Why's it OK to show people getting shot, robbing banks, beating each other up, etc; while everyday ordanary dialog is being censored.
This is by far the most irritating argument I've seen that comes up every single time censor ship and ratings are brought up, on slashdot or anywhere. It's not ok to show real people getting killed for real (as is it not ok to do that on video or not), but it's okay to show a fictional dramatic staging of such an event. Nobody died. Ordinary dialogue is censored, for better or worse, because there's no difference between hearing it from a movie and hearing it in real life- how do you 'fake' words and sound waves?
Somehow killing people isnt as bad as taking drugs...
The contention is that killing people is obviously wrong (you wouldn't want someone to kill you) and non-trivial besides (not counting jackasses who have kids and guns that aren't locked up or otherwise kid-proofed). Drugs are much more accessible and frequently have ill-effects or other repercussions that aren't immediately obvious.
Frequently this same sort argument is applied to sexual imagery or harsh language. Sex is a natural thing that is required for the propagation of the species as well as being more-or-less acceptable in non-repoductive contexts by society if it's between consenting adults. So fundamentally there's nothing wrong with sex, but there's a perceived cost to having young people develop unhealthy attitudes towards it, economic and educational costs to teen pregnancies etc., so we tend to repress sex in culture (not to say repression works, but there it is).
Language is another thing entirely. There's no physical difference between a someone saying 'shit' in a film and someone uttering it aloud- it's all sound waves. Everything else I'm talking about here has a obvious separation between a actors acting or computer generated simulations and the real thing. So not only is it easy to repeat some given sequence of words, society also perceives a cost to the usage of harsh language- in some situations it can make people angry and otherwise some people would just rather not hear it.
There's a sort of equation to this- the likelihood of something happening multiplied by the cost of that thing happening is the cost you weigh against other undesirable things.
-Murder is pretty bad, but the likelihood is extremely low. -Illegal drugs are minor to really bad, and the likelihood is moderate. -Harsh Language is minor, but the likelihood is extremely high. -Sex is sometimes acceptable and sometimes bad, and the likelihood moderate to high (should we make that a 'low' for the slashdot crowd?)
So there's a snapshot of the complicated moral landscape we have here. The judgements society makes aren't perfect, but they aren't inexplicable by any means. So for god's sake enough with these overly simplistic and tired 'x is worse than y but society represses y more than x' arguments.
He had a hellva lot more respect for those that stood up for what they believed in (and paid the price for it by going to jail) then those that ran away to Canada.
Unfortunately, as admirable as standing up for your principles is, you have to base your actions on how they might hurt others. It's probably easier to support a family in Canada than in jail.
Running away is cowardice in my eyes. Saying that "I don't have an obligation to my country" (like many of the people in this discussion have) and comparing the draft to slavery is disgusting.
You have an obligation to do what's right, and for the most part you just follow the law and pay your taxes. You might do a a few things you find distasteful because the law says so, and you might break a few rules without hurting anyone else, but if it's a big deal you can resort to voting or media attention to try and get it changed. If you're asked to put your life in danger, then you have to look pretty hard at why you're being asked to do that.
If the country is truly in peril, then you serve to protect your loved ones, or your way of life, or whatever is important to you that's threatened. Getting killed in some foreign country for no good reason or going to jail doesn't do any of those much good.
KDE and GNOME? Yeah. But there are two of them. Why? End users do not care about choice. They want something that works, and where every application looks the same and works the same. They also do not care about recompiling their kernel every time they buy some hardware, or recompiling software to alter some setting only available compile-time.
So pick KDE or GNOME, and only use apps that are particular to one or agnostic to either. Don't tell the users that the other exists, and like you said, they won't care. I think the point here is make this virtual office work from the beginning, and don't let joe office worker install a new card or dick around with a possibly unsupported webcam after his computer has been configured.
I dare not count how many Open Source projects actually start out creating a logo, a hompeage, and an implementation of themes, a particularly pointless feature. Somehow that says everything. For most of them, anyways.
