Hey glad there is someone with a sane head out there. I 100% agree with you. The movie was great in that it was... FUN. It was also timely and perfect in what it did. Like you said, it breathed new life into star trek, it captured allll the nostalgia and star trek jokes and threw them in the movie (live long and propser, vulcan neck bench, damnit i'm a doctor not a, i'm giving it all shes got, red shirt destruction (my wife and i were the only ones to laugh out loud in the theater when he got waxed in.2 seconds), and on and on. So you felt like watching a 'star trek'. Loved the little detail with muffling sound in space.
All in all it was just a well done movie, and cleverly set up a few 'torch passing' scenes for actors and will allow them to move on and create new star trek movies without having to worry about stepping on any toes with the previous established cannon.
Fun movie, let go, enjoy the movie for what it is, and be glad enough people like it that star trek won't keep nosediving to oblivion like it has been.
The biggest offence he commited in my mind was writing feast for crows:( Gah. The first 3 books remain my favorate of all time, and this is after having read a ton of other fantasy books. I think he was on the right path, but in that 4 year wait he got big, and probably got leeway from editors, and decided to split the book off into the next 2 books, feast and dance. What a mistake, feast sucked so hard, and to have waited 4 years for it, that bastard.
But really, he's only a bastard cause the first 3 were so fantastic and I want mooore:(
Rushing... I think the term actually came back from Warcraft 2 via kali. The term first got coined on shlonglor's famous war 2 page when the medium resource 7 grunt/footman rush was introduced. It was just called "Grunt Rush", and involved building no town hall but instead making 7 grunts, then immediate proceeding to your opponent and beating them with their pants down.
The strat worked because at the time each start spot was tied to your color, so you knew just where a person was, and even then still worked sometimes with proper scouting.
Universally it was just considered bad form since games were boring, and hence the rule "thf" or town hall first, was born for war2 games.
Eventually the term grunt rush become more and more diluted to just mean playing aggressively (something any good player would do) and attacking early with grunts. Weaker players would sometimes claim "ogre rules", to build only your tech 2 guys first, or just say "no grunt rushing".
Further on down the line, as RTS games become more popular, and the general population learned how to play them properly, the term has further diluted to mean 'hurry up and make something', hence zerg rush, zealot rush, mutie rush, basically any aggressive strat to go right for a particular unit.
haha subspace, biggest shit talking community in history. Amazing game... though SSCV (or whatever standard subspace rules) zones never hit critical mass enough for me to ever enjoy it like it was back in its hey day, or i'd be on it everyday... Give me back t-20 battles, please!
What bliz is doing in wotlk continues a trend of what they've done with the game since it's birth, ironing out the MMO formula and making it accessible to a larger number of people.
They really just passed over the playstyle of the game so its not too much work to play. They do keep making the game more and more accessible to people, and I don't know why people think it is a bad thing.
What is funny is that those games that have super tough end came content (tough in the sense of finding 25+ capable players to be the same place at the same time) are games that I quit when I hit the end game. In wow, I can get in and see the big bad guy at the end and be reasonably challenged.
Why is this a bad thing. People are mad they are able to clear nax? DAMNIT I SAW KEL AND DOWNED HIM!! THIS GAME IS STUPID?
Really? You really preferred having an instance or zone looming over your head you would never see?
I mean, wow right now is perfect for an mmo. Forget this causal hardcore bs. Firstly, 4 tanking classes that can tank all encounters. Great design, now i can play with my tank friend. ALL dps classes are doing comparable dps at the same gear level. All healers can handle most encounters. This means I get to play with my friends. Why do you not want to play with your friends?
I can go to all intances and down it. Yes, nax was hard, we had to learn it and it took a 2 weeks before my guild could clear it.
Ulduar is hard. It demands the entire raid understanding what is going on in the fight and avoiding mechanics as the healing and dps requirements are really tight. The tanks have lots of interesting things to do (esp OT's) that are key to the fight. They have eased up on it this week, but it is still a challenging instance with great pacing.
If you want something you'll ever see, they have hard modes. Great! Seriously this game keeps evolving into something I can play casually and really grow and see all the new content without it taking over my life.
