The series ends in such a way as to be 'complete', story-wise, without, obviously, precluding continuation. You should have watched. If you're willing to put some coin and time towards catching up, but the 4 years of 20? 26? episodes are a bit much for you, many of the major events that establish things are two/three part episodes. I think there's a 3 part episode in the last season that should suffice as enough of a crash course ("Who is that lady in black? Who is the big blue dude?" per another post) if you're willing to forgo the completeness of answers (ie, "Why is that lady in black so angry at the main character?" - established in earlier incidents).
I am, of course, referring to the... what are they? azaelia incident.
Scorpie sort of went rogue, the lady in black is sort of like the third in the series (Kryace, Scorpie, Lady in black). Kryace was violent, Scorpie cunning, she's manipulative.
Big blue dude is, IIRC, the Skaren Emperor - you know, those guys the peacekeepers are terrified of, and are basically a race of juggarnauts.
If a blaster will group with you, and then group with yet another person -- especially another blaster -- then you are obviously in the wrong group.
Please don't be confused - I don't mean "you" in the singular, you AC personally, I mean you in the collective, as in, grouping at all.
A blaster who is not retarded and does roll in the XP does so just fine solo, and only groups with you (again, the plural, collective, not AC-parent specifically) either as a courtesy, or out of some sort of enlightened self interest (ie, make friends with the healers, I will need them when we zerg the end boss, Hammidon).
and on the tip of someone else's response... if you, like many others of us have at some point or another, devote a free Saturday to playing CoH, you can go from start to the "mid game". I don't think that's true of most other MMOs.
and in LotR? Oh yeah, that's going to be great. We're either going to have a million hobbits running around Mount Doom trying to find the forge only to discover they need a +1 Skull of Angry Dude before they can use their 50 levels of Obscene Artifact Crafting.... or we're going to have a million hours of being a troll, crushing hobbits until we make level 50, so we can take on... ultra-hobbits.
It's the same thing. Think about it, who put you (as a toddler) in the sandbox, why did they get the sandbox, and why did they put you in it? It is a well known fact taht toddlers are the most destructive force in the known universe, that parents have gotten to the point where they like owning stuff they'd like to keep more than a week, and perhaps it might be good to isolate the two, by putting one in a sandbox.
If you want a nasty program (toddler) to run around without damaging your system (house) you put it in a sandbox.
maybe he was fired for spending.. 70% of his time doing his job? That's your argument, chief. Beats his boss (who got to keep his job?) by a clear 69%...
although certainly noone would accuse you of "wasting" 70% of your time worrying about the text of the actual article before playing everyone's favorite game, Leap To Conclusions.
I just want to emphasize parent. I was a 'edlin (and later) edit (and later) notepad or gedit is good enough' person - that is, whatever language, I'd write in a plain, mostly unadorned text editor. I've used many IDEs before, and I'd guess there'a a plurality who, like me, end up going back to the text editor. Load times, nuisances, 'features', crashes, eccetera...
Anyone who dismissed parent (as I would have at one time) as Yet Another Editor... it's lightweight, it's quick, it's not really much more than notepad, but the productivity gain you will get from syntax highlighting (without every IDE's horrible load time!)... you must experience to believe. No matter how small the task, there's nothing I don't open up SciTE and go to town on ( warning: dangling participle alert!) In fact, this post is the first HTML I've written since 'discovering' SciTE without using SciTE.
While a great deal of what makes of great HCI (imo) is 'common sense', you have to step back and look at how many thousands of applications ignore that common sense before opening one's foot cavity and stating that it's redundant and useless, er... gobble goble sounds.
A SIMPLE and fantastic example is defining in clear terms what an OK and CANCEL button should convey, and their relation to one another. The button on the RIGHT is ALWAYS the ACCEPT dialogue. It is the "make it so". Cancel should NEVER be "oh, well, you mean cancel this dialogue, but continue along the process anyway." Cancel is always Stop! Drop! Roll! A user clicking cancel enough should revert back to a completely unchanged state from when every dialogue popped up, in as much as is possible (obviously if the dialogue is "You lost net. Redial?" then CANCEL can't logically reform the original state). Common sense, right?
