As someone who bought Oblivion and installed the so-called "nude patch", I can safely say that it works as follows: the game contains a nude female top because it needs that as a background to wrap armor around. When a female wears a hunter's vest, it consists of something like a bikini top. When she wears steel plate, her chest is completely covered. When she wears leather, some skin is shown. To ensure that each armor shows the correct skin, there is a nude female skin underneath. However, if the female wears no top at all, she gets the standard "nude female top" which has an ugly bikini wrapped around it (actually covering more skin than the hunter's vest). Now, what the nude patch does is replacing what is wrapped around the nude female upper body (ugly bikini top) with what is wrapped around the male upper body (nothing). The only thing which one can accuse Bethesda of is that they provided a nude female upper body with nipples, which would never been shown in the game because they are always covered by something. They could have gone for a Barbie model. Frankly, I don't really know why they did not do that, but it is obvious that no beta tester (or anyone but the low-level programmers for that matter) would notice this because there is no way that the nipples could be shown by normal gameplay. (And I actually that Jack Thompson would get just as rallied by a female top without nipples as by one with).
And if you wonder why I installed the nude patch: it makes the game more realistic, in the sense that it feels quite ridiculous that every female would wear the same wrap-around bikini under her clothes. There is also a fun part in the game where a trickster god asks you to turn a party into chaos by using a spell which removes everyone's clothes. In my view the chaos is much less if every female keeps her top. True, these are subtle differences, but in a game that tries to evoke a feeling of realism, it certainly counts. But, it should be said, in no way are these nude female tops erotic. I mean, Bethesda did not implement "jiggly physics", they did not go for ridiculous boob sizes (my guess is that all women have a B-cup in Oblivion), and the females are responding in the same way as men overall (one exception is the all-female-thieves band that rip off males only). In that sense, Oblivion is one of the tamest games I know (at least on the eroticism scale), even with topless females.
But why would turning an "intelligent" computer off cause an outcry?
I guess it would if you turned the computer off without its consent. The question is how much say a computer has in determining what is done to it. I give a surgeon permission to turn me off for a while if an operation must be performed on me. If I am going to add extra memory to an intelligent computer for which it needs rebooting, I am going to politely ask if it would not mind being turned off for half an hour or so. And I expect the computer would agree, if I can make clear that it would benefit from the move. But I should not do so only because I think it is a good idea.
The goal is to build a humanoid 2-year-old child," explains Metta. This will have all of Babybot's abilities and the researchers hope it may eventually even learn how to walk.
A fun project, and potentially a good step on the road towards human-like intelligence. However, the "2-year-old" remark is again one of those far-fetched promises that is a loooooooooooooong way off. Making a robot-arm play with a rubber ducky is one thing, letting a robot understand what a rubber ducky is, is quite another. Making a robot crawl is one thing, but letting a robot crawl with a self-conscious purpose, again is quite another.
Fortunately, one of the researcher in TFA admits that 20 computers with a neural network on each is no replacement for a human brain. But the 2-year-old remark follows later, and is evidently entered as a way to generate funding. It sounds cool, but it is not what the result of this project will be. I assume the researchers know this all too well. Or perhaps they have no children of their own.
I looked through the patent, and it simply describes that you can use pattern matching (using standard pattern matching methods) to find undesirable words (well, you can find basically anything with pattern matching, so why not scan for a list of words) and not let them be heard. It talks about a "probability threshold", which is a fancy way of saying that pattern matching will never be able to be 100% certain that a certain word is a swear word, so the system guesses with a certain percentage of chance of being right. However, it will edit out some words that are not swear words, and it will also let some swear words pass through.
I do not see how this is supposed to be an invention. It is not an invention, it is an just an application. It does not advance the state of the art. The USPTO would be completely incompetent if it would award a patent for this.
However, I think most mundanes are indifferent to what operating system they use.
Absolutely true. They do not care as long as it works right. And judging from the support "mundanes" ask from me to solve problems in their Windows setup, they seem to be of the opinion that Windows doesn't work right. Yes, they usually do not blame Windows. They just say "my computer doesn't work right anymore, please fix it for me." But give 'm a machine that runs both Windows and OSX, and soon they'll realise that one part of their machine is breaking down, while the other part runs fine. Guess what, as soon as they cannot really work in Windows anymore (which will happen soon enough without proper maintenance), they will just switch to working with OSX. And they will not phone me anymore, because that is way more difficult than just turning on the part that works and does everything they need.
there is a sense of Accountability in the game. If you outright kill someone, things change.
Yeah, like, you have to pay a guard 1000 gold coins (or a thieves guild doyen 500), which you get from selling one miserable deadric item (which you probably lifted from the dead body, which is actually not considered stealing), and everything is hunky-dorey again. Until you stab the next citizen.