Take all that away, you still have amazing artwork coupled with fun skills and abilities in classes that all play much differently from one another, and it is just a pleasure to be in the game world.
I have yet to see an MMO come out that offers anything slightly unique to the standard tank, dps, healer triangle all mmo's have. If they are all the same gameplay, why would you not take the most polished one?
Yeah I feel like SL really dropped the ball, they are slow to introduce new tech. I think I started looking at it when it hit the news and still think the concept of it is fascinating and a great start to something, but it really just smells of wasted potential when you take a look at it now a days. Sure they put some new shaders in there and physics models, but everything still runs slow as hell, the avatars are primitave as hell (sure the 3d modelers/texture people have gotten WAY WAY better at hiding it) but is still the same old school avatar it always was. Animation implementation is awkward at best, and there are just way too many band aid fixes to things.
I found that time period in shadowbane to be a slowing of performance until the inevitable sb.exe error and crash to desktop. That's the only reason I left the game:(
I think it is and always will be that way. I worked at a grocery store and then a retail store growing up and experienced much the same as you, but for all the memorable mean people there were just as many memorable nice people. I think it is largely a product of the population density, culture, and location of where you are working. My retail experience was in a 'small town usa' so to speak, while living now in jersey, just seems a different atmosphere.
I try to leave a 20% tip as a baseline for people, but do disagree with your and generally people who have worked for tip's, views on tipping. Tipping in the US is fucked. It would make more sense to raise the menu prices slightly, pay the waitstaff a reasonable wage, and tip ONLY when someone goes above and beyond their job for you.
Also remember that while the waitstaff is working hard for their money, so have the customers worked hard for theirs, and shouldn't have to part with because a person managed to take 5 seconds of notes and carry food ~20 feet from the kitchen to the table. I realize at 'upscale' places the waitstaff will try to go above and beyond to justify the insane markup on the food being served, but still, that should be reflected in their salary rather then the amount of tip given.
I notice many tip waged people get so mad that people aren't willing to part with 2 + dollars over the already inflated prices on things they are paying for. Here, buy this 8 dollar shot, and you better fucking tip me 2 dollars on top of that for me walking 2 feet to the side, pulling a bottle out and tipping a few ounces of liquid into it then placing it on the counter....
Shrug, it'll always be a war of perspectives, as most of life is.
Right, this seems exactly my problem. I can control how many text messages I use (to an extent, if i get blitzed by someone on my phone I can get f'ed real fast with no way to stop it), I can control how many minutes I'm talking.
On my internet, I can't control the amount of stuff that gets sent to my pc, nor do I have a way to reasonably judge the amount of bandwidth I'm using. Someone sends you a youtube link, woops, it is the wrong video I realize 30 sec in. It doesn't matter cause I just preloaded the entire thing even though I hit the stop button.
My browser is being nice and downloading in the background all the links on the page I'm at so I can surf around faster, woops.
I just got some spyware on my pc and am a robot in a ddos attack, woops.
Every time I turn on XYZ app it downloads updates automatically.
There are SO many ways for apps to reach out to the net and use bandwith. To all of a sudden go from a climate where you have unlimited transfer AMOUNTS and to cap it, and charge for it, is sheer insanity.
The worst part is what do time warner users have as an alternative broadband option if they do not want to use the service any longer? Is there even one? DSL, verizon fios, back to modem?!?
As was said it is our own press that release things.
But again the problem is the soldiers. They are 18 year old kids, most of them from low poverty (generalizing but that seems to be the prevalent stat) areas, given assault rifles, essentially turned into police in an occupied country with probably no training what so ever. God, you see kids online power tripping when they can beat most of the people in a video game, how do you think they act when they hold ALL the power in their interactions with the population?
On top of this, they get picked of slowly one by one by god knows who, they have no targets in front of their face to take their anger out on, and hell, they are probably bored most of the time.
Don't expect to see press footage of the iraq cops full of holes cause they didn't put their guns down fast enough, or the family who's car got chewed up by 20 marines at a check point cause he drove up too fast and one guy panicked and shot, so then everybody shot, or catching a guy with an ied and the 5 minutes 'with the boys' he got. They won't let press near those things, and why would they?