I bet if you paid me a nickle for every application you could find that obeyed that 'common sense' rule - ie, what a complete non-expert to the system would expect as the behavior - and I paid you a quarter for every one I found that disobeyed, I could retire somewhere nice today.
And that's for something as BASIC as a confirmation dialogue. What about menu selectors? Drop down select boxes? When is the best time to present information in a drop down box versus a validated data text field?
Yeah. There are a load of nitwits who throw around HCI terms and act all hot because they're so five minutes right now, but there are a load of nitwits who throw around programming terms and act all hot because they're so teh leet hax0r.
There's more to good UI design than deciding how to fit your million options on the same dialogue. Yes, any software developer worth their salt can figure out how to fit them all together, but like any skill, a great many lack the 'vibe' to do it right, and say, "Gosh, maybe our users don't need to be able to set what language encoding they're viewing the page as in the middle of the text render area." Things like depth to discovery, learning curve, Fitt's Law (how big should your OK dialogue be?), and gosh, a whole course of study await those who wish to engineer properly.
Just because you've been to a hospital does not make you an expert on medicine and medical care. Just because you've written code and run programs does not make you a HCI/UI expert (or sufficently expert to discredit the field, at any rate). So yes, their 'wiser than thou' attitude to which you are clearly responding (and other commenters have gone out at specifically) is justified. They're experts. That doesn't make them infallible. But seeing the Emperor's new clothes does not make you a tailor, either.
Look at Firefox. Where are the options? How are they clustered? How deep are some things? Generally, the more expert a user who would care about the setting, the more remote it is.
Gnome is not all things to all people, nor should it try to be. Yes, they made a load of mistakes, but that always happens with a (*sigh*) paradigm shift, but you're dealing (and, I guess, a part of) a culture that is the command line interface. Gnome will always be your antithesis. There's always a terminal. Use it. Gnome is looking to me like something for those people who always go exploring with the clicking on random options, end up 'breaking' something ("Oops, I uninstalled Windows... was that important?"). I'm sorry the limit to options is a nuisance to you, but believe it or not, there are more things in heaven and earth...
Finally, if anyone's still reading, I'm not in the HCI field. I just did something really, really crazy to some of the/. crowd... I read the frelling manual.
Replayability is NOT "hi, play through this 40 hour game and if you do X, Y, Z - which are spread out at the 10, 20, and 30 hour markers, just for giggles - you get to see a different 30 second ending, which differs from the other endings in that it in/excludes $character or has good/bad ending for $character"
Replayability is how much fun I had GETTING to the X, Y, and Z markers. I'm not going to schlep through 40 hours of exactly the same thing - which was mildly enjoyable ONCE, you can imagine how it will be times 2, 3, and 4 - just to see a stupid ending. Oh, and there's the fun part where I, you know, look up at gamefaqs or buy the game guide so i can see what one of the dozens of meaningless conversation choices was the meaningful one that radically changed the outcome of poor $character's fate - you know, like where I decided that Sergio should raise a cat instead of a dog (which is OBVIOUS if you look at the Zodiac, because he was born in year 53, which is obviously monkey, so dog would be an anathama to him.... i mean, what IDIOT wouldn't pick up on that?).
Look, what's fun, and what adds to replayability is toolkits. If I, as a player, have multiple ways to achieve my objective, and they're all fun, then I'm going to go nuts playing your game three or four times. What do I mean by multiple ways of achieving the objective? I don't mean blastgun will open door in 4 hits and quantrogun will open door in 3 hits... I mean I could navigate through this maze which slowly closes in behind me by using the superrun boots, or I could fire freeze bolts at the wall, gaining me more time (even though to me, I'm doing exactly the same thing - walking through the same maze!), or if I went and got an ability I'm going to get anyway (versus ULTRA SECRET POWARRR!!1 that noone will ever find unless they shell out $40 for the guide) but I explored a bit and found earlier than designed for average players, I could use that ability to navigate on the maze edges - not without its own challenge, but safer and slower than literal mazerunning.
HELLO. That is Metroid - although the last option usually required some sort of 'exploit' - paths that look unplanned. That game is replayable.
Sales are down because we're at the lull between platform iterations - everyone owns an Xbox/PS2/NCube who is going to own one, and everyone knows X2/PS3/NTesseract are coming out - why buy a model T when you know that Pintos are due in a month? I said this in another article, I'll repeat it here.
