with a budget of $100 million dollars+, there's no good excuse for everything that comes out in theaters not being totally awesome.
First off, there's no amount of money that can simply be converted to a 'totally awesome' movie. You have to work at making a movie and hire a lot of other people to help make it, it takes a long time, and there's a great deal of risk.
Anyone can say 'I could make a better movie than that for that much money' or say they should have hired someone else that has a proven ability to make better movies. The problem with the first case is that one that even with the worst movies it's rarely true, and two because it's so rarely true it's very unlikely the people with the money are going to believe someone who claimed that even if it were true. For the second, the problem is that people with proven talents have limited time in which to make use of their talents- so not every movie made can get the best people even if they can afford them.
Want to make a lot of money on a game? Design one that's fun to play.
This kind of statement is so devoid of content that it is worthless- it's like saying 'make good movies instead of bad ones, and then people will go to them'. So what is a fun game? How does one design a fun game?
I suspect that the essence of fun cannot be objectively determined, and that whether a game is fun or not can only be determined very late in the production process.
One proposal would be that a game that turns out to be non-fun doesn't get published, but only very large publishers could afford to do that- poor sales and a diminished company image are always going to preferable to bankruptcy.
UO pioneered the modern MMOG, and yet they have nothing to show for it... Majestic, Motor City Online, and Earth & Beyond, all of which were also cancelled. UO survives as a dying shadow of its former self.
One of the big problems with MMOGs is that there is very little precedence to evaluating success. How many years, how many players? How much profit- if you could make a MMOG that made back all development and marketing costs plus lots of profit in 3 months, and then players became bored and left in droves, would that be a success, or just another item in your list of canceled games?
So far the only end-game for a MMOG is failure, the only non-failures are games that have managed to keep going, keep their players or constantly replenish them, and upgrade the engine. Former players are almost always going to be dissatisfied players- they may have a few fond memories but the reason for leaving is never going to be that their experienced culminated naturally.
This is part of the reason I find MMOGs so repulsive- the value to playing to the game is so contingent on its present popularity and also how much time invested in the game per day or week. I like a more casual experience of picking a game up that maybe nobody is playing anymore, playing it for 10-20 hours (where those ten hours may be spread out over any amount of time) to its conclusion, and then putting it down feeling satisfied while moving on to something different- which is also what the people selling the game want and expect me to do, so our interests are aligned.
On the other hand, charge $50 for crap, and suddenly folks like it because it cost them $50.
It seems simple in principle- people want to get value for their money. $50 is enough money that the average consumer is not buying multiple games at once, or new games every day- you buy a new game and you expect to play it for a while before getting a new one. So that means you spend $50 and you have say two weeks devoted to that game before you feel like you can afford to replace it- even if there's a few things you don't like about the game you're probably going to keep playing.
If you spent $5 for a bargain bin game, and you buy more than one or you plan to return soon to buy some more, the least annoying thing is much more likely to be a 'shelf level event' because you have other games in your queue to get to. It's not that anyone thinks a cheap game is worthless, it's just that the game has to be really good up-front to keep the player from moving on to another game.
The willingness to give an expensive game more of a chance to grow on you than a cheap one is just part of it, the other is that people feel bad having invested in something that doesn't pay off- ideally people would try to avoid that bad feeling by doing more research in the products before they buy them, but frequently the easiest thing to do is just change their minds. This same principle can explain why bad politicians can get re-elected...
I think he's handing out the award now, because Vint Cerf (ICANN director) is backing Bush's proposal for US controlled DNS and taking Google with him.
It's funny because you'd think they would want to distance themselves as much as possible from the administration if they want to convince the rest of the world to maintain the status quo on this issue on technical or economic grounds or whatever (I don't really know what their argument is supposed to be). The more personally interested the US political leaders are, the more it will appear validate the claims of the other countries that something of high political value is at issue and internationalized or localized control is in order, that national sovereignty is at stake, and so on.
It's hard not to resent these kinds of people, because there are very few people of above average intelligence who feel satisfied with their education as a child. It's annoying when you get to college and take a course and can't figure out why you couldn't have learned the same thing when you were five or ten years younger. Maybe there was an 'advanced track' at school, but if you could exceed beyond that that there was no where else to go- you weren't a child prodigy, but just a few more steps up and you could have gone a bit further a bit earlier and had a much more satisfying education.