You put a bunch of young kids with guns, in a f'ed up situation, where they are already alienated with the population, whom you cant tell whos going to shake your hand or try to drive a car bomb into your check point, or tell them they cant shoot at their enemies who've been putting bullets down range on you from tress...hell yeah bad shit will happen.
Spend 5 minutes talking to a marine and he'll probably have 10 to 15 stories of crazy shit like that happening. But hey, for every f'ed up situation happening in iraq, I bet you'd be surprised about the shit going down in your neighbors basement.
I am pretty ignorant of what goes on in the security world and things along the nature of vpn, certificates, etc etc, so perhaps this is over my head.
Its funny, I guess I would consider myself a somewhat saavy user, but really, I have never understood certificates, or found a place to explain how they worked. Watching the presentation linked above, makes me even more doubtful of them. I guess ultimately I feel that I can't really trust anything that comes at me over the internet. I don't spend any time knowing where my network traffic goes once it enters my comcast network. I don't know the "usual" hops it should be taking. It's gone once it comes out.
So I guess being ignorant of their workings, has always led me to believe that, if a computer is sitting between me and my destination, it can do whatever it wants to that traffic, including sending me a 'certificate'.
Ultimately it's all bits right? Just 1's and 0's. It's all sitting there in an ip packet, waiting to be pulled out. Encrypted or not, its still voltage on the line, or light, or whatever. What makes this set of data coming down more "real" then that set of data?
I guess if I knew more, I could answer that with question by saying things like HTTPS , SSL, public/private key, VPN, or whatever other technologies exist out there. But I guess in my head I know that ultimately, they are bits, and you'll never really know where its going from. Just kinda cast the die out there if I use say online banking, and see what happens, and just trust that if I see that my bank account is going haywire, I can call the company and fix it.
But this whole SSL attack seems based on the fact that via arp poisoning or whatever, it is trivial to plug into a network in which you understand the routing protocols, send out some stuff, and start parsing traffic.
That is really where the security work should go, but again, ultimately, there probably isn't a good working solution there, and like anything, would be an arms race again.
Anyway, pretty interesting presentation and vulnerability demonstration.
One of the reasons I don't subscribe to xbox live gold is that in the pc gaming world, the precident has already been set. Starting early on with ipx --> tpc emulators like kali, and most notably battle.net arriving on the scene, just about every major game has FREE online play. No reason you should need an xbox live subscription.
Even games like battlefield where you have "official servers" it is still someone paying a fee to EA to be "official" hosting on their own machines. The cost of the player is nothing, and should be nothing.
Perhaps there is some reason for it. I can appreciate that I'm sure most of the net code for a company is already written in, and interoperability between games using xbox live is probably a very nice feature to have, yet, I do not see why players should have to shoulder this cost.
Nothing new here. Playing on Kali servers I remember when "winnuke" got discovered and passed around. We all had fun for a week or two nailing each other with it. There will always be script kiddies!:)
Hilarious. When you rate a players skill at the game it is usually in pvp or a raid setting. QH will effect none of your abilities to perform in this department. Lore... Wow lore is a joke, its a hodge podge of popular culture (i like this) with a bunch of stuff tacked on from warcraft 3. There really was no lore in war1 or 2... just some vague generic stories in the instruction manual. Pretty much all the chars were added in from war3. If you've played war3, you know the story.
Moreover, not until northrend did you even really get lore mixed up with quests. Granted there would be one or two quest chains here or there that might be SLIGHTLY interesting, but if you want story, an MMO will NEVER be the place to go for that.
It is also funny that if you read the quest text, there is a long block describing the quest, followed by a short sentence saying "go kill 3 murlocks north of town". Any brain dead idiot can read that and figure out where to go. Wow even gives you a map with an arrow to tell you right where you are.
Hell, with tethered mobs, you don't even have to look where you are going. Half the time I run places , oh wait, fly over everything, but when I was questing, I just have the map up covering the whole screen and run that way. Mobs hit me but you just run away from them, no big deal. No need to care.
I just find it hilarious people holding up their nose at the questhelper addon like leveling up and questing in wow is such a deeper, more challenging experience without questhelper.