Finally, and if you were crazy enough to read me out.. another failing of current video games is having the game interface get in the way of the game play (ok-cancel asked recently where 'challenge' lie, and if HCI isn't inapplicable or even counterproductive to game design - a sexy proposition on the oversimplifiaction, but let me ramble on). Compare the interface element of "camera angle" in Mario64 and Mario Sunshine - games I'm wagering aren't that much a stretch for a common context - and while they may've done cameras better than the rest, they still reeked something awful. Cameras are interface, for presenting the game. Challenge is timing and placing your jumps. Cameras should facilitate my interaction with the game for timing and placing my jump. The failure of the interface - which is the failure of the game, and upon this failure no amount of content or quality or engineering in the WHOLE REST OF THE GAME may hang well - is when the camera decides to magically change itself (or refuse my directions at changing itself) so that I can create a plane to view and properly communicate how I wish to execute my jump. If the camera suddenly whips to a 235 degree angle shift because of some stupid algorhythm that determines my view will be ideal there because of some clipping issue or something... guess what, I'm going to get screwed mid-jump. Mario is going to do something I didn't want him to do - something I wasn't trying to instruct him to do. I've been bossing him around since he was made of pixels as big as my fist -
Reading the article, that's exactly how everyone responds, and while everyone can hmm and haw about it, this is simply a more popularized manifestation of the same phenomenon as you might find on Blizzard's Battle.net, amoung other places. It used to be that if you were 'speaking in gibberish' you were a Korean, and 'you should go back to your server', and... well, the epithets fly. "Speak in English or shut up" - regardless of the channel. It's you are in the presence of Americans, bow down and speak our language.
Now that there's a significant Brazillian community (or so it would seem) on Bnet, you can just s/Brazillian/Korean (or is that backwards?). It isn't as bad presently, I think, mainly because there's not a lot to communicate in Warcraft, and the map ping function achieves 95% of what's to be said ever in a universal language way, anyway (and the more communication-required Diablo 2 has run most of its course)
Moving on... English is a fairly well accepted language for the exact same reasons Latin was once a fairly well accepted language. Economic dominance that has historic ties to imperialism. If we're going to pick one, I nominate Italian, because it's just plain got fewer letters, and its simplicity is such that the detection rate of dyslexia in adult males is significantly lower than other modern European languages (and we can pretend we're the new Romans while we're at it). Also, I get the impression it's much more difficult to be Jeff K in Italian. SOU E STUPEDO11!!!
How is all this significantly different from impersonating a mental patient or investigating meat packing plants?
You think they should call ahead and clear everything, so they see the fine state of the mental care facilities, and how nice clean and sanitary meat packing is? "Sure, let me set up this shell for you to try and hax out of..."
PS., if you fail the reference, you're missing out on what defines great investigative journalism, as these are specific examples from "recent" US history.
Speaking of Bayesian filtering, some form of clever-er guessing as to where my next bookmark in my ecclectic collection of bookmarks goes. Sample relatively unique keywords in pages as bookmarked, weight towards bookmark folder baskets, bingo.
Avoid more sophisticated algorhythms that infer a sorting methodology the same as the developer, however. Maybe I have a Programming folder which has C in it, and so you'd infer that all characteristics of matches to Programming inherit to C, if that's the sort of sorter you are, and that fits with you, me, and program-think, so that's right? Right? Except perhaps I'm a university student who has a University folder, and I'm studying Java, whose extrinsic attribute prioritizes sorting it into that group... so you'd end up with a word weighting argument between superclass Programming, which is wrong, and Java, which is right.
Let me be clear. This suggests nothing at all about helping the user organize their bookmarks - everyone has their own system (although perhaps a Bayesian category guesser would be a separate fun feature). This suggestion is merely better guessing of first suggested folder when I CTRL-D.
Because excluding the classics (teach yourself ancient greek is slow going for me, and I like greek more than latin) and non-English texts (you miss so much in most translations, so once greek and latin are done..) aren't in my mother tongue, I've read either all of the good fiction, or enough of one author's sampling.
Accursed speed reading courses.
Also, deconstructionism sort of ruins things. You get a few paragraphs in and you discover you have hero type 342, with nemesis 209, with foil 101, and the most you can hope for is clever plot twist 59 at the end, where you discover the hero - or let's be more apt, protagonist - is secretly suffering from split personality disorder, and IS nemesis 209.