There's a few comments here wondering how people like this turn out, just off pure speculation I would say that people who do end up relatively successful will downplay their prodigy childhood a great deal so people won't be biased against them, and they have plenty of colleagues of the same capabilities who went through school at a normal pace. The prodigies just got a few years head start on the rest.
Perhaps there would be a great savings to the education system if it were more supportive of advanced learning- perhaps many people could go into industry earlier and reduce the cost of the education by being in it for less years and paying taxes for more years before retirement, even if having to support more advanced education would raise costs in the short term. But since the whole U.S. funding scheme for public education is so screwed up I doubt we'll improve things anytime soon.
If you've seen any of the video game movies of Uwe Boll or Resident Evil: Apocalypse you'll find that Paul Andersen is god's immaculate gift to movie directordom, relatively speaking.
This is great for the consumer because is balances the economics further in the consumer's favor, makes true on the generality the "knowledge is power", and allows the consumer the keep the economy pumping by having more money to purchase other goods and services.
I think economics text base the whole theory of capitalism as a means to fairly distribute limited resources (actually I'm not sure if the goal is fairness or something else) on the idea that consumers have perfect knowledge about products and services. That's a long way from being true, but perhaps google will get us closer to it.
I think the largest problem with reviewers is that they all feel compelled to have a graphics catagory and then rate games partially based on it.
Game reviewers love graphics because they can post pretty screenshots and seem objective. However, the most important part of games is the subjective fun-factor.
You pretty much pose the answer to the problem you point out. Graphics are much less subjective than 'satisfaction' or 'fun-factor', therefore they can be rated on a multiple point scale and you'll find two completely reviewers can get roughly the same ratings without conspiring to do so. But of course just because graphics are easy to rate doesn't mean they should be rated or otherwise weighted heavily into a game's overall rating. I think they do, because I like good graphics, though I recognize that some people aren't as stimulated/inspired/whatever by visuals the same way as a lot of people- though I think since we have brains with such large portions devoted to image processing the people who like good visuals are in the majority.
I suspect people who don't like graphics as much are like people who never really played football or baseball at any level in school - they rarely are sports fans despite humans having a lot of built-in athletic capabilities. For whatever reason these non-graphics people didn't get exposed to a lot of comic books, fantastic movies, or traditional art (much less tried to create any of those on their own) to give them the background to appreciate graphics in games today.
Fun-factor doesn't lend itself to a numerical rating, typically you have to read an entire review to find out the more subjective impression of the game, and perhaps because you have a past track record with that particular reviewer or first off impressions of the way they articulate their thoughts about the game make you think you and they have enough in common to trust their personal opinion. I say keep the personal stuff and the more concrete technical ratings in the reviews.
Personally, I say the type of government doesn't matter worth a damn; what matters is the level of respect a government has for individual freedom. If a society is more free living under the rule of a monarchy than the rule of a democracy, then I say the monarchy is more ethical and just, and you're damn right I'd rather live there.
This is theoretically true and probably would most likely work in a few instances for smaller countries in stable and economically secure positions, but the constitutional democracy, in which the constitution limits the powers of the democracy and protects the rights of individuals, is in most cases the best way to go.
One can posit a system confers freedom of speech and assembly to its citizens, but gives them no voice in government, but it seems to me that the system would be highly unstable- you have an outlet to criticize the government but not an outlet that forces the government to listen to that criticism. So the government would constantly be in a position of questioning whether to curtail freedoms in order to suppress dissent, or making concessions to dissenters (essentially becoming an informal/ad-hoc representative system), or ignoring it and hope it doesn't build to revolutionary furvor.
I think the biggest failure of democracy is foreign policy, not individual rights (though those are always in danger of gradually being taken away). Foreign policy frequently comes at the expense of people who are disenfranchised- they don't live in the country that is exerting it's will over them, therefore they can't vote to improve that foreign policy- the only thing they can do is hope to influence voters in that other country (language barriers frequently intercede there), or emigrate to that country and create a voting block that looks out for their country of origin - but that only works long-term (Cuba is kind of retarded there- ejecting their criminals and undesirables to Florida guarantees there is a large number voters in Florida that reinforces the anti-Cuban U.S. foreign policy).
I feel sorry for game companies because they're screwed no matter what
Companies take a calculated risk when announcing games. The more they talk about a game, including the release date, the more sales they'll be able to drum up- and of course everyone knows software projects are very difficult to schedule around. They could keep the games complete secrets until release day but then nobody will have heard of it, and if they promise an exact day or week or season too far in advance then potential customers can and should complain, so that the next time that and other companies will schedule and advertise more realistically.