News flash, all the stuff that makes wow great is what makes it accessable and easy so that anybody can play it, see the content, and have fun. That is why I still play wow. While I enjoyed my first EQ1 trek from freeport to quenos, with my binder of eqatalas maps, you really only can experience that once and still enjoy it.
Anyway for myself, I find no difference between using QH or spending 10 seconds to scan the quest text. It is pretty much the same thing.
I agree fully. I have never played eve online. I just kinda keep up with news stories from it, occasionally read an article or two about whats going on in the game...cause there really is no other MMO like it. I read the summery/article and understood the scope of the news of it within the game immediately. It IS news (for nerds).
Even with just a small understanding of how the game works and who BoB was/is, I think eve is going to be a VERY interesting place in the next few days. I'm pretty glad there was a story about it.
Crimsonland... Reflexive, are they the same publisher for this game? If you haven't seen it, i highly suggest it, it is a pretty amazingly addictive small game. I don't usually purchase small games like this but after about 10 minutes with it the guy had my 20 dollars.
I wonder if with some bigger backing there might be another version of this game, which could only be a good thing.
I agree with you much on that last statement. That hyper paranoid thing thinking all laughter is directed at you, esp that insatiable giggle laugh that is the 'laughing at someone/thing' tone. Took me a long while to get over that and even to this day at almost 30 years old do I occasional get a twitch when I hear just the right pitched laughter.
As you said everybody has their breaking point. I just wish that that breaking point would always come out in an explosion of fists rather then guns.
I wonder if high school, or any other painful social situation is something we really need to all go through to learn how to be social? I think much of the restraint adults have in terms of making personal comments or picking on other's differences comes from sympathy from having it done to them, or perhaps it is just the greater understanding that not everything different is to be ridiculed.
I don't know, it seems to me that as we "mature" it is just a process of getting hurt and upset a bunch of times and recovering from it to the point that we can deal with life without it crippling us. Confidence is not confidence unless it stands strong in the face of ridicule, that sort of thing./ramble ramble
Gamespot has an article on these 3d glasses as well. One of the screenshots shows the 3d lenses fitting over a pair of standard eye glasses, so unless you have giant coke bottle glasses, you should be good to go.
Not every game is for everyone. If you don't like the early levels of wow, but think the gameplay in general is for you, try another class. If you still don't like it, stop playing! I enjoy wow for the game mechanics of killing things as my class. I find it fun to auto attack things, watching damage numbers scroll by, while hitting abilities to do more damage. I enjoy when it gets out of hand and you end up fighgint 2 or 3 guys and living through it. That's fun and relaxing for me. So I play a bunch.
If you don't like that, then you definitely won't like the later content.
While I agree with the replies to this more then the original post...this IS a new angle to think about in a game. If you really want to f with the players head...all those scripted sequences where you see your buddy being dragged out or hit in the head... how about one where you KNOW your enemy, like you had been following his story in cut scenes and you know hes out there... or not even that, have you stumble onto a collection area for enemy wounded, or how about you are firing into some cover, and you end up seeing 2 enemies dragging a downed friend out towards the back line...
Basically do what they do to generate sympathy on your side, on the enemy side as well. Would be an interesting take.
Re:Does it always produce true responses?
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Torture in Games
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I recall a random tv show, one of those things that reports weird cases.
I am going to badly m aul the details of it, but here is a somewhat summary:
The case was something like murder/rape of a young girl. I believe there were 4 friends who were tried for it. What happened was the police kept the kids in the questioning room for like 20+ hours non stop. At the end I think some of them signed confessions to the murder and admitted guilt.
Only, several days later, they found the real killer, had evidence, pretty much had the guy who really did it. But what happened was due to the kid signing a confession, he was tried and found guilty, when in reality he had just signed to make the "torture" stop. In this case it wasn't the literal hot poker medieval thing, but a similar thing of caging someone relentlessly questioning a person.