Speaking of potential sales, given that we all know your average UFO contains at least 5 aliens, and that there have been over a thousand sightings a year, how have aliens downloading memories of movie going experiences hindered movie studio bankrolls? Especially if they go back to their homeworld, and have other aliens download the movie going experience from them! This is a giant alien peer to peer network, and the MPAA/RIAA need to hop right on it. They're losing untold numbers of gold pressed latinum bars!
"56 Deceits," found nailed to Moore's door. Inspired, Moore's next documentary-ish movie will be Fahrenheit 95, an incinderary historical deconstruction of Lutherianism...
quoting: "Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
-- This quote is entirely irrelevent to any discussion anyone may have regarding Michael Moore, current events, and specifically, Michael Moore's documentary on current events.
(Other instances of the quote usually accompany remarks about how Goering may / may not have engineered a major event may or also may not be relevent)
My reason for the downturn is that we're at a lowpoint on the console replacement treadmill. Everyone's GOT their Xbox and Halo, PS2 and FFX/X-2, Gamecube and Mario Sunshine(Look, Miyamoto, the problem isn't 3d, the problem is outrageous difficulty/essentially arbitrary success)/Crystal Chronicles... when were each of these systems released?...
We've also got everyone waiting on their flagship sequel / major sequel for the next gen... no duh sales are down. I'm not going to buy the same TV every year guys, what makes you think I'm going to buy 5 Xboxes when one plays my Halo just fine?
(Yes, I saw it was a combined total, but go watch the history of video games special - the Xbox's limited success (the success portion) is due to it being the Halo-player)
Slashdot Mirror
The series ends in such a way as to be 'complete', story-wise, without, obviously, precluding continuation. You should have watched. If you're willing to put some coin and time towards catching up, but the 4 years of 20? 26? episodes are a bit much for you, many of the major events that establish things are two/three part episodes. I think there's a 3 part episode in the last season that should suffice as enough of a crash course ("Who is that lady in black? Who is the big blue dude?" per another post) if you're willing to forgo the completeness of answers (ie, "Why is that lady in black so angry at the main character?" - established in earlier incidents).
I am, of course, referring to the... what are they? azaelia incident.
Scorpie sort of went rogue, the lady in black is sort of like the third in the series (Kryace, Scorpie, Lady in black). Kryace was violent, Scorpie cunning, she's manipulative.
Big blue dude is, IIRC, the Skaren Emperor - you know, those guys the peacekeepers are terrified of, and are basically a race of juggarnauts.
Someone made a sequel to the Anonymous Coward?
If a blaster will group with you, and then group with yet another person -- especially another blaster -- then you are obviously in the wrong group.
Please don't be confused - I don't mean "you" in the singular, you AC personally, I mean you in the collective, as in, grouping at all.
A blaster who is not retarded and does roll in the XP does so just fine solo, and only groups with you (again, the plural, collective, not AC-parent specifically) either as a courtesy, or out of some sort of enlightened self interest (ie, make friends with the healers, I will need them when we zerg the end boss, Hammidon).
and on the tip of someone else's response... if you, like many others of us have at some point or another, devote a free Saturday to playing CoH, you can go from start to the "mid game". I don't think that's true of most other MMOs.
and in LotR? Oh yeah, that's going to be great. We're either going to have a million hobbits running around Mount Doom trying to find the forge only to discover they need a +1 Skull of Angry Dude before they can use their 50 levels of Obscene Artifact Crafting.... or we're going to have a million hours of being a troll, crushing hobbits until we make level 50, so we can take on... ultra-hobbits.
You sir, have not played a Mind Controller.
It's those accursed Liberals who put the lime jello on the menu in the first place!!!
It's the same thing. Think about it, who put you (as a toddler) in the sandbox, why did they get the sandbox, and why did they put you in it? It is a well known fact taht toddlers are the most destructive force in the known universe, that parents have gotten to the point where they like owning stuff they'd like to keep more than a week, and perhaps it might be good to isolate the two, by putting one in a sandbox.
If you want a nasty program (toddler) to run around without damaging your system (house) you put it in a sandbox.