You cast customer feedback ('bitching and moaning') in a very negative light, but most game studios would love to have customers that passionate about their games.
there's no pleasing anyone in the game community.
Actually, you can please most of the people most of the time with realistic scheduling and good quality assurance. It probably comes down to how well-funded you are and how well your investors understand that bugs and delays are going to hurt the company long-term, as well as your project leaders experience with similarly scaled projects.
MS isn't inherenty bad. They have just made more mistakes than others, but that can change. Did you ever stop to think that they might just want to do something right?
People who stay in abusive relationships all sound exactly alike...
I played through both SS1 and SS2 when they were relatively new, and I sort of wonder at the SS2 fans on slashdot- did they not play the first one or did they just forget about it?
For instance:
The game robs you of human* contact, constantly holding the possibility of finding someone else still alive on the ship just out of reach.
Which is exactly what the first one did, so to me there was zero impact from retreading that concept. 'Oh, you say there's some humans holding out on level six? Yeah, right, they'll all be dead right before I get there, no matter how fast or how slowly I go' Then you realize that part of the reason they don't have human contact is the games graphics engines aren't really capable of showing convincing human models.
I really loved SS1, it was hugely innovative at the time- the journal files to tell the story, the diagonal sloping walls capability of the engine made it feel much more 3D than Doom's '2.5D', the ability to take out security cameras and degrade your opponents ability to fight you (not sure if some other game did that previously though). SS2 came out years later when FPSs already dominated pc gaming and it had decent but unremarkable graphics (the levels and textures were nice, the enemy models not so much), and instead of continuing to innovate it just retread the original game- and without anyone noticing apparently, because nobody played the original game, and now people are talking about the sequel the same way I do about SS1.
This sort of appalling misuse of copyright to advance ideology is another reason why standards should not be subject to restrictive copyright licensing.
It sounds like a standards body is not authorizing redistribution by organizations that are in bad faith attempting to subvert or ignore parts of the standard. If God had bothered to copyright the bible he could send cease and desist letters to the Devil for quoting scripture at him, fair use or no, et cetera.
I mostly agree it would be nice if there were some good standards and curricula and textbooks under some-rights-reserved CC licenses, and it would be hilarious if this event provided the impetus to actually create them.
Exactly what is with the strong feelings of hatrid towards ID?
Think of the religion you find the most offensive or repulsive, and then imagine that the state is using your tax dollars to indoctrinate your children with it. For a lot of people that is enough reason to leave a country en masse and found a colony where everyone else shares their core beliefs or start burning effigies in the streets or whatever form of rebellion you fancy. So, instead here we have maybe something that is 1/100th as repulsive to some people but still smacks just a little of the government forcing a religion you don't believe in down your throat, and therefore you see angry posts on slashdot to that effect, rather than massive social upheaval or entire cities of people that believe in one version Christianity being slaughtered by one with a slightly different version and so on for hundreds of years until you're out of the dark ages.
we don't even have a concrete scientific definition of intelligence. So then how can "intelligent design" even be a topic of discussion?
This is one of my favorite points to make in this context. Not only is there no theory of intelligence, there is no theory of design. Complex functional and useful artifacts almost never spring from the minds of inventors complete and working, they are typically the products of many people working over many years, making and testing incremental changes- one interesting theory of innovation suggests that evolution may be one of the best analogies- check out The Evolution of Technology (my notes here).
It's funny because I think the source of the whole issue is a result of the industrial revolution, followed by advances in biology which too often used the 'machine' analogy when explaining biological processes. Religious types hope to advance their beliefs by observing that humans are intelligent, humans make machines, humans are like machines (though with a supernatural 'soul' making Free Will command decisions from behind the curtain), therefore something intelligent made humans. The reaction is happening now in this form because now science has basically unlocked all the major mysteries of life as we observe it now except for those of intelligence, the last front of the 'god of the gaps'- and since we don't have perfect records of the history of life/time-machines, deep history is a weak spot that can be assaulted in order to carve out a space for the interventions of the intelligent designer/s.
