Wait a minute, how is Bogost trying to advocate the destruction of an art form? What he's trying to say is that Bully could have been much more had they taken it seriously instead of making it like their usual fare. There's no "OMG! Hate! Burn it!" message there, and it's depressing that you saw that.
If the producer doesn't understand what actually makes Castlevania great, and relates it to *shudder* Underworld, then it'll suck simply because we'll all go in expecting a movie detailing the accomplishments of the Belmont family. What we'll get is most likely just a crappy generic action flick like the beginning of Underworld 2, with a bunch of bullet time and really dumb stunts meant to put you at the edge of your seat. Then there'll be a few sex scenes along the way, because all Belmonts are ravishingly horny vampire hunters and that's completely related to the plot of Castlevania. At least one of these has to end in bloodshed, because sex and violence all in one scene is just daring enough to work! At the end, there'll be a gigantic fight scene where Dracula is defeated "Once and For All!" There will probably be a helicopter somewhere in the scene which nearly takes the Belmont's head off, and Dracula will jump right into the blades and die like a complete moron. Anyone who thinks they can't reuse that scene more than once without it looking cliched is deluding themselves.
What they're really hoping for is a massive turnout of 13 year old girls and people who think like them to get on their blogs afterward and post something to the effect of "omg, like Castlevania is totally awesome!" Then they can score some serious viral marketing or something. I dunno. I forgot why I was typing this. I also stopped caring.
How many is "lots?" Nobody I know owns an HDTV. They're all college students or just starting out in life though. And the GP wasn't calling a standard definition device a media center. He was just saying that the media center consoles are HD, while the gaming consoles are SD.
That's all well and good if you ignore the actual complexity of the problem and reduce it down to terms that a 4 or 5 year old could understand. Sodium and Chlorine are definitely dangerous, and their interaction with our bloodstream is nowhere near as complex as a virus's interaction with our DNA. An above poster made the very good point that it's possible for viruses to be beneficial or to contribute beneficial pieces to our genome. Chlorine only kills us. What I'm trying to say is that your analogy reflects that you don't actually understand the problem, or you wouldn't need the analogy in the first place.
No, a vote for anything is a vote wasted. I'd prefer not to vote to show that I don't care about the system anymore. I also don't care that the Voter Apathy party is giving me this generic button to show their lack of support in my non-cause. If you don't care as much as I don't care, then don't even bother joining a party. We might accept your application, so long as you share our apathy about voting.
Seriously, though, a simple little "no-confidence" option would go a long way to restore my confidence in the system. I would like to be able to say that both candidates are equally horrible and that I would like to repeat the process with a different set. And if you're going to nitpick about my use of the word "both," remember that every other candidate gets a comparatively slim margin of the vote.
I would like to have the option of declaring a total lack of confidence in the way the government is designed, too. I think a coalition government with a voting method which employs ranking would be a much more agreeable solution.
By shooting people you do not show that you can stand up for yourself. Further more, you're comitting a grievous logical fallacy by equating a punch to a shot. There's a huge difference between punching someone and shooting them dead, and if you can't see the difference there's something seriously wrong with you. If you lose a fistfight at school, tough shit. You don't go get a gun and come back the next day. There's no honor in that.
You have a completely wrong-headed idea of why the past generations fought as well. None of the men involved in the wars of our past generations extolled the virtues of warfare. If you asked any or all of them, they would all tell you that war is hell. But in at least one of the wars of the past generation, most everyone involved felt that they had to fight in order to preserve an ideal. In WWII, when the Nazis swept across Europe and the fascists took power, America fought to preserve the idea that people have to have the freedom to choose and to think for themselves.