Right, 90% of everything is crap. Nothing insightful there. If you know how to use google intelligently, read trade publications or slashdot, and so forth, then you know what's good and what works. Browsing sourceforge or freshmeat randomly is not how you find software to create a work environment quickly and easily.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that much of the systems on board some US Navy ships run Windows NT. Also, there was an article in Wired last year software used by the US military in Iraq, which was mostly Windows. Both of these situations could endanger human life.
I'm kind of confused... human life could be endangered only if the software used by the military doesn't work?
I don't get what the problem is- some jackass developer just wants to hang out at parties or get more girls? Perhaps they could negotiate higher wages or better working conditions if gamers would buy games based on the names on the box, and perhaps higher pay and audience attention would reduce burnout- but what is the benefit again for all of us, or the publishers? If the answer isn't 'better games' then forget it.
Improvements to the industry should be made, but don't look to media centered around having a pretty face for a model to emulate.
Sid Meier, Warren Spector, John Carmack, and that Nintendo guy (Miyamoto?) are all the game celebrities I can think of and pay attention to. No one else deserves my recognition because they haven't stayed in the industry long enough, worked hard enough, or haven't been creative enough- and their combined resumes are a list of most of my favorite games.
Even if the average gamer has never heard of them, they will know about their games because they get enormous amounts of press and advertising. I only pay attention to what Warren Spector does because he has very compelling ideas for nonlinear gameplay and has successfully implemented them, I wouldn't judge him by his looks or wit nor would I buy some crappy rail-shooter because his name is on the box.
I recall some loser on the Unreal II team all tattooed up with spikey hair and some horrible get-up (vest and gloves or something) appearing in a major magazine like Newsweek. And the quote that made it into the blurb made hime sound like even ten times the jackass the picture did- calling attention to his flashy cars and so forth and how badass his game his. The real celebrities his picture is next to just wear something nice, smile, and say something humble, and everybody loves them. Nobody wants to hear about the Unreal II guy's cars.
So you're saying that the U.S. has an infinite economic resource to spend on ABM technology, while its military rivals don't. But if every percentage increase costs a hundred or a thousand times what countering technology that would nullify that percentage would cost- then who exactly is going to overspend until they fail?
I think that missile intercepting technology is very interesting and useful, the current approach (deployment without testing) seems extremely stupid, and basing future military planning and foreign policy on the expectation that such a system will work even some percentage of the time could be disasterous.
There's the blue sky suggestion that there could be an international ABM effort- I would add that the money to pay for it could come from disarming some of our WMDs (costs like 30 billion yearly or so to keep all 10K ICBMs or whatever we have operating), and the sharing of technology would be contingent on other countries having reciprocal WMD reductions... I'll stop with the fantasy for now.
"play through the game once and forget" games hardly get any replay value
The ultimate in replay value would be the game that you completely forget after playing, except for how great it was to play, so you play it again and forget and then back to step one again...
For true replayability though, since the player probably won't forget, is to give the game a great deal of depth- so much that after beating the game the player is able to go back and play in a totally different style, explore more remote areas, and really try to find the boundaries of the game and easter eggs and so forth. It also has to be lots of fun so that all that exploring won't be a chore, as cruising across town in your vehicle of choice is in GTA3.
Firefly was one of the few shows I've watched that I really like
Can someone point out what was especially good about it? I'll grant without having seen more than half an episode that it was better than Enterprise or any other show in the genre on tv currently, but that's not saying much.
Somehow killing people isnt as bad as taking drugs...
The contention is that killing people is obviously wrong (you wouldn't want someone to kill you) and non-trivial besides (not counting jackasses who have kids and guns that aren't locked up or otherwise kid-proofed). Drugs are much more accessible and frequently have ill-effects or other repercussions that aren't immediately obvious.