What is really humorous about the bottom line of the ID/Creationism argument is their argument that they have a theory that is more plausible than evolutionary scientist's. If you take two universes, one in which life sprang out of raw materials and evolved to sentience, and one in which a God created intelligent life in-situ, the first universe is one more worthy of awe than the second, because it is less likely or even impossible by the arguments of the ID/Creationists! Any old God can make his own complex multi-cellular organisms in Its image, but a universe that bootstraps itself up to having sentience is truly impressive.
The education systems of many western nations are quite lacking these days. It's not surprising that the vast majority of young people are completely ignorant of history.
When exactly was it where the western nations did have great proportions of people well-versed with history? Public education hasn't been around for much more than a century at least in the U.S., so sometime in the 20th century?
In my experience, there are two types of people who spout off on the 'they don't teach history well anymore' troll:
Those who are simply old, and who encounter young people who don't know about things they didn't have the benefit of being alive to hear about when it was news.
The well-educated (and also relatively old), either by being born to the well-off or an accident of geography or because they took a personal interest in self-education through books or whatever. For all their superior education they still express surprise when encountering younger people who did not enjoy the same good fortune as they did, and then make the simple minded assumption that the education system is going down the tubes.
I'm not really sure what the point of the troll is, other than to say 'I am knowledgeable and wise and you or most other people aren't, so therefore they should respect my opinion more than their uninformed one and that is why nobody has fixed the other things wrong with the country today...'.
Calling a joke title jingoistic is a joke. Asking 'why do you hate America so much?' of the person who called the joke title jingoistic is also a joke.
Of course, the authors of those posts and Zonk may not be in on it (what did Zonk know about Brewster Jennings and when did he know it?), but that makes the whole thing even more funny.
There isn't a set rate at which your eye runs at, just like there isn't a resolution for your eye- more pixels and more fps are going to look smoother than less, there's no hard limit just a point of diminishing returns.
I think you're going to see what appears to be a screenshot of Halo (2)
If what you're saying is that any of these movies is so visually undifferentiated that it's pointless to see a screenshot, then I don't really understand the point of watching any of them. The videos should be creative enough that there is going to be some screenshot that makes the video stand out from the other videos and the regular game. If this is unrealistic or impossible then I apologize for showing any falsely placed interest and I express my bafflement on what other people are getting out of this.
I realize they may be receiving a minor slashdotting, but I'm not going to download a video without seeing at least a tiny thumbnail screenshot so I'll know what the hell I'm wasting all this time to see.
How is the U.S. congress going to pass a law that requires the non-U.S. portions of the world how to operate their portions of the internet? Is national security or the U.S. economy threatened by this issue?
What does DNS have to do with the ability of repressive countries to repress usage of the internet in their countries? Aren't those countries already doing things to restrict internet usage? (heck, aren't U.S. companies selling them the software to do it?) It's probably time to stop thinking of the internet as a technological trojan horse that will magically set the people of world free despite efforts of their local governments to prevent it.
Why do so many posters get so worked up in defending the U.S. right to operate DNS or whatever for the benefit of the entire world, and why do they get moderated so highly? Can somebody please tell me what the change here actually threatens?
The first Resident Evil movie should get lots of props.
RE: Apocalypse didn't have as strong a scenario, writing, or anything else really.
I thought RE was okay when I first watched it, and later my opinion of it improved after watching some of the special features- it sounded like some of the people involved had interesting ideas and worked hard etc. Then I watched RE: Apocalypse, and my opinion of the first movie skyrocketed. Wow, was RE:A bad: the boss-monster, the corporate villains, that female police officer with the rediculous outfit, in general all the lighting and the film stock they shot the movie with- RE looks like it could win an Oscar it was so much better in comparison in every single respect in which a movie can be appreciated.
A week later I watched Alone in the Dark and I began to realize that RE:A wasn't so bad after all...
Re:Grand Theft Auto as Carjacking Prevention Train
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Sid Meier Responds
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Violence in current videogames? A South Carolina man was able to foil an attempted carjacking using methods learned from Grand Theft Auto. I think both sides of the "violent games" story need to be told!
I haven't played a GTA where you can violently open a car door or throw a hot beverage in someone's face. What I've learned from GTA about carjacker escape is to either get out of the car and shoot the carjacker with your UZI, or simply drive away.
Are the lawyers just more proactive in California, or is the law bent towards the ability to sue immediately after a law is passed? I sort of thought you had to wait until someone is charged under the law, then defend them and take the case as high as you can- or perhaps that's just the way to do it and actually succeed, because you can show real damages?