There's danger in being able to think for yourself and being able to choose, but life without danger is life unlived. It's a shame that the America of today is slipping into a safe, clean, peaceful police state. I'd much rather have a little anarchy and dissent in the streets and the schools and be able to decide for myself what is safe then to have Big Brother decide for me. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
It's certainly not manly to start a fight, but it is manly to defend yourself. At the same time, we all have to stick up for and preserve our ideals against whatever odds prevail. To give up the idea of freedom for the theatre of security is a fool's gambit. I would discourage my children from starting fights, but encourage them to stick up for others, with violence as a last resort. Sympathize with the parents of the children injured in fights, punish your children for taking the fight too far, but don't tell them that all forms of violence are evil and must be supressed. In the last, you encourage them to be victims, and the victimization of society is leading to its dysfunction.
I was breast-fed and I'm still overweight. There might be a correlation, but that's certainly not a major factor. Before you ask or accuse, I'm not morbidly obese and panting from the effort of moving the keyboard from the desk to my lap. I helped roof a couple of houses over the summer as well as helping to build a shed. Not obese, just fat. It's most likely the healthy diet you give your kids instead of the breast-feeding. When I was living with my mom all we had were microwave dinners and the occasional sack of fruit. Now that I'm living alone I eat a fuckton of vegetables and fruits with sparing amounts of meat. I've lost about 10 pounds since I moved out.
I do the same thing with my music CDs. That's what makes them attractive to me. Sure, it's a little piece of plastic, but it's also a hell of a lot more resistant to damage than a CD-R, less of a data-integrity worry than a hard drive, and competitively priced when you take the lyrics booklet, discography, and shiney case into account. Not only that, if a better-quality form of compression becomes available, I can just rerip from my originals instead of paying another dollar per song. At that rate, to replace my entire collection if it consisted of iTunes downloads, I would lose about a thousand dollars. Imagine paying that every few years to update encodes. Compared to that buying iTunes songs is like bending over in a prison shower. You don't own the data, the content is locked, and you can't play it on anything other than an iPod without some hacking. Don't get me started on the iPod user interface.
The real problem that I see with the PS3 is that, in order for them to have majority marketshare they have to have more systems available than Microsoft. As of now, Microsoft has majority marketshare for getting to market sooner. Nintendo is changing markets to the casual gamer, and Sony is trying to get people with a lot of money to throw around. I think that a lot of people are missing what Sony is saying about the PS3. Think about the amount of space a DVD player, a Blue-Ray player, a DVR, and whatever else the PS3 does would take up. Now, think about the cost. Then go back and look at the size of the PS3 and the cost. That's where the real advantage is.
Am I going to buy a PS3? No. I do think they have some good ideas in moving toward multimedia, but it's just not something I'm interested in as I have a PC for all the things their PS3 can do. As it stands now, I, like a lot of other people, are waiting for all three systems to come out and develop their libraries to make a decision. I don't want to buy a Wii if all that's going to be available on it is Zelda XLI and Super Ultra Mega Smash Brothers Melee Tournament Battle 2. I don't like those franchises, and I don't like playing FPSes on a console. If the Wii has some good jRPGs that are out of the mainstream, and has some multiplayer games that are also fun in single-player mode, then they've got me. Otherwise I'm looking at the 360 or the PS3.
As an aside, is there a way to filter out stories from gaming blogs on Slashdot? Most of them aren't worth the 3 seconds it takes to download them.
The reasoning is that since everyone can potentially be selected, there should be no discrimination against people who have been selected for jury duty. Otherwise this might create a situation where someone can't serve because they can't afford to or don't want to lose their job. I'm pretty sure it's illegal to fire someone for serving jury duty. So yeah, civil service job.
I hate to break it to you, but in English we have this thing called a "colloquialism." A colloquialism is basically a statement or phrase that is not intended literally, and has a different meaning, sometimes entirely different, from its literal meaning. These can really throw off ESL students during casual conversation. Examples are "I see," "never looked back," "I've got your back," etc. When I say to a friend "I've got your back," I don't literally mean that I am holding onto the rear half of his body. I mean that I'm protecting him or watching out for him somehow. Similarly, when the GP said he "never looked back," he means that he moved on, away from his original decision not regretting it or feeling the need to reconsider.
