Truth be told, everyone else can see articles in the future too. At least until the stars all burn out and we use up all the energy on the planet. And provided we're around to keep reading them/creating them. I suppose they meant that subscribers can see future articles before nonsubscribers, but the wording on that has always amused me.
I do think Baldur's Gate and Planescape could have been higher, but I have consistently told my friends that the Half Life and Deus Ex games felt like reading a great novel or watching a good movie as much as they did playing games. Those are the only two games I find myself going back to repeatedly, apart from Civilization. Sheer, utter brilliance. I only wish there were more games like those two.
This is completely off topic, but I wanted to say that I completely agree with your stance on this issue and it's something I've been trying to preach to my own group of friends, albeit with less elegance than you seem to be stating it. People are first and foremost responsible for their own safety, and abdicating the responsibility for protecting yourself to the police is simply retarded.
I wish I knew more people who thought the way you do. My social circle is sadly lacking in people who are able to think critically.:-P
I ended up giving up on backyard astronomy because I kept trigger neigbors' security lights. Nothing like spending half an hour getting dark adapted and being hit in the face with a pair of 150 watt spot lights.
Maybe it was the "pointing your telescope at their windows" part that had them so concerned.;-)
..from my ass, so to speak, but I imagine you could leave certain frequencies uncloaked, enough to slip in, say, remote video from a drone flying nearby or surveillance cameras in the area or GPS satellites in the case of bots.
Perhaps a super-advanced version could shift cloaked frequencies on the fly in order to prevent jamming/detection of the video source even. I dunno, if this works in the first place it seems like there should be ways around the "blindness."
The US government has monitored potential threats and "alternative political parties" (witness the whole communist thing) for decades, if not centuries. Actual detainment was not what the GP was referring to. Congratulations on beating up your straw man.
If you google around, there have been several discussions on Slashdot and elsewhere of so-called meta-materials which can essentially deflect light around an object. No light bouncing off you = no way for a human eyeball to detect you. It's interesting, and apparently theoretically possible and compatible with physics as we know it.
...I should point out that despite paying my own insurance and working my ass off to purchase my own first (second-hand) vehicle, I ended up totalling it. Not because of particularly reckless driving, but because I didn't have the experience to recognize that swerving to avoid an animal is not worth it.
So it's no guarantee of safety, but it definitely makes you somewhat less reckless than you might otherwise be, I'd say.
Nobody _really_ knows what happened on Flight 93, as all we have are half-assed audio tapes and a few recorded phone calls. There are eyewitness accounts strongly suggesting that 93 was shot down. Who knows? The people who were there are dead now.
In Reid's case, he acted alone. One loony guy biting a stewardess's thumb is hardly the same as a team of dedicated men who have cut a few throats to demonstrate resolve. Again, only time will tell how such a situation will play out in the future.
Everyone keeps saying this stuff about "passengers won't comply" in the aftermath of 9/11.
I call BS. Nobody knows whether or not passengers will comply, because these are very volatile, fear-laden situations and if a couple of bodies are lying in front of you to illustrate the resolve of the attackers, you are gonna be scared to death of trying anything yourself. I'm not saying it's impossible, but until there is another hijacking attempt and we find out that the passengers rush the hijackers, we cannot categorically say that this will happen. I think it's a fantasy to pretend otherwise.
I think that this whole cell phone culture is pretty fascinating. I mean, a few millenia ago it was pretty common for kids to live in tribal societies where they knew and had easy access to their friends in physical space. Walk to the next hut over and talk to your friend, if you're not busy doing chores.
In modern society, I think that social networking and technology are bringing people "virtually" closer together despite the fact that many of us now live orders of magnitude further away from our friends and even relatives than our ancestors did. So in a sense, the idea that a kid is "too young" for a cell phone really cuts to controlling that child's interactions with his or her peers. I mean, once they would have been able to physically play with their friends, but now they live 30 miles from their best friend.
To me, it seems like it will happen anyway - we will see kids getting phones as soon as their language skills reach the point that they can appreciate having conversations with people that they can't physically interact with. Instead of restricting the phones, though, I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't phones developed which allowed parents to restrict/track contacts in the same way that parents long ago would visually keep an eye on their kids.
It's a different world, but in a way, there's nothing new under the sun again. Just technology enabling old ways of interaction to be feasible (at least in spirit) in a faster, more spread-out world.
Your argument of aloneness doesn't ring true to me. Star Trek is very much a group off people, especially the original series, while say the entire TES series of games (Oblivion) is very very lonely.
You and a couple other respondents to my original post are missing what I'm saying. My point is that the existing attempts to make multiplayer SciFi have not been from the few franchises (Star Trek, Battletech, etc) that actually feature such party-based ideas while maintaining a fairly strong scifi focus. That excludes the Warhammer and Star Wars franchises which are arguably more space-fantasy than they are science fiction. Not that a good scifi game would need to be from a franchise, but it would need to have a compelling backstory and clear role differentiation.