Frequently this same sort argument is applied to sexual imagery or harsh language. Sex is a natural thing that is required for the propagation of the species as well as being more-or-less acceptable in non-repoductive contexts by society if it's between consenting adults. So fundamentally there's nothing wrong with sex, but there's a perceived cost to having young people develop unhealthy attitudes towards it, economic and educational costs to teen pregnancies etc., so we tend to repress sex in culture (not to say repression works, but there it is).
Language is another thing entirely. There's no physical difference between a someone saying 'shit' in a film and someone uttering it aloud- it's all sound waves. Everything else I'm talking about here has a obvious separation between a actors acting or computer generated simulations and the real thing. So not only is it easy to repeat some given sequence of words, society also perceives a cost to the usage of harsh language- in some situations it can make people angry and otherwise some people would just rather not hear it.
There's a sort of equation to this- the likelihood of something happening multiplied by the cost of that thing happening is the cost you weigh against other undesirable things.
-Murder is pretty bad, but the likelihood is extremely low. -Illegal drugs are minor to really bad, and the likelihood is moderate. -Harsh Language is minor, but the likelihood is extremely high. -Sex is sometimes acceptable and sometimes bad, and the likelihood moderate to high (should we make that a 'low' for the slashdot crowd?)
So there's a snapshot of the complicated moral landscape we have here. The judgements society makes aren't perfect, but they aren't inexplicable by any means. So for god's sake enough with these overly simplistic and tired 'x is worse than y but society represses y more than x' arguments.
I tried it out and it looked like a lot of the import/export/plugin functionality was disabled:
Maya PLE faq: "Alias Studio Personal Learning Edition has a unique binary file format; scene files and models cannot be imported into the commercial versions of StudioTools or other CAD packages." and:
1.9 Will Alias offer a file conversion service to convert Alias Studio Personal Learning Edition files into regular Studio files once the user has purchased a commercial version of StudioTools?
No, the Alias Studio Personal Learning Edition is specifically intended as a non-commercial learning tool.
I haven't tried it with HW2, but I'm kind of guessing since the Relic guess didn't use the PLE to do HW2 they didn't design around it's limiations- however, a quick google brings up this from relicnews:
2. What's the primary tool being used in the development of HW2? Will it be required to create a mod?
The primary tool being used in development of HW2 is Maya 3.0, and the assorted custom tools that we've written for it. Yes, Maya will be required to create mods. However, we realize that a lot of people may not have access to Maya and we are currently trying to work with Alias to release our Maya tools for Maya PLE (Personal Learning Edition).
I don't care about a standalone tool to do everything, but with HL2 they'll give a standalone suite (that's the proposal at least) where there's specially licensed version and adapted versions of an otherwise very expensive tools and there's a few tools they developed in house.
Pretty soon all this hardware will be worthless, since nothing will be recordable except your home movies.
No, you won't be able to make copies of your home movies for fear that you just pointed your camera at something that was copyrighted. You'll have to submit the video to a huge signal analysis farm that'll will check it against its database of registered copyrighted materials, and get back an approved copyable copy a few months after you shoot it.
You're part way there if you go with Valve's Half-Life. Full SDK that allows you to create maps, models, etc. and a ton of public domain tools for sprites and textures.
That'll be great to have a standalone SDK. I downloaded the Homeworld 2 SDK and it requires Maya, Photoshop, and Excel to get much anything out of. Open Office can probably handle the Excel part, but custom plugins were written for Maya and Photoshop so there's no way to mod a $50 game without hundreds or thousands(don't know what Maya goes for) of dollars of investment, so they've probably cut everyone out except the people who have warez versions.
With respect to open-source projects, that's certainly true.
I think it's harder to collaborate on art- Software forces a certain degree of conformity, while in art freedom is absolute- there's a huge proliferation of different styles that wouldn't look good next to each other in the same game.