This would be especially nice as, at my university, the intranet is not accessible from off-campus, and I live off-campus, so I'm pretty much stuck with either a flash drive or gmail for file transfers. In case you were wondering, I don't own a printer. I really wish my university offered off- or on-campus print queuing to a print shop, with batch jobs done every night after the shop closes so that I could pick up my paper in the morning. Of course this would be unfeasable unless you actually were my university, so I'd settle for remote data storage. Y'know, I should see if IT has a suggestion box somewhere.
All i have to say, and feel free to disagree with me all you want because it doesn't make any difference to me, is that there is a pretty fucking big difference between ten-thousand and a million. We're talking the difference between planets and suns, electrons and protons. Maybe not that big, but the difference is on the order of a small city versus a state(or province). I'm not saying that this makes it inheriently bad or good as a service, but 3 orders of magnitude is a pretty gross overstatement. On EVE, we were excited that we broke the 30k mark for simultaneous users. There's nothing wrong with being small relative to World of Warcraft. Everyone is.
I don't think the guy who posted this read the article very well. I think they actually mean that the students who are most confident in their math skills tend to score the lowest on math aptitude tests. That isn't really news at all, as ignorance is bliss. The headline on Slashdot completely misses the actual point of the article which has nothing to do with social skills. Maybe the submitter could actually try reading the article more carefully. Of course, the entire article is phrased in such ambiguous language that it's difficult to discern what is meant by "confident." It has nothing to do with social skills.
Speaking of Lucas Arts and games that were totally awesome, does anyone remember The Dig? Man, I remember how much fun the puzzles were to solve, and how well the ambience carried through the music. It's too bad I'll never see another game like that without paying a subscription fee. I'd actually pay $50 for a new adventure game if it's done in the same style as the old-school ones. Another series I want to play again is the Legend of Kyrandia series. Oh, and Torin's Passage. Hooray Tangent!
Nope. Fry guys. Apparently, and this is from an anonymous--Penny Arcade--source, they're the KGB of Hamburger land. They're always there watching your food, and watching you, and they come with everything.
If you read one of the articles posted in this thread, he didn't just kill his wife, he killed his ex wife with his children in the house and had obviously been planning her murder for a while. That is, if the evidence is to be trusted. I don't really see the testimony of the children as being applicable in a court of law since it's so easy to ask them leading questions. I find it interesting that the man was collecting criminology books. I'd say that the missing car seat and the monkey wrench and plastic bags in his car are pretty damning evidence, not to mention the bloodstains.
Yeah, actually I assumed that all the numbers will eventually be allocated and that we recycle numbers upon the death of the previous owner. I think our calculations and assumptions must be very different.
The people in the Charter Communications office where I live said flat out that when the introductory offer I've got runs out in three months, that they would be happy to sign me up with a new one if I went into their office and asked for it. I've not seen one indication that they will be holding me for any length of time on any of the literature they've given me. I think they're more concerned with keeping paying customers than with forcing me to pay for service that I can't afford. In my part of the US, no carriers hold you to a contract. The only people who would hold you to a yearly contract are the satellite providers, and if they've teamed up with DSL providers to give you a "triple-play" then they're the people contractually obligating you.
I don't understand where you're getting the numbers for your mathematics or what kind of model you're using. I used exponential growth and a range of populations nabbed from the census. 106 is really close to 110, so either one works for me.
I did the math on this for a math ed. class. It's about 110-130 years from now that we will run out, assuming the population maintains the same growth rate.
The bit about not being able to connect to more than 5 network devices is part of the XP Home license is true. It's totally unenforceable though, as I've been at 10-person LANs with my copy of Home.
They did that so that they could have a copy of the actual printed output that you recieved, and the reason it was dot matrix is because that's the only thing that will apply pressure so that the carbon paper can copy.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait a minute, how is Bogost trying to advocate the destruction of an art form? What he's trying to say is that Bully could have been much more had they taken it seriously instead of making it like their usual fare. There's no "OMG! Hate! Burn it!" message there, and it's depressing that you saw that.