Hooray.
maybe he was fired for spending.. 70% of his time doing his job? That's your argument, chief. Beats his boss (who got to keep his job?) by a clear 69%...
although certainly noone would accuse you of "wasting" 70% of your time worrying about the text of the actual article before playing everyone's favorite game, Leap To Conclusions.
I just want to emphasize parent. I was a 'edlin (and later) edit (and later) notepad or gedit is good enough' person - that is, whatever language, I'd write in a plain, mostly unadorned text editor. I've used many IDEs before, and I'd guess there'a a plurality who, like me, end up going back to the text editor. Load times, nuisances, 'features', crashes, eccetera...
Anyone who dismissed parent (as I would have at one time) as Yet Another Editor... it's lightweight, it's quick, it's not really much more than notepad, but the productivity gain you will get from syntax highlighting (without every IDE's horrible load time!)... you must experience to believe. No matter how small the task, there's nothing I don't open up SciTE and go to town on ( warning: dangling participle alert!) In fact, this post is the first HTML I've written since 'discovering' SciTE without using SciTE.
While a great deal of what makes of great HCI (imo) is 'common sense', you have to step back and look at how many thousands of applications ignore that common sense before opening one's foot cavity and stating that it's redundant and useless, er... gobble goble sounds.
/. crowd... I read the frelling manual.
A SIMPLE and fantastic example is defining in clear terms what an OK and CANCEL button should convey, and their relation to one another. The button on the RIGHT is ALWAYS the ACCEPT dialogue. It is the "make it so". Cancel should NEVER be "oh, well, you mean cancel this dialogue, but continue along the process anyway." Cancel is always Stop! Drop! Roll! A user clicking cancel enough should revert back to a completely unchanged state from when every dialogue popped up, in as much as is possible (obviously if the dialogue is "You lost net. Redial?" then CANCEL can't logically reform the original state). Common sense, right?
I bet if you paid me a nickle for every application you could find that obeyed that 'common sense' rule - ie, what a complete non-expert to the system would expect as the behavior - and I paid you a quarter for every one I found that disobeyed, I could retire somewhere nice today.
And that's for something as BASIC as a confirmation dialogue. What about menu selectors? Drop down select boxes? When is the best time to present information in a drop down box versus a validated data text field?
Yeah. There are a load of nitwits who throw around HCI terms and act all hot because they're so five minutes right now, but there are a load of nitwits who throw around programming terms and act all hot because they're so teh leet hax0r.
There's more to good UI design than deciding how to fit your million options on the same dialogue. Yes, any software developer worth their salt can figure out how to fit them all together, but like any skill, a great many lack the 'vibe' to do it right, and say, "Gosh, maybe our users don't need to be able to set what language encoding they're viewing the page as in the middle of the text render area." Things like depth to discovery, learning curve, Fitt's Law (how big should your OK dialogue be?), and gosh, a whole course of study await those who wish to engineer properly.
Just because you've been to a hospital does not make you an expert on medicine and medical care. Just because you've written code and run programs does not make you a HCI/UI expert (or sufficently expert to discredit the field, at any rate). So yes, their 'wiser than thou' attitude to which you are clearly responding (and other commenters have gone out at specifically) is justified. They're experts. That doesn't make them infallible. But seeing the Emperor's new clothes does not make you a tailor, either.
Look at Firefox. Where are the options? How are they clustered? How deep are some things? Generally, the more expert a user who would care about the setting, the more remote it is.
Gnome is not all things to all people, nor should it try to be. Yes, they made a load of mistakes, but that always happens with a (*sigh*) paradigm shift, but you're dealing (and, I guess, a part of) a culture that is the command line interface. Gnome will always be your antithesis. There's always a terminal. Use it. Gnome is looking to me like something for those people who always go exploring with the clicking on random options, end up 'breaking' something ("Oops, I uninstalled Windows... was that important?"). I'm sorry the limit to options is a nuisance to you, but believe it or not, there are more things in heaven and earth...
Finally, if anyone's still reading, I'm not in the HCI field. I just did something really, really crazy to some of the
We're now calling it "The Freedom", and Palpatine is a "Freedom Lord"...
So ... we're completely ruling out the voodun priest?