Slashdot Mirror
with a budget of $100 million dollars+, there's no good excuse for everything that comes out in theaters not being totally awesome.
First off, there's no amount of money that can simply be converted to a 'totally awesome' movie. You have to work at making a movie and hire a lot of other people to help make it, it takes a long time, and there's a great deal of risk.
Anyone can say 'I could make a better movie than that for that much money' or say they should have hired someone else that has a proven ability to make better movies. The problem with the first case is that one that even with the worst movies it's rarely true, and two because it's so rarely true it's very unlikely the people with the money are going to believe someone who claimed that even if it were true. For the second, the problem is that people with proven talents have limited time in which to make use of their talents- so not every movie made can get the best people even if they can afford them.
Want to make a lot of money on a game? Design one that's fun to play.
This kind of statement is so devoid of content that it is worthless- it's like saying 'make good movies instead of bad ones, and then people will go to them'. So what is a fun game? How does one design a fun game?
I suspect that the essence of fun cannot be objectively determined, and that whether a game is fun or not can only be determined very late in the production process.
One proposal would be that a game that turns out to be non-fun doesn't get published, but only very large publishers could afford to do that- poor sales and a diminished company image are always going to preferable to bankruptcy.
UO pioneered the modern MMOG, and yet they have nothing to show for it... Majestic, Motor City Online, and Earth & Beyond, all of which were also cancelled. UO survives as a dying shadow of its former self.
One of the big problems with MMOGs is that there is very little precedence to evaluating success. How many years, how many players? How much profit- if you could make a MMOG that made back all development and marketing costs plus lots of profit in 3 months, and then players became bored and left in droves, would that be a success, or just another item in your list of canceled games?
So far the only end-game for a MMOG is failure, the only non-failures are games that have managed to keep going, keep their players or constantly replenish them, and upgrade the engine. Former players are almost always going to be dissatisfied players- they may have a few fond memories but the reason for leaving is never going to be that their experienced culminated naturally.
This is part of the reason I find MMOGs so repulsive- the value to playing to the game is so contingent on its present popularity and also how much time invested in the game per day or week. I like a more casual experience of picking a game up that maybe nobody is playing anymore, playing it for 10-20 hours (where those ten hours may be spread out over any amount of time) to its conclusion, and then putting it down feeling satisfied while moving on to something different- which is also what the people selling the game want and expect me to do, so our interests are aligned.
On the other hand, charge $50 for crap, and suddenly folks like it because it cost them $50.
It seems simple in principle- people want to get value for their money. $50 is enough money that the average consumer is not buying multiple games at once, or new games every day- you buy a new game and you expect to play it for a while before getting a new one. So that means you spend $50 and you have say two weeks devoted to that game before you feel like you can afford to replace it- even if there's a few things you don't like about the game you're probably going to keep playing.
If you spent $5 for a bargain bin game, and you buy more than one or you plan to return soon to buy some more, the least annoying thing is much more likely to be a 'shelf level event' because you have other games in your queue to get to. It's not that anyone thinks a cheap game is worthless, it's just that the game has to be really good up-front to keep the player from moving on to another game.
The willingness to give an expensive game more of a chance to grow on you than a cheap one is just part of it, the other is that people feel bad having invested in something that doesn't pay off- ideally people would try to avoid that bad feeling by doing more research in the products before they buy them, but frequently the easiest thing to do is just change their minds. This same principle can explain why bad politicians can get re-elected...
I think he's handing out the award now, because Vint Cerf (ICANN director) is backing Bush's proposal for US controlled DNS and taking Google with him.
It's funny because you'd think they would want to distance themselves as much as possible from the administration if they want to convince the rest of the world to maintain the status quo on this issue on technical or economic grounds or whatever (I don't really know what their argument is supposed to be). The more personally interested the US political leaders are, the more it will appear validate the claims of the other countries that something of high political value is at issue and internationalized or localized control is in order, that national sovereignty is at stake, and so on.
It's hard not to resent these kinds of people, because there are very few people of above average intelligence who feel satisfied with their education as a child. It's annoying when you get to college and take a course and can't figure out why you couldn't have learned the same thing when you were five or ten years younger. Maybe there was an 'advanced track' at school, but if you could exceed beyond that that there was no where else to go- you weren't a child prodigy, but just a few more steps up and you could have gone a bit further a bit earlier and had a much more satisfying education.
