To be fair, the most contested presidental election in at least a generation, needing to be settled by a Supreme Court decision essentially on party lines isn't a great start.
That wasn't Bush's fault, but if you wanted to feel like (or were at all inclined to feel like) he was an illegitimate president, it's a pretty good and early starting point.
Wow that's... an article that leaves out a lot to try to make its point.
For example, that taxes were raised in 7 out of 8 years of the Reagan administration. But no, the article just says: Look, Reagan cut taxes! And revenues increased!
(Let's not even get started on those same economic policies tripling the national debt. Frankly, we could have damn near 0% employment this year if the Obama administration was crazy or stupid enough to triple the debt and could get Congress to go along with it, along with a giant increase in tax revenue since, hey, all the people employed by government spending run amok pay taxes.)
And there is a very important thing that Windows users love to deny, but I witness each and every day: The typical Windows machine is constantly in need of attention for malware, driver problems, and so forth. Macs... aren't. You can debate the reasons until the sun goes down, but it doesn't change the fact that a Mac requires a lot less maintainance from its owner.
I hear this a lot but I'm not convinced it's true.
I know a lot of people with Windows machines, and the only one who ever had virus/malware problems was my computer-illiterate father-in-law... who now has a Mac and is having to take it to the Apple Geniuses constantly because he's somehow managed to fuck it up. At least the tech support is no longer my problem, even if it's even more of a hassle for him.
Now, if you want to fucking REDEFINE MARRIAGE from what it's been in Western civilization for the last 3000 years, by all means, go ahead.
Bullshit. That statement's ridiculously easy to disprove by counterexample.
Arranged marriages have gone from standard to virtually nonexistant in Western civilization.
Dowries? Standard at one point and gone now.
A fifty years ago black people couldn't marry white people in America. A hundred years before that, black people couldn't marry each other, either.
120 years ago Mormons were still practicing plural marriage in America. Now they can't.
Marriage as seen in the Bible is another great example, if you're the kind of person to take it seriously. You could have as many wives as you wanted and beat them to keep them in line, as long as you didn't use too big of a stick to do it -- God gets pissed if the wife-beating stick is too big. If you raped a woman, you had to pay fifty pieces of silver to her father and marry her. Modern America? Not so much about any of these things.
Standards of legality and acceptedness of divorce have changed radically over the years. Hell, the whole founding of the Anglican Church is all about redefining marriage.
How accepted or legal marrying members of your family is has changed radically over time in Western civilization.
This is all off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more to find if you really want to dig, but I assume you're going to somehow try to justify how all of these huge changes aren't big deals but FSM forbid two women want to marry each other.
I have spoken to homosexuals who have openly stated that they want it to be called "marriage". Nothing less will do. (Personally, I believe government should not recognize any marriages at all and convert all current marriages to "civil unions".)
I'm not opposed to getting government out of the marriage business altogether, but the reality is, there are thousands upon thousands of laws in America that key off the institution of marriage. The amount of law at every level of government that would have to be rewritten to make a civil union equal to a marriage is staggering and, frankly, not realistic.
So given that, yeah, nothing less than marriage will do can be a pretty pragmatic position.
I love AC and dearly hope for an unlikely AC2, but:
- Its UI has not aged well (not the graphics, just, how useable the controls are relative to a decent modern game), and
- Its AI is really not equal to the task of how open-ended the game can be. For example, it's pretty mediocre at terraforming, it doesn't make effective use of supply crawlers, it can't defend against boat probes, and it makes terrible use of copters relative to a human player.
I've love a near-exact port of AC on the Civ 4 engine. It's a shame the rights to make that came are so tied up.
I had a lot of fun with CTP, but off the top of my head:
- Government/Civics choices are a lot better designed in Civ 4 in my opinion. Even if you could run all the 'last' choices in each category from turn one of the game, you wouldn't want to -- they provide advantages that are just sort of naturally good for what a civ looks like in the 1900s, not for what one looks like in 4000 BC.
- I like the effects of wonders a lot better in Civ 4; my people don't spontaneously start starving because Stonehenge became obsolete. (I picture a bunch of peasants mocking Stonehenge and ceasing to take it seriously as they starve for some reason.)
- I just found the lawyers in CTP too ridiculous. (Beyond that, they make One City Challenge, which I love as a variant game, just about impossible -- you have to literally ring your city with troops just to keep the lawyers out, and if anything ever happens to one of the stacks surrounding your one city, you will literally never produce anything ever again as a swarm of lawyers decends upon the city, madly slapping it with injunctions.)