For the rest of them, it's still not the guns, per se, but rather the fact that there is no clear role differentiation between characters that makes it uninteresting. You can cheat on things like instant kills by doing it movie-style; ever notice in most movies with long gunfights, the opponents trade shots that never actually hit anything, or only seem to hit non-vital points? The old Westerns with your protagonist hiding behind a rock or a barrel in a saloon or whatever are classic examples. And Dune and other scifi stories (some of Asimov's spring to mind, and even Warren Specter's Deus Ex) have ducked the gunfight issue by concepts like personal shields which could easily be implemented to drag out the duration of gunfights.
I still think the real problem is that most existing scifi games haven't divided up your science officers, medical personnel, security guys, etc., and left room for group play that makes sense. It's doable, it just hasn't been done well yet. In the meantime, we get lots of boring scenarios (I've seen it in MUDs as well) where there are no distinctions worth mentioning between character "types" and so no incentive to really team up with people other than the sheer "watch my back against PKers" factor. You go to play, and you end up feeling relatively alone, just Stormtrooper #1932 as someone else pointed out.
I don't know offhand what IS, but I don't think it's the "impersonal" factor of guns being able to shoot across a room - witness the Counterstrike and Quake and countless other multiplayer FPS games that have been massively successful. I'd say there is some other factor at work here.
I'm thinking offhand, but most of the time your classic fantasy stories have been about parties of heroes (witness Tolkien) whereas classic scifi has tended to be much more individualist (even with the Matrix, the main character so strongly overshadowed the others that it didn't really feel very much like a group effort). (Maybe Star Wars is an exception to this, and the Star Wars games have tended to be fairly successful, although some people call it space-based fantasy instead of science fiction anyway.)
I can't really think of any compelling party-leaning science fiction stories at the moment. And this translates out to the scifi games I've tried, from single player stuff to MUDs. They've all felt very "lonely." In fantasy, you have clearly defined classes with separate roles and you tend to need a group of them to get anywhere, which is begging for a multiplayer setting.
Keep in mind that I'm only on my first cup of coffee, though.
It doesn't sound like it. They might tweak the interface for some of their old titles to take advantage of the new controller, but these are apparently going to be franchise games rather than original titles.
So what if "Information can be stolen very quickly." I'm sure people were saying that back when hard drives increased into the low megabytes too. I'd hate for this sort of technology to fail to filter down for such a stupid reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Truth be told, everyone else can see articles in the future too. At least until the stars all burn out and we use up all the energy on the planet. And provided we're around to keep reading them/creating them. I suppose they meant that subscribers can see future articles before nonsubscribers, but the wording on that has always amused me.
...stupid lyrics sites get the lyrics wrong.
"Now there's a have to hook'in fee" - what the fuck does that even mean? And if you google it, a lot of lyric sites have it this way.:-P
The real lyrics are "No, there's a hefty fuckin' fee" which actually makes sense.:-P
...say something about liars having an appointment with a certain overly warm lake?
I would if I had mod points, even though it's probably a bit off-topic. I agree 100%.
A screenshot of the fake color.
Looks pretty real to me. Perhaps you can clarify what you mean by 'faked'.
I do think Baldur's Gate and Planescape could have been higher, but I have consistently told my friends that the Half Life and Deus Ex games felt like reading a great novel or watching a good movie as much as they did playing games. Those are the only two games I find myself going back to repeatedly, apart from Civilization. Sheer, utter brilliance. I only wish there were more games like those two.
Made me chuckle.
This is completely off topic, but I wanted to say that I completely agree with your stance on this issue and it's something I've been trying to preach to my own group of friends, albeit with less elegance than you seem to be stating it. People are first and foremost responsible for their own safety, and abdicating the responsibility for protecting yourself to the police is simply retarded.
I wish I knew more people who thought the way you do. My social circle is sadly lacking in people who are able to think critically.:-P
Maybe it was the "pointing your telescope at their windows" part that had them so concerned.;-)
..from my ass, so to speak, but I imagine you could leave certain frequencies uncloaked, enough to slip in, say, remote video from a drone flying nearby or surveillance cameras in the area or GPS satellites in the case of bots. Perhaps a super-advanced version could shift cloaked frequencies on the fly in order to prevent jamming/detection of the video source even. I dunno, if this works in the first place it seems like there should be ways around the "blindness."
Guess a swarm of tiny robots ran off with the story.
...as "Jessica Alba and Muhammed" which made me double-take.;-)
I dunno if this new oral theme will fly with my gf...
...but if the satellite was blinded, there would be no images to see.;-)
The US government has monitored potential threats and "alternative political parties" (witness the whole communist thing) for decades, if not centuries. Actual detainment was not what the GP was referring to. Congratulations on beating up your straw man.
If you google around, there have been several discussions on Slashdot and elsewhere of so-called meta-materials which can essentially deflect light around an object. No light bouncing off you = no way for a human eyeball to detect you. It's interesting, and apparently theoretically possible and compatible with physics as we know it.
...I should point out that despite paying my own insurance and working my ass off to purchase my own first (second-hand) vehicle, I ended up totalling it. Not because of particularly reckless driving, but because I didn't have the experience to recognize that swerving to avoid an animal is not worth it.