But yeah, I don't know of any studies about the effectiveness of torture or whatever. Works in movies a lot though;)
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Hey glad there is someone with a sane head out there. I 100% agree with you. The movie was great in that it was... FUN. It was also timely and perfect in what it did. Like you said, it breathed new life into star trek, it captured allll the nostalgia and star trek jokes and threw them in the movie (live long and propser, vulcan neck bench, damnit i'm a doctor not a, i'm giving it all shes got, red shirt destruction (my wife and i were the only ones to laugh out loud in the theater when he got waxed in .2 seconds), and on and on. So you felt like watching a 'star trek'. Loved the little detail with muffling sound in space.
All in all it was just a well done movie, and cleverly set up a few 'torch passing' scenes for actors and will allow them to move on and create new star trek movies without having to worry about stepping on any toes with the previous established cannon.
Fun movie, let go, enjoy the movie for what it is, and be glad enough people like it that star trek won't keep nosediving to oblivion like it has been.
I hate people.
"could do without the softporn."
But you are ok with everything else in the book. I'm glad they chalked it full of violence, but man, hes just pushing it by including sex.
What. The. Fuck. is wrong with this fucking country?
The biggest offence he commited in my mind was writing feast for crows :( Gah. The first 3 books remain my favorate of all time, and this is after having read a ton of other fantasy books. I think he was on the right path, but in that 4 year wait he got big, and probably got leeway from editors, and decided to split the book off into the next 2 books, feast and dance. What a mistake, feast sucked so hard, and to have waited 4 years for it, that bastard.
But really, he's only a bastard cause the first 3 were so fantastic and I want mooore :(
I'm going to date myself more.
Rushing... I think the term actually came back from Warcraft 2 via kali. The term first got coined on shlonglor's famous war 2 page when the medium resource 7 grunt/footman rush was introduced. It was just called "Grunt Rush", and involved building no town hall but instead making 7 grunts, then immediate proceeding to your opponent and beating them with their pants down.
The strat worked because at the time each start spot was tied to your color, so you knew just where a person was, and even then still worked sometimes with proper scouting.
Universally it was just considered bad form since games were boring, and hence the rule "thf" or town hall first, was born for war2 games.
Eventually the term grunt rush become more and more diluted to just mean playing aggressively (something any good player would do) and attacking early with grunts. Weaker players would sometimes claim "ogre rules", to build only your tech 2 guys first, or just say "no grunt rushing".
Further on down the line, as RTS games become more popular, and the general population learned how to play them properly, the term has further diluted to mean 'hurry up and make something', hence zerg rush, zealot rush, mutie rush, basically any aggressive strat to go right for a particular unit.
I guess you can safely get off my lawn now :(
haha subspace, biggest shit talking community in history. Amazing game... though SSCV (or whatever standard subspace rules) zones never hit critical mass enough for me to ever enjoy it like it was back in its hey day, or i'd be on it everyday... Give me back t-20 battles, please!
You guys seem bitter. (2 replies here)
What bliz is doing in wotlk continues a trend of what they've done with the game since it's birth, ironing out the MMO formula and making it accessible to a larger number of people.
They really just passed over the playstyle of the game so its not too much work to play. They do keep making the game more and more accessible to people, and I don't know why people think it is a bad thing.
What is funny is that those games that have super tough end came content (tough in the sense of finding 25+ capable players to be the same place at the same time) are games that I quit when I hit the end game. In wow, I can get in and see the big bad guy at the end and be reasonably challenged.
Why is this a bad thing. People are mad they are able to clear nax? DAMNIT I SAW KEL AND DOWNED HIM!! THIS GAME IS STUPID?
Really? You really preferred having an instance or zone looming over your head you would never see?
I mean, wow right now is perfect for an mmo. Forget this causal hardcore bs. Firstly, 4 tanking classes that can tank all encounters. Great design, now i can play with my tank friend. ALL dps classes are doing comparable dps at the same gear level. All healers can handle most encounters. This means I get to play with my friends. Why do you not want to play with your friends?
I can go to all intances and down it. Yes, nax was hard, we had to learn it and it took a 2 weeks before my guild could clear it.
Ulduar is hard. It demands the entire raid understanding what is going on in the fight and avoiding mechanics as the healing and dps requirements are really tight. The tanks have lots of interesting things to do (esp OT's) that are key to the fight. They have eased up on it this week, but it is still a challenging instance with great pacing.