To one of your other points, if I could steal anything from Alpha Centauri, it would be the probe (spy/espionage) system. (Except for the part about the AI having no idea what to do about probe team boats.)
As a self-taught software developer without a CS degree, I've come to recognize that the better and more efficient developers are those that are self-taught, with real-world experience.
Any chance there's a little bit of confirmation bias in there?
Certainly I've worked with a ton of self-taught developers who had huge egos about their self-taught-ed-ness and were awesome at writing code the wrong way. Hell, almost all of the VB6 developers I've ever had to clean up after were self-taught, proud of it, and produced truly atrocious code even by VB6 standards.
I've worked with a lot of unqualified useless idiots with degrees, too. I just think you notice the latter and not the former because you've already decided that being self-taught, as you were, is better.
It doesn't help that the other half of congress think party and skin color is what drives the others to oppose the president's agenda.
Party politics can't account for all opposition to the President's agenda, true.
But how else can you account for the non-short list of things in the last two years that were either wholly or partially Republican ideas (originally), that the President backed, that Republicans then voted uniformly against?
Because progressive these days is moving away from personal rights, not towards more.
Not necessarily! Exhibit A: Same-sex marriage.
Beyond that, any honest view of freedom can't help but be: it's complicated.
For example, traffic laws restrict my freedoms to drive straight through any intersection at any time if I want to, my freedom to drive on whichever side of the road I want to, and more. On the other hand, they also create a much greater freedom to move about the country quickly than I would otherwise possess. So I give up something to live in a society where traffic laws are taken seriously, but I gain something, too. (And anyone who's ever spent an hour or more completely unmoving in a traffic jam in a part of the world that doesn't take traffic laws seriously because everyone decided they were going to go through the intersection at the same time and thus nobody could will realize what a big thing that is.)
There is almost nobody with my name....but amusingly enough there is someone from almost the same town with the same name.....google away, I am not that guy. Wish I had his money...
It might seem funny now, but wait until thugs beat you up and piss on your rug. That rug really ties the room together.
All the different versions of Microsoft Office out there,
Office, and mostly not that different. Even post-Ribbon!
law firms still using some version of Word Perfect,
I've heard of this, though all the law firms I'm personally familiar with are running Office.
Open Office,
Fits solidly in the 'wants to be Office' category.
iWork,
I'll admit to no experience with this one -- none of the Mac people I know use it.
Without trying to start a flame war, Macs are pretty much dead in the business world. I do know a couple people with iMacs as their business machine but they boot Windows exclusively on them. Don't ask me to explain that.
Google Docs
I'd also argue that this wants to be a lightweight version of Office, but that's probably a harder argument.
Although specific patches and versions haven't run great, overall Civ 4 (and the full version with all expansions / last patch in specific) is supposed to run pretty well in WINE overall. I have this secondhand from a few people but haven't put it to the test myself.
I can't swear that it would run great on that machine, though.
The vague explanation of social paths, which I'm confused now if these are just civics or if this has been made some kind of a victory condition such as culture in Civ IV.
My understanding is it's victory condition. You have to crank out something like 6 of 10 bars (some of which are mutually exclusive) past some threshold and then essentially build a wonder to win that way.
Anyone who has played through the first turn of Civ IV can tell you that hit points and experience points are not new and every unit has them, including the 2 starting units.
FWIW, the review/article was later updated to clarify that part of what he meant (and failed) to originally convey with the talk of HP is that it's possible for a losing unit to survive a battle in Civ 5.
Which, for that matter, can happen for units in 4 with a withdrawal chance and move to burn, but if I'm not misreading the article is more broadly common/possible in 5.
He also made comments such as the game being boring and turning on automation.
I agree with this -- the details of the Civ style games are some of where a particular game is great or isn't. In the better games, the automation/AI is good enough that it can handle details passably for you if you really want to just speed through things, but you can almost always turn things more optimally to exactly the direction you're trying to go if you micromanage. If you're someone who enjoys managing the details, you can get a game experience that plays slower and allows you to challenge a higher difficulty level than someone who doesn't -- whichever your preference is the game is enjoyable and challenging. We only get one side of that continuum in this article.
The One City Challenge concept takes this to an extreme -- on anything but a tiny map, to win with one city while your opponents have multiple cities, it's necessary to manage the hell out of that one city and milk every drop of potential out of it. (If this doesn't sound fun, consider that a OCC game is also typically a full game in just a couple hours.)
On the other hand, in a first playthrough, which this is, I tend to automate more so I can get the bigger picture first. So I'm not sure I'd have done any better.
