybe there's a flying creature that takes more damage from regular slash, so you want to knock them to the ground with jump attack and beat on them with regular slash.
The point, anyway, is that n00b_01 doesn't have the skill diversity of expert_1337, but they're still valuable as team members. Sword Tech 1 never gets replaced or becomes more powerful, it just gets adapted to the needs of the user. N00b_01 is the grunt that deals appreciable damage but can't do much else, while expert_1337 can knock enemies out of the air, or block their hits, or do a bunch of other things that help themselves and n00b_01 get the job done more expediently.
My favorite example of a weapon that has different kinds of settings like this is from Planetside, where there's a shotgun that lets you adjust the spread and refire rate on three settings: narrow spread and slow rate, medium spread and medium rate, wide spread and fast rate. In my example, you'd start with just medium spread and medium rate and get the ability to adjust it anywhere along the continuum as you "level."
... *stops in the middle of writing his reply to the GP*
Not that I think the rest of the post is particularly illuminating, but that last bit on Edison is just sort of incoherent. Zapping animals didn't help us invent electricity, it helped Edison push his business agenda. Our current power grids exist in spite of, not because of, Edison's little demonstrations.
Time between when the story was posted by the editors and someone blames $$president_of_the_US... blah blah blah. It doesn't help that this president has defined his administration with a War on Terror and the article is about domestic terrorism in his country.
It's true, usually after sitting there for two minutes going through options I need to get transferred around at least once, maybe even twice, to get to the person I really need to talk to. I actually found e-mail and those online tech support chats have faster and better turn-around then even using the phone these days.
So if some FBI/Hacker acts all sexy in IRC and then finally say: 'BTW, I'm 16, do you still wanna meet ?' where is the fault there ?
If you actually go ahead with the meeting or get into more explicit online contact? With you.
I respect that people have odd fetishes, just want to get their cyber on, or want to hook up with people they meet on the internet for whatever reason. But before you start slipping your virtual pants off, before the conversation even gets to addresses or phone numbers, before the first jpg gets sent out, whatever, make sure you ask what their age is and get it logged and timestamped however you can. You always see people that claim they're role playing or whatever. Well, before you start up, get a straightforward, clear-as-day, out-of-character agreement that what you're doing is just roleplaying and everyone's of consenting age.
The entire point of this article is that the information was gathered by committing a crime.
who at worst are shown simply to possess an image of an act (not actually participated in the act) no more or less heinous than videotapes of the twin towers falling and killing 3,000 people. (i.e. the images themselves are just images, its the unprovable-without-confession arrousal that is the sick act.)
As far as I understand, the rationale behind child pornography laws isn't the arousal, it's the implicit support of child pornographers. The Supreme Court struck down the parts of COPA that made virtual child porn illegal, and I'm guessing that virtual child porn has pretty much the same "arousal factor" as the real stuff.
Real child pornography is illegal because it damages the child. Your possession of it has, in a sense, made you complicit in its creation by giving them motivation. Basically, I think it comes down to that they're really looking for the person abusing the kids, not the deviant jerking off to it, but they need some leverage over the deviant to get to the people producing the images. Also, possession of large quantities of said pornography probably has a pretty high correlation to people that directly supported the making of it with their money or have actually perpetrated such acts in reality.
I'm not sure I agree with that stance, but it is a real tricky issue since legal minors are involved. I honestly don't know how I'd fix it.
If the U.S. government is allowed to prosecute based on the fruits of information obtained by a circumvention of their laws (whether within or without their country), their laws become worthless. Absolute governmental power has the greatest potential for massive abuse, so we agree to give up some of their protection in exchange for protection from them. We take a couple negatives to mitigate the odds on huge negatives, in your language. A child molestor might abuse a couple children and scar them for life, but the government can frame an innocent man as a child pornographer, put his kids in foster homes, and lock him in jail for the rest of his life.