If you want something you'll ever see, they have hard modes. Great! Seriously this game keeps evolving into something I can play casually and really grow and see all the new content without it taking over my life.
Take all that away, you still have amazing artwork coupled with fun skills and abilities in classes that all play much differently from one another, and it is just a pleasure to be in the game world.
I have yet to see an MMO come out that offers anything slightly unique to the standard tank, dps, healer triangle all mmo's have. If they are all the same gameplay, why would you not take the most polished one?
The sad thing is this is rated as funny.
Yeah I feel like SL really dropped the ball, they are slow to introduce new tech. I think I started looking at it when it hit the news and still think the concept of it is fascinating and a great start to something, but it really just smells of wasted potential when you take a look at it now a days. Sure they put some new shaders in there and physics models, but everything still runs slow as hell, the avatars are primitave as hell (sure the 3d modelers/texture people have gotten WAY WAY better at hiding it) but is still the same old school avatar it always was. Animation implementation is awkward at best, and there are just way too many band aid fixes to things.
I found that time period in shadowbane to be a slowing of performance until the inevitable sb.exe error and crash to desktop. That's the only reason I left the game :(
I think it is and always will be that way. I worked at a grocery store and then a retail store growing up and experienced much the same as you, but for all the memorable mean people there were just as many memorable nice people. I think it is largely a product of the population density, culture, and location of where you are working. My retail experience was in a 'small town usa' so to speak, while living now in jersey, just seems a different atmosphere.
I try to leave a 20% tip as a baseline for people, but do disagree with your and generally people who have worked for tip's, views on tipping. Tipping in the US is fucked. It would make more sense to raise the menu prices slightly, pay the waitstaff a reasonable wage, and tip ONLY when someone goes above and beyond their job for you.
Also remember that while the waitstaff is working hard for their money, so have the customers worked hard for theirs, and shouldn't have to part with because a person managed to take 5 seconds of notes and carry food ~20 feet from the kitchen to the table. I realize at 'upscale' places the waitstaff will try to go above and beyond to justify the insane markup on the food being served, but still, that should be reflected in their salary rather then the amount of tip given.
I notice many tip waged people get so mad that people aren't willing to part with 2 + dollars over the already inflated prices on things they are paying for. Here, buy this 8 dollar shot, and you better fucking tip me 2 dollars on top of that for me walking 2 feet to the side, pulling a bottle out and tipping a few ounces of liquid into it then placing it on the counter....
Shrug, it'll always be a war of perspectives, as most of life is.
Right, this seems exactly my problem. I can control how many text messages I use (to an extent, if i get blitzed by someone on my phone I can get f'ed real fast with no way to stop it), I can control how many minutes I'm talking.
On my internet, I can't control the amount of stuff that gets sent to my pc, nor do I have a way to reasonably judge the amount of bandwidth I'm using. Someone sends you a youtube link, woops, it is the wrong video I realize 30 sec in. It doesn't matter cause I just preloaded the entire thing even though I hit the stop button.
My browser is being nice and downloading in the background all the links on the page I'm at so I can surf around faster, woops.
I just got some spyware on my pc and am a robot in a ddos attack, woops.
Every time I turn on XYZ app it downloads updates automatically.
There are SO many ways for apps to reach out to the net and use bandwith. To all of a sudden go from a climate where you have unlimited transfer AMOUNTS and to cap it, and charge for it, is sheer insanity.
The worst part is what do time warner users have as an alternative broadband option if they do not want to use the service any longer? Is there even one? DSL, verizon fios, back to modem?!?
Edit, i meant the problem "ISN'T" the soldiers. I guess I should reread comments.
As was said it is our own press that release things.
But again the problem is the soldiers. They are 18 year old kids, most of them from low poverty (generalizing but that seems to be the prevalent stat) areas, given assault rifles, essentially turned into police in an occupied country with probably no training what so ever. God, you see kids online power tripping when they can beat most of the people in a video game, how do you think they act when they hold ALL the power in their interactions with the population?
On top of this, they get picked of slowly one by one by god knows who, they have no targets in front of their face to take their anger out on, and hell, they are probably bored most of the time.