Tools are partially to blame- they are prohibitively expensive and hard to master. There are some good open-source solutions: Gimp is okay for 2d stuff (please someone give it a docked interface rather than having to shuffle through dozens of independent windows...), though interface-wise I'd rather be using a copy of Deluxe Paint from ten years ago (and is there any paint program that allows you to assign one color and tool to the left button and another color and tool to the right button?). Wings 3D and Blender can do some good 3D stuff, but there's a lot missing for creating more complicated objects
The other problem is that the open-source community spirit hasn't infiltrated the art community yet. It may take a few years- I see in a site like deviantArt indicating a future where sharing and collaboration are more the rule. Artists may be less susceptible to the gpl ideology, or simply lack leadership- who would be the RMS or Linus of free software-art? And what is the standard license for distribution- something from Creative Commons?
Every year or so I buy a game that consists of 90% 3D fluff
The game industry looks like the equivalant of the comic book industry in the eary 90s, lots of eye-candy, gimmick covers, etc and little substance.
I think the way this works is this: there's three types of games- those with fluff, those with substance, and those with fluff and substance (and gradients inbetween of course). Substance, by itself, does not sell.
The thing about substance or gameplay is that it requires a certain amount of attention that cannot be extracted from an audience until they have bought the product and invested some amount of minutes or hours into it. The sure-fire way to get that investment is to attract the eye- visuals can transmit much more information about something much faster than sound or text, so discerning quality of visuals is easy for nearly anyone. There is no shorthand to communicate gameplay other than simply playing the game, though screenshots and videos and short text descriptions may at least indicate what is to be expected.
If I'm going to play a crappy game, I'd rather play a crappy game that looks good than the alternative- and the same goes for other visual media.
An addition to that last statement is that there are a lot of people for which style is substance. The obvious ones are artists, or people with ambitions in that direction or simply an appreciation for it- playing something with really cool level and character design and etc. is the main thing while the story and interface should drive it along- if they're really good, that's a great bonus. Bad story isn't really a showstopper, but bad interface is - so I don't mind seeing the 'cookie cutter' approach get used there because I'd rather not every game try to reinvent the wheel when I just want to move the camera/character/units around.
the savings that will come as a result of scrapping the project, even with the billions that were already sunk into it, will still save the economy several billions of dollars.
With a $400 billion deficit and the devaluation of the dollar, I think this is a just a token cancelation to make it seem like the current administration is being fiscally responsible. Besides, they're going to replace it with a sub-orbital bomber using kerosene boost rockets & scramjet engines and a dozen unproven technologies with no deliverables until 2025... but then they'll cancel that after there's $100 billion in the hole so they can start working on a laser fusion powered nano-factured hypersonic mirving cruise missile with a microgram of antimatter in each of the warheads. Damn, that sounds cool- I can't wait until they have some computer generated pictures of it on the cover of Popular Mechanics.
I was kinda partial to it, ever since LHX came out for MSDOS back in like 1990 or so
All these jokes about a military program that people really only knew about from computer games- just think, when they cancel the entire United States Army slashdotters will be cracking jokes: "yeah, it's too bad there won't be Americas Army 2 now..."
so that it can't be used for anything threating the homeland.
100% serious tangent here: do you actually know anybody that uses the phrase 'homeland' outside of references to the government agency, and without inducing cringing in anybody within earshot? This post is probably the first time I've seen it used non-sarcastically and without criticizing the word for its connotations... though on second thought, since the poster is speculating about the intentions government they are putting it in phrase in a way that they think the government would, and quotes belong around it.
We should do the same thing with terrorism in the middle east--talk to them and understand their feelings. That will make the whole world peaceful. Of course, that's what Sarah Conner should have done with the cyberborg from the future in The Terminator. Remember how Reese was saying that it has no feelings and no remorse, and that it won't stop, ever, until she's dead? Well, I don't believe that.
ROTFLMAO!
This would make a great Onion article (actually it's probably already been done), where it's the president saying this in the State of the Union Address or Colin Powell at a news conference:
NY Times: blah blah no WMD found blah blah?
Mr. Powell: I've prepared a short clip from James Cameron's The Terminator that should make our position clear...