There's a few comments here wondering how people like this turn out, just off pure speculation I would say that people who do end up relatively successful will downplay their prodigy childhood a great deal so people won't be biased against them, and they have plenty of colleagues of the same capabilities who went through school at a normal pace. The prodigies just got a few years head start on the rest.
Perhaps there would be a great savings to the education system if it were more supportive of advanced learning- perhaps many people could go into industry earlier and reduce the cost of the education by being in it for less years and paying taxes for more years before retirement, even if having to support more advanced education would raise costs in the short term. But since the whole U.S. funding scheme for public education is so screwed up I doubt we'll improve things anytime soon.
Well, actually, no, we haven't missed you at all.
If you've seen any of the video game movies of Uwe Boll or Resident Evil: Apocalypse you'll find that Paul Andersen is god's immaculate gift to movie directordom, relatively speaking.
This is great for the consumer because is balances the economics further in the consumer's favor, makes true on the generality the "knowledge is power", and allows the consumer the keep the economy pumping by having more money to purchase other goods and services.
I think economics text base the whole theory of capitalism as a means to fairly distribute limited resources (actually I'm not sure if the goal is fairness or something else) on the idea that consumers have perfect knowledge about products and services. That's a long way from being true, but perhaps google will get us closer to it.
I think the largest problem with reviewers is that they all feel compelled to have a graphics catagory and then rate games partially based on it.
Game reviewers love graphics because they can post pretty screenshots and seem objective. However, the most important part of games is the subjective fun-factor.
You pretty much pose the answer to the problem you point out. Graphics are much less subjective than 'satisfaction' or 'fun-factor', therefore they can be rated on a multiple point scale and you'll find two completely reviewers can get roughly the same ratings without conspiring to do so. But of course just because graphics are easy to rate doesn't mean they should be rated or otherwise weighted heavily into a game's overall rating. I think they do, because I like good graphics, though I recognize that some people aren't as stimulated/inspired/whatever by visuals the same way as a lot of people- though I think since we have brains with such large portions devoted to image processing the people who like good visuals are in the majority.
I suspect people who don't like graphics as much are like people who never really played football or baseball at any level in school - they rarely are sports fans despite humans having a lot of built-in athletic capabilities. For whatever reason these non-graphics people didn't get exposed to a lot of comic books, fantastic movies, or traditional art (much less tried to create any of those on their own) to give them the background to appreciate graphics in games today.
Fun-factor doesn't lend itself to a numerical rating, typically you have to read an entire review to find out the more subjective impression of the game, and perhaps because you have a past track record with that particular reviewer or first off impressions of the way they articulate their thoughts about the game make you think you and they have enough in common to trust their personal opinion. I say keep the personal stuff and the more concrete technical ratings in the reviews.
Personally, I say the type of government doesn't matter worth a damn; what matters is the level of respect a government has for individual freedom. If a society is more free living under the rule of a monarchy than the rule of a democracy, then I say the monarchy is more ethical and just, and you're damn right I'd rather live there.
This is theoretically true and probably would most likely work in a few instances for smaller countries in stable and economically secure positions, but the constitutional democracy, in which the constitution limits the powers of the democracy and protects the rights of individuals, is in most cases the best way to go.
One can posit a system confers freedom of speech and assembly to its citizens, but gives them no voice in government, but it seems to me that the system would be highly unstable- you have an outlet to criticize the government but not an outlet that forces the government to listen to that criticism. So the government would constantly be in a position of questioning whether to curtail freedoms in order to suppress dissent, or making concessions to dissenters (essentially becoming an informal/ad-hoc representative system), or ignoring it and hope it doesn't build to revolutionary furvor.
I think the biggest failure of democracy is foreign policy, not individual rights (though those are always in danger of gradually being taken away). Foreign policy frequently comes at the expense of people who are disenfranchised- they don't live in the country that is exerting it's will over them, therefore they can't vote to improve that foreign policy- the only thing they can do is hope to influence voters in that other country (language barriers frequently intercede there), or emigrate to that country and create a voting block that looks out for their country of origin - but that only works long-term (Cuba is kind of retarded there- ejecting their criminals and undesirables to Florida guarantees there is a large number voters in Florida that reinforces the anti-Cuban U.S. foreign policy).
I feel sorry for game companies because they're screwed no matter what
Companies take a calculated risk when announcing games. The more they talk about a game, including the release date, the more sales they'll be able to drum up- and of course everyone knows software projects are very difficult to schedule around. They could keep the games complete secrets until release day but then nobody will have heard of it, and if they promise an exact day or week or season too far in advance then potential customers can and should complain, so that the next time that and other companies will schedule and advertise more realistically.