If the producer doesn't understand what actually makes Castlevania great, and relates it to *shudder* Underworld, then it'll suck simply because we'll all go in expecting a movie detailing the accomplishments of the Belmont family. What we'll get is most likely just a crappy generic action flick like the beginning of Underworld 2, with a bunch of bullet time and really dumb stunts meant to put you at the edge of your seat. Then there'll be a few sex scenes along the way, because all Belmonts are ravishingly horny vampire hunters and that's completely related to the plot of Castlevania. At least one of these has to end in bloodshed, because sex and violence all in one scene is just daring enough to work! At the end, there'll be a gigantic fight scene where Dracula is defeated "Once and For All!" There will probably be a helicopter somewhere in the scene which nearly takes the Belmont's head off, and Dracula will jump right into the blades and die like a complete moron. Anyone who thinks they can't reuse that scene more than once without it looking cliched is deluding themselves.
What they're really hoping for is a massive turnout of 13 year old girls and people who think like them to get on their blogs afterward and post something to the effect of "omg, like Castlevania is totally awesome!" Then they can score some serious viral marketing or something. I dunno. I forgot why I was typing this. I also stopped caring.
Warranty void if seal broken!
You are more wrong, because:
More irrelevant comparisons.
Superfluous anecdotal evidence.
How many is "lots?" Nobody I know owns an HDTV. They're all college students or just starting out in life though. And the GP wasn't calling a standard definition device a media center. He was just saying that the media center consoles are HD, while the gaming consoles are SD.
That's all well and good if you ignore the actual complexity of the problem and reduce it down to terms that a 4 or 5 year old could understand. Sodium and Chlorine are definitely dangerous, and their interaction with our bloodstream is nowhere near as complex as a virus's interaction with our DNA. An above poster made the very good point that it's possible for viruses to be beneficial or to contribute beneficial pieces to our genome. Chlorine only kills us. What I'm trying to say is that your analogy reflects that you don't actually understand the problem, or you wouldn't need the analogy in the first place.
No, a vote for anything is a vote wasted. I'd prefer not to vote to show that I don't care about the system anymore. I also don't care that the Voter Apathy party is giving me this generic button to show their lack of support in my non-cause. If you don't care as much as I don't care, then don't even bother joining a party. We might accept your application, so long as you share our apathy about voting.
Seriously, though, a simple little "no-confidence" option would go a long way to restore my confidence in the system. I would like to be able to say that both candidates are equally horrible and that I would like to repeat the process with a different set. And if you're going to nitpick about my use of the word "both," remember that every other candidate gets a comparatively slim margin of the vote.
I would like to have the option of declaring a total lack of confidence in the way the government is designed, too. I think a coalition government with a voting method which employs ranking would be a much more agreeable solution.
By shooting people you do not show that you can stand up for yourself. Further more, you're comitting a grievous logical fallacy by equating a punch to a shot. There's a huge difference between punching someone and shooting them dead, and if you can't see the difference there's something seriously wrong with you. If you lose a fistfight at school, tough shit. You don't go get a gun and come back the next day. There's no honor in that.
You have a completely wrong-headed idea of why the past generations fought as well. None of the men involved in the wars of our past generations extolled the virtues of warfare. If you asked any or all of them, they would all tell you that war is hell. But in at least one of the wars of the past generation, most everyone involved felt that they had to fight in order to preserve an ideal. In WWII, when the Nazis swept across Europe and the fascists took power, America fought to preserve the idea that people have to have the freedom to choose and to think for themselves.