Aircraft are extremely vulnerable and can be destroyed by a variety of means including man portable missiles
Until some country takes out a satellite and claims responsiblity, nobody knows what the repercussions will be. The examples you give all pertain to things that have people on them and have non-military uses, and move through international waters or airspaces or whatever.
If you blow up a ship or an airliner and there's all these dead people to show on the news it's obvious that's an act of war. If you shoot down, say, a UAV that was flying near or over your airspace spying on you, nobody really is going to notice at all- there may be a little increased tension, but nothing significant there.
Satellites are in a class by themselves, because by virtue of orbital mechanics they tend to fly over all kinds of countries that haven't given them permission to do so- but until now maybe that's worked out okay because none of those countries had the capability to do anything about it. I'm sure the U.S. will go out of it's way to say how attacking their space assets is just as bad as bombing a base in terms of potential retaliation- but it's still not clear if it would actually work out that way.
Slashdot Mirror
This is by far the most irritating argument I've seen that comes up every single time censor ship and ratings are brought up, on slashdot or anywhere. It's not ok to show real people getting killed for real (as is it not ok to do that on video or not), but it's okay to show a fictional dramatic staging of such an event. Nobody died. Ordinary dialogue is censored, for better or worse, because there's no difference between hearing it from a movie and hearing it in real life- how do you 'fake' words and sound waves?
Blockquoting myself:
Somehow killing people isnt as bad as taking drugs...
He had a hellva lot more respect for those that stood up for what they believed in (and paid the price for it by going to jail) then those that ran away to Canada.
Unfortunately, as admirable as standing up for your principles is, you have to base your actions on how they might hurt others. It's probably easier to support a family in Canada than in jail.
Running away is cowardice in my eyes. Saying that "I don't have an obligation to my country" (like many of the people in this discussion have) and comparing the draft to slavery is disgusting.
You have an obligation to do what's right, and for the most part you just follow the law and pay your taxes. You might do a a few things you find distasteful because the law says so, and you might break a few rules without hurting anyone else, but if it's a big deal you can resort to voting or media attention to try and get it changed. If you're asked to put your life in danger, then you have to look pretty hard at why you're being asked to do that.
If the country is truly in peril, then you serve to protect your loved ones, or your way of life, or whatever is important to you that's threatened. Getting killed in some foreign country for no good reason or going to jail doesn't do any of those much good.
Look at GTA for example, it doesn't have anything new but still it is one of the most popular games.
Did you play it at all? For more than 30 minutes? Which game is it a clone of?
KDE and GNOME? Yeah. But there are two of them. Why? End users do not care about choice. They want something that works, and where every application looks the same and works the same. They also do not care about recompiling their kernel every time they buy some hardware, or recompiling software to alter some setting only available compile-time.
So pick KDE or GNOME, and only use apps that are particular to one or agnostic to either. Don't tell the users that the other exists, and like you said, they won't care. I think the point here is make this virtual office work from the beginning, and don't let joe office worker install a new card or dick around with a possibly unsupported webcam after his computer has been configured.
I dare not count how many Open Source projects actually start out creating a logo, a hompeage, and an implementation of themes, a particularly pointless feature. Somehow that says everything. For most of them, anyways.
Right, 90% of everything is crap. Nothing insightful there. If you know how to use google intelligently, read trade publications or slashdot, and so forth, then you know what's good and what works. Browsing sourceforge or freshmeat randomly is not how you find software to create a work environment quickly and easily.
No, software cannot kill anyone. Only machines controlled by software can kill people.
Aren't computers machines?
We don't have software that will run without underlying hardware yet- see Permutation City for how to run software on nothing at all.
You can also make software that causes things to get blown up, so a failure there might actually save lives...
I seem to recall reading somewhere that much of the systems on board some US Navy ships run Windows NT. Also, there was an article in Wired last year software used by the US military in Iraq, which was mostly Windows. Both of these situations could endanger human life.