I think his criticisms were pretty fair for Civ 3 (where I would say rapid expansion is much more feasible/optimal), but I agree with you on 4.
On the other hand, if you play Civ 4 in multiplayer with all human players that's less true -- because typically other human players are much too aggressive for the game to end with anything but a relatively early conquest victory. It's be interesting to see tweaks or options that would make that less true.
That's pretty much where I am, too -- I think Civ 3 introduced some great ideas, but in the form that they existed in Civ 3 they weren't actually fun. Civ 4 polished those ideas (while adding others) and made them good.
Agreed -- a guy I play multiplayer Civ4 with regularly still literally can't play a huge map game. It kills his sad computer, which doesn't have great specs for today, but they would have been pretty solid at Civ 4's original release.
but I think the consensus was that Civ IV was a flop
Source?
Anecdotal, obviously, but I don't know anyone who doesn't think 4 is the best one. I'm still playing it regularly (some single player, some multi with wife + friends) and if 5 isn't great I probably won't stop.
I was disappointed to find out there was no multiplayer, which seemed like a very big oversight.
My understanding was that it wasn't so much oversight as:
- Multiplayer would be one of the hardest single pieces of such a game, in terms of development time and getting it right, and
- The previous project for most of these guys was Hellgate: London, a game where they basically had more ideas about what they wanted to do with the game that they could get done before running out of money / publisher patience forced them to release it in an unfinished form. In some ways that game was great but it really felt like something that needed an extra solid year of polishing to be competitive in the market.
- Therefore, let's release single player Torchlight because they could get it done reasonably quickly, and thereby generate some hype for their next game which would have the multiplayer piece, and some money to pay the bills in the meantime.
For me, personally, Torchlight without multiplayer fell pretty flat, but I can understand why they did it.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, the most contested presidental election in at least a generation, needing to be settled by a Supreme Court decision essentially on party lines isn't a great start.
That wasn't Bush's fault, but if you wanted to feel like (or were at all inclined to feel like) he was an illegitimate president, it's a pretty good and early starting point.
Wow that's... an article that leaves out a lot to try to make its point.
For example, that taxes were raised in 7 out of 8 years of the Reagan administration. But no, the article just says: Look, Reagan cut taxes! And revenues increased!
(Let's not even get started on those same economic policies tripling the national debt. Frankly, we could have damn near 0% employment this year if the Obama administration was crazy or stupid enough to triple the debt and could get Congress to go along with it, along with a giant increase in tax revenue since, hey, all the people employed by government spending run amok pay taxes.)
And to be fair, it was never about keeping their slaves, but rather to protect states' rights to decide whether or not to allow slavery.
I hear that a lot (mostly from Southerners), but I don't think non-revisionist history really backs it up.
Slight tangent: an interesting article I read this morning that takes a crack at the idea that most Confederate soldiers weren't slaveowners.
30+ moderations with a crapload of overrated,troll, etc.. when the post was 100% op topic are a prime example of this.
To be fair, it's possible for a post to both be a troll and 100% on-topic.
I don't think anyone wants Flash, per se, but they may well want content that's only available (or more easily available) in Flash.
And there is a very important thing that Windows users love to deny, but I witness each and every day: The typical Windows machine is constantly in need of attention for malware, driver problems, and so forth. Macs... aren't. You can debate the reasons until the sun goes down, but it doesn't change the fact that a Mac requires a lot less maintainance from its owner.
I hear this a lot but I'm not convinced it's true.
I know a lot of people with Windows machines, and the only one who ever had virus/malware problems was my computer-illiterate father-in-law... who now has a Mac and is having to take it to the Apple Geniuses constantly because he's somehow managed to fuck it up. At least the tech support is no longer my problem, even if it's even more of a hassle for him.
Now, if you want to fucking REDEFINE MARRIAGE from what it's been in Western civilization for the last 3000 years, by all means, go ahead.
Bullshit. That statement's ridiculously easy to disprove by counterexample.
Arranged marriages have gone from standard to virtually nonexistant in Western civilization.
Dowries? Standard at one point and gone now.
A fifty years ago black people couldn't marry white people in America. A hundred years before that, black people couldn't marry each other, either.
120 years ago Mormons were still practicing plural marriage in America. Now they can't.
Marriage as seen in the Bible is another great example, if you're the kind of person to take it seriously. You could have as many wives as you wanted and beat them to keep them in line, as long as you didn't use too big of a stick to do it -- God gets pissed if the wife-beating stick is too big. If you raped a woman, you had to pay fifty pieces of silver to her father and marry her. Modern America? Not so much about any of these things.