RTFA TSIA HTH HAND
(other repliees did the math for you on the difference between "quarterly" versus "annually")
Replayability is NOT "hi, play through this 40 hour game and if you do X, Y, Z - which are spread out at the 10, 20, and 30 hour markers, just for giggles - you get to see a different 30 second ending, which differs from the other endings in that it in/excludes $character or has good/bad ending for $character"
Replayability is how much fun I had GETTING to the X, Y, and Z markers. I'm not going to schlep through 40 hours of exactly the same thing - which was mildly enjoyable ONCE, you can imagine how it will be times 2, 3, and 4 - just to see a stupid ending. Oh, and there's the fun part where I, you know, look up at gamefaqs or buy the game guide so i can see what one of the dozens of meaningless conversation choices was the meaningful one that radically changed the outcome of poor $character's fate - you know, like where I decided that Sergio should raise a cat instead of a dog (which is OBVIOUS if you look at the Zodiac, because he was born in year 53, which is obviously monkey, so dog would be an anathama to him.... i mean, what IDIOT wouldn't pick up on that?).
Look, what's fun, and what adds to replayability is toolkits. If I, as a player, have multiple ways to achieve my objective, and they're all fun, then I'm going to go nuts playing your game three or four times. What do I mean by multiple ways of achieving the objective? I don't mean blastgun will open door in 4 hits and quantrogun will open door in 3 hits... I mean I could navigate through this maze which slowly closes in behind me by using the superrun boots, or I could fire freeze bolts at the wall, gaining me more time (even though to me, I'm doing exactly the same thing - walking through the same maze!), or if I went and got an ability I'm going to get anyway (versus ULTRA SECRET POWARRR!!1 that noone will ever find unless they shell out $40 for the guide) but I explored a bit and found earlier than designed for average players, I could use that ability to navigate on the maze edges - not without its own challenge, but safer and slower than literal mazerunning.
HELLO. That is Metroid - although the last option usually required some sort of 'exploit' - paths that look unplanned. That game is replayable.
Sales are down because we're at the lull between platform iterations - everyone owns an Xbox/PS2/NCube who is going to own one, and everyone knows X2/PS3/NTesseract are coming out - why buy a model T when you know that Pintos are due in a month? I said this in another article, I'll repeat it here.
Finally, and if you were crazy enough to read me out.. another failing of current video games is having the game interface get in the way of the game play (ok-cancel asked recently where 'challenge' lie, and if HCI isn't inapplicable or even counterproductive to game design - a sexy proposition on the oversimplifiaction, but let me ramble on). Compare the interface element of "camera angle" in Mario64 and Mario Sunshine - games I'm wagering aren't that much a stretch for a common context - and while they may've done cameras better than the rest, they still reeked something awful. Cameras are interface, for presenting the game. Challenge is timing and placing your jumps. Cameras should facilitate my interaction with the game for timing and placing my jump. The failure of the interface - which is the failure of the game, and upon this failure no amount of content or quality or engineering in the WHOLE REST OF THE GAME may hang well - is when the camera decides to magically change itself (or refuse my directions at changing itself) so that I can create a plane to view and properly communicate how I wish to execute my jump. If the camera suddenly whips to a 235 degree angle shift because of some stupid algorhythm that determines my view will be ideal there because of some clipping issue or something... guess what, I'm going to get screwed mid-jump. Mario is going to do something I didn't want him to do - something I wasn't trying to instruct him to do. I've been bossing him around since he was made of pixels as big as my fist -
Reading the article, that's exactly how everyone responds, and while everyone can hmm and haw about it, this is simply a more popularized manifestation of the same phenomenon as you might find on Blizzard's Battle.net, amoung other places. It used to be that if you were 'speaking in gibberish' you were a Korean, and 'you should go back to your server', and ... well, the epithets fly. "Speak in English or shut up" - regardless of the channel. It's you are in the presence of Americans, bow down and speak our language.
Now that there's a significant Brazillian community (or so it would seem) on Bnet, you can just s/Brazillian/Korean (or is that backwards?). It isn't as bad presently, I think, mainly because there's not a lot to communicate in Warcraft, and the map ping function achieves 95% of what's to be said ever in a universal language way, anyway (and the more communication-required Diablo 2 has run most of its course)
Moving on... English is a fairly well accepted language for the exact same reasons Latin was once a fairly well accepted language. Economic dominance that has historic ties to imperialism. If we're going to pick one, I nominate Italian, because it's just plain got fewer letters, and its simplicity is such that the detection rate of dyslexia in adult males is significantly lower than other modern European languages (and we can pretend we're the new Romans while we're at it). Also, I get the impression it's much more difficult to be Jeff K in Italian. SOU E STUPEDO11!!!