So it's no guarantee of safety, but it definitely makes you somewhat less reckless than you might otherwise be, I'd say.
Nobody _really_ knows what happened on Flight 93, as all we have are half-assed audio tapes and a few recorded phone calls. There are eyewitness accounts strongly suggesting that 93 was shot down. Who knows? The people who were there are dead now.
In Reid's case, he acted alone. One loony guy biting a stewardess's thumb is hardly the same as a team of dedicated men who have cut a few throats to demonstrate resolve. Again, only time will tell how such a situation will play out in the future.
Everyone keeps saying this stuff about "passengers won't comply" in the aftermath of 9/11.
I call BS. Nobody knows whether or not passengers will comply, because these are very volatile, fear-laden situations and if a couple of bodies are lying in front of you to illustrate the resolve of the attackers, you are gonna be scared to death of trying anything yourself. I'm not saying it's impossible, but until there is another hijacking attempt and we find out that the passengers rush the hijackers, we cannot categorically say that this will happen. I think it's a fantasy to pretend otherwise.
I think that this whole cell phone culture is pretty fascinating. I mean, a few millenia ago it was pretty common for kids to live in tribal societies where they knew and had easy access to their friends in physical space. Walk to the next hut over and talk to your friend, if you're not busy doing chores.
In modern society, I think that social networking and technology are bringing people "virtually" closer together despite the fact that many of us now live orders of magnitude further away from our friends and even relatives than our ancestors did. So in a sense, the idea that a kid is "too young" for a cell phone really cuts to controlling that child's interactions with his or her peers. I mean, once they would have been able to physically play with their friends, but now they live 30 miles from their best friend.
To me, it seems like it will happen anyway - we will see kids getting phones as soon as their language skills reach the point that they can appreciate having conversations with people that they can't physically interact with. Instead of restricting the phones, though, I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't phones developed which allowed parents to restrict/track contacts in the same way that parents long ago would visually keep an eye on their kids.
It's a different world, but in a way, there's nothing new under the sun again. Just technology enabling old ways of interaction to be feasible (at least in spirit) in a faster, more spread-out world.
You and a couple other respondents to my original post are missing what I'm saying. My point is that the existing attempts to make multiplayer SciFi have not been from the few franchises (Star Trek, Battletech, etc) that actually feature such party-based ideas while maintaining a fairly strong scifi focus. That excludes the Warhammer and Star Wars franchises which are arguably more space-fantasy than they are science fiction. Not that a good scifi game would need to be from a franchise, but it would need to have a compelling backstory and clear role differentiation.
For the rest of them, it's still not the guns, per se, but rather the fact that there is no clear role differentiation between characters that makes it uninteresting. You can cheat on things like instant kills by doing it movie-style; ever notice in most movies with long gunfights, the opponents trade shots that never actually hit anything, or only seem to hit non-vital points? The old Westerns with your protagonist hiding behind a rock or a barrel in a saloon or whatever are classic examples. And Dune and other scifi stories (some of Asimov's spring to mind, and even Warren Specter's Deus Ex) have ducked the gunfight issue by concepts like personal shields which could easily be implemented to drag out the duration of gunfights.
I still think the real problem is that most existing scifi games haven't divided up your science officers, medical personnel, security guys, etc., and left room for group play that makes sense. It's doable, it just hasn't been done well yet. In the meantime, we get lots of boring scenarios (I've seen it in MUDs as well) where there are no distinctions worth mentioning between character "types" and so no incentive to really team up with people other than the sheer "watch my back against PKers" factor. You go to play, and you end up feeling relatively alone, just Stormtrooper #1932 as someone else pointed out.
I don't know offhand what IS, but I don't think it's the "impersonal" factor of guns being able to shoot across a room - witness the Counterstrike and Quake and countless other multiplayer FPS games that have been massively successful. I'd say there is some other factor at work here.
I'm thinking offhand, but most of the time your classic fantasy stories have been about parties of heroes (witness Tolkien) whereas classic scifi has tended to be much more individualist (even with the Matrix, the main character so strongly overshadowed the others that it didn't really feel very much like a group effort). (Maybe Star Wars is an exception to this, and the Star Wars games have tended to be fairly successful, although some people call it space-based fantasy instead of science fiction anyway.)
I can't really think of any compelling party-leaning science fiction stories at the moment. And this translates out to the scifi games I've tried, from single player stuff to MUDs. They've all felt very "lonely." In fantasy, you have clearly defined classes with separate roles and you tend to need a group of them to get anywhere, which is begging for a multiplayer setting.
Keep in mind that I'm only on my first cup of coffee, though.
It doesn't sound like it. They might tweak the interface for some of their old titles to take advantage of the new controller, but these are apparently going to be franchise games rather than original titles.
So what if "Information can be stolen very quickly." I'm sure people were saying that back when hard drives increased into the low megabytes too. I'd hate for this sort of technology to fail to filter down for such a stupid reason.
I respect your point here. The summary seems a bit flippant and this is not really funny at all.