There's danger in being able to think for yourself and being able to choose, but life without danger is life unlived. It's a shame that the America of today is slipping into a safe, clean, peaceful police state. I'd much rather have a little anarchy and dissent in the streets and the schools and be able to decide for myself what is safe then to have Big Brother decide for me. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
It's certainly not manly to start a fight, but it is manly to defend yourself. At the same time, we all have to stick up for and preserve our ideals against whatever odds prevail. To give up the idea of freedom for the theatre of security is a fool's gambit. I would discourage my children from starting fights, but encourage them to stick up for others, with violence as a last resort. Sympathize with the parents of the children injured in fights, punish your children for taking the fight too far, but don't tell them that all forms of violence are evil and must be supressed. In the last, you encourage them to be victims, and the victimization of society is leading to its dysfunction.
I was breast-fed and I'm still overweight. There might be a correlation, but that's certainly not a major factor. Before you ask or accuse, I'm not morbidly obese and panting from the effort of moving the keyboard from the desk to my lap. I helped roof a couple of houses over the summer as well as helping to build a shed. Not obese, just fat. It's most likely the healthy diet you give your kids instead of the breast-feeding. When I was living with my mom all we had were microwave dinners and the occasional sack of fruit. Now that I'm living alone I eat a fuckton of vegetables and fruits with sparing amounts of meat. I've lost about 10 pounds since I moved out.
I do the same thing with my music CDs. That's what makes them attractive to me. Sure, it's a little piece of plastic, but it's also a hell of a lot more resistant to damage than a CD-R, less of a data-integrity worry than a hard drive, and competitively priced when you take the lyrics booklet, discography, and shiney case into account. Not only that, if a better-quality form of compression becomes available, I can just rerip from my originals instead of paying another dollar per song. At that rate, to replace my entire collection if it consisted of iTunes downloads, I would lose about a thousand dollars. Imagine paying that every few years to update encodes. Compared to that buying iTunes songs is like bending over in a prison shower. You don't own the data, the content is locked, and you can't play it on anything other than an iPod without some hacking. Don't get me started on the iPod user interface.
The real problem that I see with the PS3 is that, in order for them to have majority marketshare they have to have more systems available than Microsoft. As of now, Microsoft has majority marketshare for getting to market sooner. Nintendo is changing markets to the casual gamer, and Sony is trying to get people with a lot of money to throw around. I think that a lot of people are missing what Sony is saying about the PS3. Think about the amount of space a DVD player, a Blue-Ray player, a DVR, and whatever else the PS3 does would take up. Now, think about the cost. Then go back and look at the size of the PS3 and the cost. That's where the real advantage is.
Am I going to buy a PS3? No. I do think they have some good ideas in moving toward multimedia, but it's just not something I'm interested in as I have a PC for all the things their PS3 can do. As it stands now, I, like a lot of other people, are waiting for all three systems to come out and develop their libraries to make a decision. I don't want to buy a Wii if all that's going to be available on it is Zelda XLI and Super Ultra Mega Smash Brothers Melee Tournament Battle 2. I don't like those franchises, and I don't like playing FPSes on a console. If the Wii has some good jRPGs that are out of the mainstream, and has some multiplayer games that are also fun in single-player mode, then they've got me. Otherwise I'm looking at the 360 or the PS3.
As an aside, is there a way to filter out stories from gaming blogs on Slashdot? Most of them aren't worth the 3 seconds it takes to download them.
The reasoning is that since everyone can potentially be selected, there should be no discrimination against people who have been selected for jury duty. Otherwise this might create a situation where someone can't serve because they can't afford to or don't want to lose their job. I'm pretty sure it's illegal to fire someone for serving jury duty. So yeah, civil service job.
I hate to break it to you, but in English we have this thing called a "colloquialism." A colloquialism is basically a statement or phrase that is not intended literally, and has a different meaning, sometimes entirely different, from its literal meaning. These can really throw off ESL students during casual conversation. Examples are "I see," "never looked back," "I've got your back," etc. When I say to a friend "I've got your back," I don't literally mean that I am holding onto the rear half of his body. I mean that I'm protecting him or watching out for him somehow. Similarly, when the GP said he "never looked back," he means that he moved on, away from his original decision not regretting it or feeling the need to reconsider.