Okay, scratch the last one.
How is all this significantly different from impersonating a mental patient or investigating meat packing plants?
You think they should call ahead and clear everything, so they see the fine state of the mental care facilities, and how nice clean and sanitary meat packing is? "Sure, let me set up this shell for you to try and hax out of..."
PS., if you fail the reference, you're missing out on what defines great investigative journalism, as these are specific examples from "recent" US history.
Here is your accordion, so goes the Far Side strip...
but at least now you know what the PREVIEW button is for.
well, pseudoquote, since I don't have the line in front of me, but the gist is..
"Privacy is an anathama is democracy."
Feel free to cite historic figures who have said the same, or the inverse.
What has nasty Interplays in its pocketses? Our preccssiousss... the one true License to Fallout!
Speaking of Bayesian filtering, some form of clever-er guessing as to where my next bookmark in my ecclectic collection of bookmarks goes. Sample relatively unique keywords in pages as bookmarked, weight towards bookmark folder baskets, bingo.
Avoid more sophisticated algorhythms that infer a sorting methodology the same as the developer, however. Maybe I have a Programming folder which has C in it, and so you'd infer that all characteristics of matches to Programming inherit to C, if that's the sort of sorter you are, and that fits with you, me, and program-think, so that's right? Right? Except perhaps I'm a university student who has a University folder, and I'm studying Java, whose extrinsic attribute prioritizes sorting it into that group... so you'd end up with a word weighting argument between superclass Programming, which is wrong, and Java, which is right.
Let me be clear. This suggests nothing at all about helping the user organize their bookmarks - everyone has their own system (although perhaps a Bayesian category guesser would be a separate fun feature). This suggestion is merely better guessing of first suggested folder when I CTRL-D.
Because excluding the classics (teach yourself ancient greek is slow going for me, and I like greek more than latin) and non-English texts (you miss so much in most translations, so once greek and latin are done..) aren't in my mother tongue, I've read either all of the good fiction, or enough of one author's sampling.
Accursed speed reading courses.
Also, deconstructionism sort of ruins things. You get a few paragraphs in and you discover you have hero type 342, with nemesis 209, with foil 101, and the most you can hope for is clever plot twist 59 at the end, where you discover the hero - or let's be more apt, protagonist - is secretly suffering from split personality disorder, and IS nemesis 209.
Speaking of potential sales, given that we all know your average UFO contains at least 5 aliens, and that there have been over a thousand sightings a year, how have aliens downloading memories of movie going experiences hindered movie studio bankrolls? Especially if they go back to their homeworld, and have other aliens download the movie going experience from them! This is a giant alien peer to peer network, and the MPAA/RIAA need to hop right on it. They're losing untold numbers of gold pressed latinum bars!
"56 Deceits," found nailed to Moore's door. Inspired, Moore's next documentary-ish movie will be Fahrenheit 95, an incinderary historical deconstruction of Lutherianism...
But political nontheless.
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/goering.htm
quoting:
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
--
This quote is entirely irrelevent to any discussion anyone may have regarding Michael Moore, current events, and specifically, Michael Moore's documentary on current events.
(Other instances of the quote usually accompany remarks about how Goering may / may not have engineered a major event may or also may not be relevent)
My reason for the downturn is that we're at a lowpoint on the console replacement treadmill. Everyone's GOT their Xbox and Halo, PS2 and FFX/X-2, Gamecube and Mario Sunshine(Look, Miyamoto, the problem isn't 3d, the problem is outrageous difficulty/essentially arbitrary success)/Crystal Chronicles... when were each of these systems released?...
We've also got everyone waiting on their flagship sequel / major sequel for the next gen... no duh sales are down. I'm not going to buy the same TV every year guys, what makes you think I'm going to buy 5 Xboxes when one plays my Halo just fine?
(Yes, I saw it was a combined total, but go watch the history of video games special - the Xbox's limited success (the success portion) is due to it being the Halo-player)