Standards of legality and acceptedness of divorce have changed radically over the years. Hell, the whole founding of the Anglican Church is all about redefining marriage.
How accepted or legal marrying members of your family is has changed radically over time in Western civilization.
This is all off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more to find if you really want to dig, but I assume you're going to somehow try to justify how all of these huge changes aren't big deals but FSM forbid two women want to marry each other.
I have spoken to homosexuals who have openly stated that they want it to be called "marriage". Nothing less will do. (Personally, I believe government should not recognize any marriages at all and convert all current marriages to "civil unions".)
I'm not opposed to getting government out of the marriage business altogether, but the reality is, there are thousands upon thousands of laws in America that key off the institution of marriage. The amount of law at every level of government that would have to be rewritten to make a civil union equal to a marriage is staggering and, frankly, not realistic.
So given that, yeah, nothing less than marriage will do can be a pretty pragmatic position.
I love AC and dearly hope for an unlikely AC2, but:
- Its UI has not aged well (not the graphics, just, how useable the controls are relative to a decent modern game), and
- Its AI is really not equal to the task of how open-ended the game can be. For example, it's pretty mediocre at terraforming, it doesn't make effective use of supply crawlers, it can't defend against boat probes, and it makes terrible use of copters relative to a human player.
I've love a near-exact port of AC on the Civ 4 engine. It's a shame the rights to make that came are so tied up.
I had a lot of fun with CTP, but off the top of my head:
- Government/Civics choices are a lot better designed in Civ 4 in my opinion. Even if you could run all the 'last' choices in each category from turn one of the game, you wouldn't want to -- they provide advantages that are just sort of naturally good for what a civ looks like in the 1900s, not for what one looks like in 4000 BC.
- I like the effects of wonders a lot better in Civ 4; my people don't spontaneously start starving because Stonehenge became obsolete. (I picture a bunch of peasants mocking Stonehenge and ceasing to take it seriously as they starve for some reason.)
- I just found the lawyers in CTP too ridiculous. (Beyond that, they make One City Challenge, which I love as a variant game, just about impossible -- you have to literally ring your city with troops just to keep the lawyers out, and if anything ever happens to one of the stacks surrounding your one city, you will literally never produce anything ever again as a swarm of lawyers decends upon the city, madly slapping it with injunctions.)
To one of your other points, if I could steal anything from Alpha Centauri, it would be the probe (spy/espionage) system. (Except for the part about the AI having no idea what to do about probe team boats.)
As a self-taught software developer without a CS degree, I've come to recognize that the better and more efficient developers are those that are self-taught, with real-world experience.
Any chance there's a little bit of confirmation bias in there?
Certainly I've worked with a ton of self-taught developers who had huge egos about their self-taught-ed-ness and were awesome at writing code the wrong way. Hell, almost all of the VB6 developers I've ever had to clean up after were self-taught, proud of it, and produced truly atrocious code even by VB6 standards.
I've worked with a lot of unqualified useless idiots with degrees, too. I just think you notice the latter and not the former because you've already decided that being self-taught, as you were, is better.
It doesn't help that the other half of congress think party and skin color is what drives the others to oppose the president's agenda.
Party politics can't account for all opposition to the President's agenda, true.
But how else can you account for the non-short list of things in the last two years that were either wholly or partially Republican ideas (originally), that the President backed, that Republicans then voted uniformly against?
If progressives were really interested in freedom they'd push to abolish marriage licenses entirely.
But I think we both can probably admit that's a non-starter. The public isn't interested in that.
Because progressive these days is moving away from personal rights, not towards more.
Not necessarily! Exhibit A: Same-sex marriage.
Beyond that, any honest view of freedom can't help but be: it's complicated.
For example, traffic laws restrict my freedoms to drive straight through any intersection at any time if I want to, my freedom to drive on whichever side of the road I want to, and more. On the other hand, they also create a much greater freedom to move about the country quickly than I would otherwise possess. So I give up something to live in a society where traffic laws are taken seriously, but I gain something, too. (And anyone who's ever spent an hour or more completely unmoving in a traffic jam in a part of the world that doesn't take traffic laws seriously because everyone decided they were going to go through the intersection at the same time and thus nobody could will realize what a big thing that is.)
There is almost nobody with my name....but amusingly enough there is someone from almost the same town with the same name.....google away, I am not that guy. Wish I had his money...
It might seem funny now, but wait until thugs beat you up and piss on your rug. That rug really ties the room together.