I'm kind of confused... human life could be endangered only if the software used by the military doesn't work?
I don't get what the problem is- some jackass developer just wants to hang out at parties or get more girls? Perhaps they could negotiate higher wages or better working conditions if gamers would buy games based on the names on the box, and perhaps higher pay and audience attention would reduce burnout- but what is the benefit again for all of us, or the publishers? If the answer isn't 'better games' then forget it.
Improvements to the industry should be made, but don't look to media centered around having a pretty face for a model to emulate.
Sid Meier, Warren Spector, John Carmack, and that Nintendo guy (Miyamoto?) are all the game celebrities I can think of and pay attention to. No one else deserves my recognition because they haven't stayed in the industry long enough, worked hard enough, or haven't been creative enough- and their combined resumes are a list of most of my favorite games.
Even if the average gamer has never heard of them, they will know about their games because they get enormous amounts of press and advertising. I only pay attention to what Warren Spector does because he has very compelling ideas for nonlinear gameplay and has successfully implemented them, I wouldn't judge him by his looks or wit nor would I buy some crappy rail-shooter because his name is on the box.
I recall some loser on the Unreal II team all tattooed up with spikey hair and some horrible get-up (vest and gloves or something) appearing in a major magazine like Newsweek. And the quote that made it into the blurb made hime sound like even ten times the jackass the picture did- calling attention to his flashy cars and so forth and how badass his game his. The real celebrities his picture is next to just wear something nice, smile, and say something humble, and everybody loves them. Nobody wants to hear about the Unreal II guy's cars.
In short; Outspend them until they fail.
So you're saying that the U.S. has an infinite economic resource to spend on ABM technology, while its military rivals don't. But if every percentage increase costs a hundred or a thousand times what countering technology that would nullify that percentage would cost- then who exactly is going to overspend until they fail?
I think that missile intercepting technology is very interesting and useful, the current approach (deployment without testing) seems extremely stupid, and basing future military planning and foreign policy on the expectation that such a system will work even some percentage of the time could be disasterous.
There's the blue sky suggestion that there could be an international ABM effort- I would add that the money to pay for it could come from disarming some of our WMDs (costs like 30 billion yearly or so to keep all 10K ICBMs or whatever we have operating), and the sharing of technology would be contingent on other countries having reciprocal WMD reductions... I'll stop with the fantasy for now.
"play through the game once and forget" games hardly get any replay value
The ultimate in replay value would be the game that you completely forget after playing, except for how great it was to play, so you play it again and forget and then back to step one again...
For true replayability though, since the player probably won't forget, is to give the game a great deal of depth- so much that after beating the game the player is able to go back and play in a totally different style, explore more remote areas, and really try to find the boundaries of the game and easter eggs and so forth. It also has to be lots of fun so that all that exploring won't be a chore, as cruising across town in your vehicle of choice is in GTA3.
Firefly was one of the few shows I've watched that I really like
Can someone point out what was especially good about it? I'll grant without having seen more than half an episode that it was better than Enterprise or any other show in the genre on tv currently, but that's not saying much.
Somehow killing people isnt as bad as taking drugs...
The contention is that killing people is obviously wrong (you wouldn't want someone to kill you) and non-trivial besides (not counting jackasses who have kids and guns that aren't locked up or otherwise kid-proofed). Drugs are much more accessible and frequently have ill-effects or other repercussions that aren't immediately obvious.
Frequently this same sort argument is applied to sexual imagery or harsh language. Sex is a natural thing that is required for the propagation of the species as well as being more-or-less acceptable in non-repoductive contexts by society if it's between consenting adults. So fundamentally there's nothing wrong with sex, but there's a perceived cost to having young people develop unhealthy attitudes towards it, economic and educational costs to teen pregnancies etc., so we tend to repress sex in culture (not to say repression works, but there it is).