You cast customer feedback ('bitching and moaning') in a very negative light, but most game studios would love to have customers that passionate about their games.
there's no pleasing anyone in the game community.
Actually, you can please most of the people most of the time with realistic scheduling and good quality assurance. It probably comes down to how well-funded you are and how well your investors understand that bugs and delays are going to hurt the company long-term, as well as your project leaders experience with similarly scaled projects.
MS isn't inherenty bad. They have just made more mistakes than others, but that can change. Did you ever stop to think that they might just want to do something right?
People who stay in abusive relationships all sound exactly alike...
I can't believe nobody mentioned System Shock 2.
I played through both SS1 and SS2 when they were relatively new, and I sort of wonder at the SS2 fans on slashdot- did they not play the first one or did they just forget about it?
For instance:
The game robs you of human* contact, constantly holding the possibility of finding someone else still alive on the ship just out of reach.
Which is exactly what the first one did, so to me there was zero impact from retreading that concept. 'Oh, you say there's some humans holding out on level six? Yeah, right, they'll all be dead right before I get there, no matter how fast or how slowly I go' Then you realize that part of the reason they don't have human contact is the games graphics engines aren't really capable of showing convincing human models.
I really loved SS1, it was hugely innovative at the time- the journal files to tell the story, the diagonal sloping walls capability of the engine made it feel much more 3D than Doom's '2.5D', the ability to take out security cameras and degrade your opponents ability to fight you (not sure if some other game did that previously though). SS2 came out years later when FPSs already dominated pc gaming and it had decent but unremarkable graphics (the levels and textures were nice, the enemy models not so much), and instead of continuing to innovate it just retread the original game- and without anyone noticing apparently, because nobody played the original game, and now people are talking about the sequel the same way I do about SS1.
This sort of appalling misuse of copyright to advance ideology is another reason why standards should not be subject to restrictive copyright licensing.
It sounds like a standards body is not authorizing redistribution by organizations that are in bad faith attempting to subvert or ignore parts of the standard. If God had bothered to copyright the bible he could send cease and desist letters to the Devil for quoting scripture at him, fair use or no, et cetera.
I mostly agree it would be nice if there were some good standards and curricula and textbooks under some-rights-reserved CC licenses, and it would be hilarious if this event provided the impetus to actually create them.
Exactly what is with the strong feelings of hatrid towards ID?
Think of the religion you find the most offensive or repulsive, and then imagine that the state is using your tax dollars to indoctrinate your children with it. For a lot of people that is enough reason to leave a country en masse and found a colony where everyone else shares their core beliefs or start burning effigies in the streets or whatever form of rebellion you fancy. So, instead here we have maybe something that is 1/100th as repulsive to some people but still smacks just a little of the government forcing a religion you don't believe in down your throat, and therefore you see angry posts on slashdot to that effect, rather than massive social upheaval or entire cities of people that believe in one version Christianity being slaughtered by one with a slightly different version and so on for hundreds of years until you're out of the dark ages.
It's a sensitive issue in other words.
we don't even have a concrete scientific definition of intelligence. So then how can "intelligent design" even be a topic of discussion?
This is one of my favorite points to make in this context. Not only is there no theory of intelligence, there is no theory of design. Complex functional and useful artifacts almost never spring from the minds of inventors complete and working, they are typically the products of many people working over many years, making and testing incremental changes- one interesting theory of innovation suggests that evolution may be one of the best analogies- check out The Evolution of Technology (my notes here).
It's funny because I think the source of the whole issue is a result of the industrial revolution, followed by advances in biology which too often used the 'machine' analogy when explaining biological processes. Religious types hope to advance their beliefs by observing that humans are intelligent, humans make machines, humans are like machines (though with a supernatural 'soul' making Free Will command decisions from behind the curtain), therefore something intelligent made humans. The reaction is happening now in this form because now science has basically unlocked all the major mysteries of life as we observe it now except for those of intelligence, the last front of the 'god of the gaps'- and since we don't have perfect records of the history of life/time-machines, deep history is a weak spot that can be assaulted in order to carve out a space for the interventions of the intelligent designer/s.