Eh:
All the different versions of Microsoft Office out there,
Office, and mostly not that different. Even post-Ribbon!
law firms still using some version of Word Perfect,
I've heard of this, though all the law firms I'm personally familiar with are running Office.
Open Office,
Fits solidly in the 'wants to be Office' category.
iWork,
I'll admit to no experience with this one -- none of the Mac people I know use it.
Without trying to start a flame war, Macs are pretty much dead in the business world. I do know a couple people with iMacs as their business machine but they boot Windows exclusively on them. Don't ask me to explain that.
Google Docs
I'd also argue that this wants to be a lightweight version of Office, but that's probably a harder argument.
Although specific patches and versions haven't run great, overall Civ 4 (and the full version with all expansions / last patch in specific) is supposed to run pretty well in WINE overall. I have this secondhand from a few people but haven't put it to the test myself.
I can't swear that it would run great on that machine, though.
The vague explanation of social paths, which I'm confused now if these are just civics or if this has been made some kind of a victory condition such as culture in Civ IV.
My understanding is it's victory condition. You have to crank out something like 6 of 10 bars (some of which are mutually exclusive) past some threshold and then essentially build a wonder to win that way.
Anyone who has played through the first turn of Civ IV can tell you that hit points and experience points are not new and every unit has them, including the 2 starting units.
FWIW, the review/article was later updated to clarify that part of what he meant (and failed) to originally convey with the talk of HP is that it's possible for a losing unit to survive a battle in Civ 5.
Which, for that matter, can happen for units in 4 with a withdrawal chance and move to burn, but if I'm not misreading the article is more broadly common/possible in 5.
He also made comments such as the game being boring and turning on automation.
I agree with this -- the details of the Civ style games are some of where a particular game is great or isn't. In the better games, the automation/AI is good enough that it can handle details passably for you if you really want to just speed through things, but you can almost always turn things more optimally to exactly the direction you're trying to go if you micromanage. If you're someone who enjoys managing the details, you can get a game experience that plays slower and allows you to challenge a higher difficulty level than someone who doesn't -- whichever your preference is the game is enjoyable and challenging. We only get one side of that continuum in this article.
The One City Challenge concept takes this to an extreme -- on anything but a tiny map, to win with one city while your opponents have multiple cities, it's necessary to manage the hell out of that one city and milk every drop of potential out of it. (If this doesn't sound fun, consider that a OCC game is also typically a full game in just a couple hours.)
On the other hand, in a first playthrough, which this is, I tend to automate more so I can get the bigger picture first. So I'm not sure I'd have done any better.
I think his criticisms were pretty fair for Civ 3 (where I would say rapid expansion is much more feasible/optimal), but I agree with you on 4.
On the other hand, if you play Civ 4 in multiplayer with all human players that's less true -- because typically other human players are much too aggressive for the game to end with anything but a relatively early conquest victory. It's be interesting to see tweaks or options that would make that less true.
Pfffft. You're just hoping for a +V Funny.
On the other hand, you and I grew up in a world with multiple word processors, each with very different interfaces.
Now your options are Office, or something that's trying to be Office.
That's pretty much where I am, too -- I think Civ 3 introduced some great ideas, but in the form that they existed in Civ 3 they weren't actually fun. Civ 4 polished those ideas (while adding others) and made them good.
Agreed -- a guy I play multiplayer Civ4 with regularly still literally can't play a huge map game. It kills his sad computer, which doesn't have great specs for today, but they would have been pretty solid at Civ 4's original release.
but I think the consensus was that Civ IV was a flop
Source?
Anecdotal, obviously, but I don't know anyone who doesn't think 4 is the best one. I'm still playing it regularly (some single player, some multi with wife + friends) and if 5 isn't great I probably won't stop.
I was disappointed to find out there was no multiplayer, which seemed like a very big oversight.
My understanding was that it wasn't so much oversight as:
- Multiplayer would be one of the hardest single pieces of such a game, in terms of development time and getting it right, and
- The previous project for most of these guys was Hellgate: London, a game where they basically had more ideas about what they wanted to do with the game that they could get done before running out of money / publisher patience forced them to release it in an unfinished form. In some ways that game was great but it really felt like something that needed an extra solid year of polishing to be competitive in the market.
- Therefore, let's release single player Torchlight because they could get it done reasonably quickly, and thereby generate some hype for their next game which would have the multiplayer piece, and some money to pay the bills in the meantime.
For me, personally, Torchlight without multiplayer fell pretty flat, but I can understand why they did it.