Language is another thing entirely. There's no physical difference between a someone saying 'shit' in a film and someone uttering it aloud- it's all sound waves. Everything else I'm talking about here has a obvious separation between a actors acting or computer generated simulations and the real thing. So not only is it easy to repeat some given sequence of words, society also perceives a cost to the usage of harsh language- in some situations it can make people angry and otherwise some people would just rather not hear it.
There's a sort of equation to this- the likelihood of something happening multiplied by the cost of that thing happening is the cost you weigh against other undesirable things.
-Murder is pretty bad, but the likelihood is extremely low.
-Illegal drugs are minor to really bad, and the likelihood is moderate.
-Harsh Language is minor, but the likelihood is extremely high.
-Sex is sometimes acceptable and sometimes bad, and the likelihood moderate to high (should we make that a 'low' for the slashdot crowd?)
So there's a snapshot of the complicated moral landscape we have here. The judgements society makes aren't perfect, but they aren't inexplicable by any means. So for god's sake enough with these overly simplistic and tired 'x is worse than y but society represses y more than x' arguments.
Maya PLE faq: "Alias Studio Personal Learning Edition has a unique binary file format; scene files and models cannot be imported into the commercial versions of StudioTools or other CAD packages." and:
I haven't tried it with HW2, but I'm kind of guessing since the Relic guess didn't use the PLE to do HW2 they didn't design around it's limiations- however, a quick google brings up this from relicnews:
I don't care about a standalone tool to do everything, but with HL2 they'll give a standalone suite (that's the proposal at least) where there's specially licensed version and adapted versions of an otherwise very expensive tools and there's a few tools they developed in house.
Pretty soon all this hardware will be worthless, since nothing will be recordable except your home movies.
No, you won't be able to make copies of your home movies for fear that you just pointed your camera at something that was copyrighted. You'll have to submit the video to a huge signal analysis farm that'll will check it against its database of registered copyrighted materials, and get back an approved copyable copy a few months after you shoot it.
You're part way there if you go with Valve's Half-Life. Full SDK that allows you to create maps, models, etc. and a ton of public domain tools for sprites and textures.
That'll be great to have a standalone SDK. I downloaded the Homeworld 2 SDK and it requires Maya, Photoshop, and Excel to get much anything out of. Open Office can probably handle the Excel part, but custom plugins were written for Maya and Photoshop so there's no way to mod a $50 game without hundreds or thousands(don't know what Maya goes for) of dollars of investment, so they've probably cut everyone out except the people who have warez versions.
What's really lacking is artists.
With respect to open-source projects, that's certainly true.
I think it's harder to collaborate on art- Software forces a certain degree of conformity, while in art freedom is absolute- there's a huge proliferation of different styles that wouldn't look good next to each other in the same game.
Tools are partially to blame- they are prohibitively expensive and hard to master. There are some good open-source solutions: Gimp is okay for 2d stuff (please someone give it a docked interface rather than having to shuffle through dozens of independent windows...), though interface-wise I'd rather be using a copy of Deluxe Paint from ten years ago (and is there any paint program that allows you to assign one color and tool to the left button and another color and tool to the right button?). Wings 3D and Blender can do some good 3D stuff, but there's a lot missing for creating more complicated objects
The other problem is that the open-source community spirit hasn't infiltrated the art community yet. It may take a few years- I see in a site like deviantArt indicating a future where sharing and collaboration are more the rule. Artists may be less susceptible to the gpl ideology, or simply lack leadership- who would be the RMS or Linus of free software-art? And what is the standard license for distribution- something from Creative Commons?
Every year or so I buy a game that consists of 90% 3D fluff
The game industry looks like the equivalant of the comic book industry in the eary 90s, lots of eye-candy, gimmick covers, etc and little substance.
I think the way this works is this: there's three types of games- those with fluff, those with substance, and those with fluff and substance (and gradients inbetween of course). Substance, by itself, does not sell.