Don't expect to see press footage of the iraq cops full of holes cause they didn't put their guns down fast enough, or the family who's car got chewed up by 20 marines at a check point cause he drove up too fast and one guy panicked and shot, so then everybody shot, or catching a guy with an ied and the 5 minutes 'with the boys' he got. They won't let press near those things, and why would they?
You put a bunch of young kids with guns, in a f'ed up situation, where they are already alienated with the population, whom you cant tell whos going to shake your hand or try to drive a car bomb into your check point, or tell them they cant shoot at their enemies who've been putting bullets down range on you from tress...hell yeah bad shit will happen.
Spend 5 minutes talking to a marine and he'll probably have 10 to 15 stories of crazy shit like that happening. But hey, for every f'ed up situation happening in iraq, I bet you'd be surprised about the shit going down in your neighbors basement.
I am pretty ignorant of what goes on in the security world and things along the nature of vpn, certificates, etc etc, so perhaps this is over my head.
Its funny, I guess I would consider myself a somewhat saavy user, but really, I have never understood certificates, or found a place to explain how they worked. Watching the presentation linked above, makes me even more doubtful of them. I guess ultimately I feel that I can't really trust anything that comes at me over the internet. I don't spend any time knowing where my network traffic goes once it enters my comcast network. I don't know the "usual" hops it should be taking. It's gone once it comes out.
So I guess being ignorant of their workings, has always led me to believe that, if a computer is sitting between me and my destination, it can do whatever it wants to that traffic, including sending me a 'certificate'.
Ultimately it's all bits right? Just 1's and 0's. It's all sitting there in an ip packet, waiting to be pulled out. Encrypted or not, its still voltage on the line, or light, or whatever. What makes this set of data coming down more "real" then that set of data?
I guess if I knew more, I could answer that with question by saying things like HTTPS , SSL, public/private key, VPN, or whatever other technologies exist out there. But I guess in my head I know that ultimately, they are bits, and you'll never really know where its going from. Just kinda cast the die out there if I use say online banking, and see what happens, and just trust that if I see that my bank account is going haywire, I can call the company and fix it.
But this whole SSL attack seems based on the fact that via arp poisoning or whatever, it is trivial to plug into a network in which you understand the routing protocols, send out some stuff, and start parsing traffic.
That is really where the security work should go, but again, ultimately, there probably isn't a good working solution there, and like anything, would be an arms race again.
Anyway, pretty interesting presentation and vulnerability demonstration.
One of the reasons I don't subscribe to xbox live gold is that in the pc gaming world, the precident has already been set. Starting early on with ipx --> tpc emulators like kali, and most notably battle.net arriving on the scene, just about every major game has FREE online play. No reason you should need an xbox live subscription.
Even games like battlefield where you have "official servers" it is still someone paying a fee to EA to be "official" hosting on their own machines. The cost of the player is nothing, and should be nothing.
Perhaps there is some reason for it. I can appreciate that I'm sure most of the net code for a company is already written in, and interoperability between games using xbox live is probably a very nice feature to have, yet, I do not see why players should have to shoulder this cost.
Nothing new here. Playing on Kali servers I remember when "winnuke" got discovered and passed around. We all had fun for a week or two nailing each other with it. There will always be script kiddies! :)
Hilarious. When you rate a players skill at the game it is usually in pvp or a raid setting. QH will effect none of your abilities to perform in this department. Lore... Wow lore is a joke, its a hodge podge of popular culture (i like this) with a bunch of stuff tacked on from warcraft 3. There really was no lore in war1 or 2... just some vague generic stories in the instruction manual. Pretty much all the chars were added in from war3. If you've played war3, you know the story.
Moreover, not until northrend did you even really get lore mixed up with quests. Granted there would be one or two quest chains here or there that might be SLIGHTLY interesting, but if you want story, an MMO will NEVER be the place to go for that.
It is also funny that if you read the quest text, there is a long block describing the quest, followed by a short sentence saying "go kill 3 murlocks north of town". Any brain dead idiot can read that and figure out where to go. Wow even gives you a map with an arrow to tell you right where you are.
Hell, with tethered mobs, you don't even have to look where you are going. Half the time I run places , oh wait, fly over everything, but when I was questing, I just have the map up covering the whole screen and run that way. Mobs hit me but you just run away from them, no big deal. No need to care.