What is really humorous about the bottom line of the ID/Creationism argument is their argument that they have a theory that is more plausible than evolutionary scientist's. If you take two universes, one in which life sprang out of raw materials and evolved to sentience, and one in which a God created intelligent life in-situ, the first universe is one more worthy of awe than the second, because it is less likely or even impossible by the arguments of the ID/Creationists! Any old God can make his own complex multi-cellular organisms in Its image, but a universe that bootstraps itself up to having sentience is truly impressive.
The education systems of many western nations are quite lacking these days. It's not surprising that the vast majority of young people are completely ignorant of history.
When exactly was it where the western nations did have great proportions of people well-versed with history? Public education hasn't been around for much more than a century at least in the U.S., so sometime in the 20th century?
In my experience, there are two types of people who spout off on the 'they don't teach history well anymore' troll:
Those who are simply old, and who encounter young people who don't know about things they didn't have the benefit of being alive to hear about when it was news.
The well-educated (and also relatively old), either by being born to the well-off or an accident of geography or because they took a personal interest in self-education through books or whatever. For all their superior education they still express surprise when encountering younger people who did not enjoy the same good fortune as they did, and then make the simple minded assumption that the education system is going down the tubes.
I'm not really sure what the point of the troll is, other than to say 'I am knowledgeable and wise and you or most other people aren't, so therefore they should respect my opinion more than their uninformed one and that is why nobody has fixed the other things wrong with the country today...'.
the title isn't "jingoistic": it's just a joke.
Calling a joke title jingoistic is a joke. Asking 'why do you hate America so much?' of the person who called the joke title jingoistic is also a joke.
Of course, the authors of those posts and Zonk may not be in on it (what did Zonk know about Brewster Jennings and when did he know it?), but that makes the whole thing even more funny.
There isn't a set rate at which your eye runs at, just like there isn't a resolution for your eye- more pixels and more fps are going to look smoother than less, there's no hard limit just a point of diminishing returns.
I think you're going to see what appears to be a screenshot of Halo (2)
If what you're saying is that any of these movies is so visually undifferentiated that it's pointless to see a screenshot, then I don't really understand the point of watching any of them. The videos should be creative enough that there is going to be some screenshot that makes the video stand out from the other videos and the regular game. If this is unrealistic or impossible then I apologize for showing any falsely placed interest and I express my bafflement on what other people are getting out of this.
I realize they may be receiving a minor slashdotting, but I'm not going to download a video without seeing at least a tiny thumbnail screenshot so I'll know what the hell I'm wasting all this time to see.
How is the U.S. congress going to pass a law that requires the non-U.S. portions of the world how to operate their portions of the internet? Is national security or the U.S. economy threatened by this issue?
What does DNS have to do with the ability of repressive countries to repress usage of the internet in their countries? Aren't those countries already doing things to restrict internet usage? (heck, aren't U.S. companies selling them the software to do it?) It's probably time to stop thinking of the internet as a technological trojan horse that will magically set the people of world free despite efforts of their local governments to prevent it.
Why do so many posters get so worked up in defending the U.S. right to operate DNS or whatever for the benefit of the entire world, and why do they get moderated so highly? Can somebody please tell me what the change here actually threatens?
The first Resident Evil movie should get lots of props.
RE: Apocalypse didn't have as strong a scenario, writing, or anything else really.
I thought RE was okay when I first watched it, and later my opinion of it improved after watching some of the special features- it sounded like some of the people involved had interesting ideas and worked hard etc. Then I watched RE: Apocalypse, and my opinion of the first movie skyrocketed. Wow, was RE:A bad: the boss-monster, the corporate villains, that female police officer with the rediculous outfit, in general all the lighting and the film stock they shot the movie with- RE looks like it could win an Oscar it was so much better in comparison in every single respect in which a movie can be appreciated.
A week later I watched Alone in the Dark and I began to realize that RE:A wasn't so bad after all...
Violence in current videogames? A South Carolina man was able to foil an attempted carjacking using methods learned from Grand Theft Auto. I think both sides of the "violent games" story need to be told!
I haven't played a GTA where you can violently open a car door or throw a hot beverage in someone's face. What I've learned from GTA about carjacker escape is to either get out of the car and shoot the carjacker with your UZI, or simply drive away.
Are the lawyers just more proactive in California, or is the law bent towards the ability to sue immediately after a law is passed? I sort of thought you had to wait until someone is charged under the law, then defend them and take the case as high as you can- or perhaps that's just the way to do it and actually succeed, because you can show real damages?