The thing about substance or gameplay is that it requires a certain amount of attention that cannot be extracted from an audience until they have bought the product and invested some amount of minutes or hours into it. The sure-fire way to get that investment is to attract the eye- visuals can transmit much more information about something much faster than sound or text, so discerning quality of visuals is easy for nearly anyone. There is no shorthand to communicate gameplay other than simply playing the game, though screenshots and videos and short text descriptions may at least indicate what is to be expected.
If I'm going to play a crappy game, I'd rather play a crappy game that looks good than the alternative- and the same goes for other visual media.
An addition to that last statement is that there are a lot of people for which style is substance. The obvious ones are artists, or people with ambitions in that direction or simply an appreciation for it- playing something with really cool level and character design and etc. is the main thing while the story and interface should drive it along- if they're really good, that's a great bonus. Bad story isn't really a showstopper, but bad interface is - so I don't mind seeing the 'cookie cutter' approach get used there because I'd rather not every game try to reinvent the wheel when I just want to move the camera/character/units around.
the savings that will come as a result of scrapping the project, even with the billions that were already sunk into it, will still save the economy several billions of dollars.
With a $400 billion deficit and the devaluation of the dollar, I think this is a just a token cancelation to make it seem like the current administration is being fiscally responsible. Besides, they're going to replace it with a sub-orbital bomber using kerosene boost rockets & scramjet engines and a dozen unproven technologies with no deliverables until 2025... but then they'll cancel that after there's $100 billion in the hole so they can start working on a laser fusion powered nano-factured hypersonic mirving cruise missile with a microgram of antimatter in each of the warheads. Damn, that sounds cool- I can't wait until they have some computer generated pictures of it on the cover of Popular Mechanics.
They've lost money on these kinds of deals before
Yeah, corruption and cronyism doesn't always have a good ROI...
http://imdb.com/title/tt0144550/
I was kinda partial to it, ever since LHX came out for MSDOS back in like 1990 or so
All these jokes about a military program that people really only knew about from computer games- just think, when they cancel the entire United States Army slashdotters will be cracking jokes: "yeah, it's too bad there won't be Americas Army 2 now..."
so that it can't be used for anything threating the homeland.
100% serious tangent here: do you actually know anybody that uses the phrase 'homeland' outside of references to the government agency, and without inducing cringing in anybody within earshot? This post is probably the first time I've seen it used non-sarcastically and without criticizing the word for its connotations... though on second thought, since the poster is speculating about the intentions government they are putting it in phrase in a way that they think the government would, and quotes belong around it.
We should do the same thing with terrorism in the middle east--talk to them and understand their feelings. That will make the whole world peaceful. Of course, that's what Sarah Conner should have done with the cyberborg from the future in The Terminator. Remember how Reese was saying that it has no feelings and no remorse, and that it won't stop, ever, until she's dead? Well, I don't believe that.
ROTFLMAO!
This would make a great Onion article (actually it's probably already been done), where it's the president saying this in the State of the Union Address or Colin Powell at a news conference:
NY Times: blah blah no WMD found blah blah?
Mr. Powell: I've prepared a short clip from James Cameron's The Terminator that should make our position clear...
Aircraft are extremely vulnerable and can be destroyed by a variety of means including man portable missiles
Until some country takes out a satellite and claims responsiblity, nobody knows what the repercussions will be. The examples you give all pertain to things that have people on them and have non-military uses, and move through international waters or airspaces or whatever.
If you blow up a ship or an airliner and there's all these dead people to show on the news it's obvious that's an act of war. If you shoot down, say, a UAV that was flying near or over your airspace spying on you, nobody really is going to notice at all- there may be a little increased tension, but nothing significant there.
Satellites are in a class by themselves, because by virtue of orbital mechanics they tend to fly over all kinds of countries that haven't given them permission to do so- but until now maybe that's worked out okay because none of those countries had the capability to do anything about it. I'm sure the U.S. will go out of it's way to say how attacking their space assets is just as bad as bombing a base in terms of potential retaliation- but it's still not clear if it would actually work out that way.