I just find it hilarious people holding up their nose at the questhelper addon like leveling up and questing in wow is such a deeper, more challenging experience without questhelper.
News flash, all the stuff that makes wow great is what makes it accessable and easy so that anybody can play it, see the content, and have fun. That is why I still play wow. While I enjoyed my first EQ1 trek from freeport to quenos, with my binder of eqatalas maps, you really only can experience that once and still enjoy it.
Anyway for myself, I find no difference between using QH or spending 10 seconds to scan the quest text. It is pretty much the same thing.
I agree fully. I have never played eve online. I just kinda keep up with news stories from it, occasionally read an article or two about whats going on in the game...cause there really is no other MMO like it. I read the summery/article and understood the scope of the news of it within the game immediately. It IS news (for nerds).
Even with just a small understanding of how the game works and who BoB was/is, I think eve is going to be a VERY interesting place in the next few days. I'm pretty glad there was a story about it.
Could say the same thing about books.
Crimsonland ... Reflexive, are they the same publisher for this game? If you haven't seen it, i highly suggest it, it is a pretty amazingly addictive small game. I don't usually purchase small games like this but after about 10 minutes with it the guy had my 20 dollars.
I wonder if with some bigger backing there might be another version of this game, which could only be a good thing.
I agree with you much on that last statement. That hyper paranoid thing thinking all laughter is directed at you, esp that insatiable giggle laugh that is the 'laughing at someone/thing' tone. Took me a long while to get over that and even to this day at almost 30 years old do I occasional get a twitch when I hear just the right pitched laughter.
As you said everybody has their breaking point. I just wish that that breaking point would always come out in an explosion of fists rather then guns.
I wonder if high school, or any other painful social situation is something we really need to all go through to learn how to be social? I think much of the restraint adults have in terms of making personal comments or picking on other's differences comes from sympathy from having it done to them, or perhaps it is just the greater understanding that not everything different is to be ridiculed.
I don't know, it seems to me that as we "mature" it is just a process of getting hurt and upset a bunch of times and recovering from it to the point that we can deal with life without it crippling us. Confidence is not confidence unless it stands strong in the face of ridicule, that sort of thing. /ramble ramble
Gamespot has an article on these 3d glasses as well. One of the screenshots shows the 3d lenses fitting over a pair of standard eye glasses, so unless you have giant coke bottle glasses, you should be good to go.
Not every game is for everyone. If you don't like the early levels of wow, but think the gameplay in general is for you, try another class. If you still don't like it, stop playing! I enjoy wow for the game mechanics of killing things as my class. I find it fun to auto attack things, watching damage numbers scroll by, while hitting abilities to do more damage. I enjoy when it gets out of hand and you end up fighgint 2 or 3 guys and living through it. That's fun and relaxing for me. So I play a bunch.
If you don't like that, then you definitely won't like the later content.
While I agree with the replies to this more then the original post...this IS a new angle to think about in a game. If you really want to f with the players head...all those scripted sequences where you see your buddy being dragged out or hit in the head... how about one where you KNOW your enemy, like you had been following his story in cut scenes and you know hes out there... or not even that, have you stumble onto a collection area for enemy wounded, or how about you are firing into some cover, and you end up seeing 2 enemies dragging a downed friend out towards the back line...
Basically do what they do to generate sympathy on your side, on the enemy side as well. Would be an interesting take.
I recall a random tv show, one of those things that reports weird cases.
I am going to badly m aul the details of it, but here is a somewhat summary:
The case was something like murder/rape of a young girl. I believe there were 4 friends who were tried for it. What happened was the police kept the kids in the questioning room for like 20+ hours non stop. At the end I think some of them signed confessions to the murder and admitted guilt.
Only, several days later, they found the real killer, had evidence, pretty much had the guy who really did it. But what happened was due to the kid signing a confession, he was tried and found guilty, when in reality he had just signed to make the "torture" stop. In this case it wasn't the literal hot poker medieval thing, but a similar thing of caging someone relentlessly questioning a person.
But yeah, I don't know of any studies about the effectiveness of torture or whatever. Works in movies a lot though ;)