This would be especially nice as, at my university, the intranet is not accessible from off-campus, and I live off-campus, so I'm pretty much stuck with either a flash drive or gmail for file transfers. In case you were wondering, I don't own a printer. I really wish my university offered off- or on-campus print queuing to a print shop, with batch jobs done every night after the shop closes so that I could pick up my paper in the morning. Of course this would be unfeasable unless you actually were my university, so I'd settle for remote data storage. Y'know, I should see if IT has a suggestion box somewhere.
All i have to say, and feel free to disagree with me all you want because it doesn't make any difference to me, is that there is a pretty fucking big difference between ten-thousand and a million. We're talking the difference between planets and suns, electrons and protons. Maybe not that big, but the difference is on the order of a small city versus a state(or province). I'm not saying that this makes it inheriently bad or good as a service, but 3 orders of magnitude is a pretty gross overstatement. On EVE, we were excited that we broke the 30k mark for simultaneous users. There's nothing wrong with being small relative to World of Warcraft. Everyone is.
I don't think the guy who posted this read the article very well. I think they actually mean that the students who are most confident in their math skills tend to score the lowest on math aptitude tests. That isn't really news at all, as ignorance is bliss. The headline on Slashdot completely misses the actual point of the article which has nothing to do with social skills. Maybe the submitter could actually try reading the article more carefully. Of course, the entire article is phrased in such ambiguous language that it's difficult to discern what is meant by "confident." It has nothing to do with social skills.
Speaking of Lucas Arts and games that were totally awesome, does anyone remember The Dig? Man, I remember how much fun the puzzles were to solve, and how well the ambience carried through the music. It's too bad I'll never see another game like that without paying a subscription fee. I'd actually pay $50 for a new adventure game if it's done in the same style as the old-school ones. Another series I want to play again is the Legend of Kyrandia series. Oh, and Torin's Passage. Hooray Tangent!
Nope. Fry guys. Apparently, and this is from an anonymous--Penny Arcade--source, they're the KGB of Hamburger land. They're always there watching your food, and watching you, and they come with everything.
If you read one of the articles posted in this thread, he didn't just kill his wife, he killed his ex wife with his children in the house and had obviously been planning her murder for a while. That is, if the evidence is to be trusted. I don't really see the testimony of the children as being applicable in a court of law since it's so easy to ask them leading questions. I find it interesting that the man was collecting criminology books. I'd say that the missing car seat and the monkey wrench and plastic bags in his car are pretty damning evidence, not to mention the bloodstains.
Yeah, actually I assumed that all the numbers will eventually be allocated and that we recycle numbers upon the death of the previous owner. I think our calculations and assumptions must be very different.
The people in the Charter Communications office where I live said flat out that when the introductory offer I've got runs out in three months, that they would be happy to sign me up with a new one if I went into their office and asked for it. I've not seen one indication that they will be holding me for any length of time on any of the literature they've given me. I think they're more concerned with keeping paying customers than with forcing me to pay for service that I can't afford. In my part of the US, no carriers hold you to a contract. The only people who would hold you to a yearly contract are the satellite providers, and if they've teamed up with DSL providers to give you a "triple-play" then they're the people contractually obligating you.
I don't understand where you're getting the numbers for your mathematics or what kind of model you're using. I used exponential growth and a range of populations nabbed from the census. 106 is really close to 110, so either one works for me.
I did the math on this for a math ed. class. It's about 110-130 years from now that we will run out, assuming the population maintains the same growth rate.
The bit about not being able to connect to more than 5 network devices is part of the XP Home license is true. It's totally unenforceable though, as I've been at 10-person LANs with my copy of Home.
They did that so that they could have a copy of the actual printed output that you recieved, and the reason it was dot matrix is because that's the only thing that will apply pressure so that the carbon paper can copy.
Err... not to be a pedant or anything.