Accountability? Hogwash. Mind you, I don't think that players would like it if they could not get off with a small fine, so from a gameplaying point-of-view it is probably a good choice.
IBM was the largest software/IT company in the world.
Was.
Actually, IBM is still MUCH bigger than MS. It is not owned by the richest man in the world, but it is a HUGE company. Perhaps MS is bigger in software, I don't know, but as an IT company, MS is dwarfed by IBM.
um... MS innovating? other than MS Bob, which innovations are you refering to?
Actually, MS innovates a lot. The fact that you do not see that, is because you confuse "innovating" with "inventing". "Inventing" means doing something new. MS does nothing new. So they coined the term "innovating" to refer to slapping a label saying "new and improved" on an existing product.
The console losing money on sale and made up in game royalties I thought was pretty standard for all console makers?
Yes, that is pretty standard for all console makers - except for Microsoft, which is losing money even when you take games sold into account. Of course, they accepted as much for the Xbox, indeed to create a market. They are hoping that the 360 will at least play even when games are taken into account. This may be, but the matter is still open, and I don't think it looks good. It will probably depend a lot on how the competitors release their new products.
The 360 still has the best games sold/console ratio in the history of games.
Since so few of them are available and their price is ridiculously high, it is no wonder they are bought by rich game/Microsoft fanatics, who are typically the ones who buy the most games. So your holy ratio should not be measured at this point in history.
Xbox LIVE has been a monumental hit with more downloads/day than iTunes already.
May I ask where you got this statistic from? I cannot outright deny it, but it seems pretty fishy, comparing the number of people that use iTunes with the number of XBox owners. What entails a "download" from XBox live? Is that something people actually pay for? Are these things you download once, or are these things you download regularly (as iTunes provides)?
Hard to say it wasn't a success.
Hard to say it was. It has been out for only a few months, there is no history to measure yet. People who were vying to get a 360 initially but could not get one because of the low supply, have become less interested over time and are looking out for the Revolution. There are VERY few games that need a 360 to run, and the 360 runs a whole lot of games NOT. And Microsoft is still WAY in the red on the whole Xbox venture. It will be a long time before it is a financial success, let alone a success with the gaming public.
Suppose there is a movie with a pretty good plot, which is completely botched up by sucky actors, or sucky editing, or whatever. Such a movie would totally warrant a remake. However, since it will not be a success in the first place, its name will not be associated with "quality" (or "fun") and it is hard to build an advertising campaign around making a remake of it.
So, Hollywood will only make remakes of movies that were good in the first place. Which makes it pretty hard to create a remake that is better than the original.
Hollywood's solution to that is fivefold:
Adding big special effects
Adding computer graphics
Adding well-known actors
Adding semi-explicit sex
Adding loud music
All this to make the movie appeal to a "young audience." Unfortunately, the gross of the "young audience" is mainly interested in trash, which Hollywood's fivefold solution will help to emerge.
Here are some movies that should be remade:
The Fountainhead (1949). This could have been a very good movie, but unfortunately Gary Cooper had no idea how to play Howard Roarke.
Trapped in Space (1994). A gripping story which is performed by fairly poor actors in an environment of low production values. This one could actually benefit from good special effects.
The Power (1968). A SF-Thriller-Mystery based on a great book which it manages to totally fuck up by giving it a happy ending, mainly by redoing the last few chapters.
Furthermore, any movie based on one of Philip K. Dick's books could use a remake, that does not shy away from the more philosophical sides of his stories. True, Blade Runner is cool, but losing Mercer and thereby totally ignoring the last three chapters of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" were big disappointments for me.
You can imagine that smokers having grown up with idea that smoking a good thing didn't react all that well when people started telling them how bad it is.
Ah, but there is a direct connection between smoke and harm. Everyone who smokes harms his health, and the health of the people around them. However, whether the quoted study is correct or not, it only states that gamers are more likely to drink and get high. So while the smoking study says something about ALL smokers, the gaming study says something about SOME gamers. And those gamers that do not drink or use drugs (such as myself) are annoyed that they are automatically labeled as heavy drinkers and drug users according to the study. Perhaps the study does not say that, but it IS the way it is interpreted by people. As you so adequately demonstrate with the comparison with smoking studies.
To test the effects of violent games on gamers lets use another hobby but one where we have very clear examples of the violence it generates. Soccer.
Very, very, VERY bad example. There is no way to know whether soccer generates violence (as you think is the case), or that violent people use soccer matches as an excuse to go on a rampage. Actually, I personally think it is the latter. If audiences were forbidden for soccer matches, the hooligans would find another place to get together. Maybe they go to tennis matches, or hockey matches, or - who knows - LAN parties. And there will be violence there.
Hell, even simpler suggestion. Let the soccer clubs pay for the police presence. They make billions they can afford it. Good luck again.
Considering that you cannot prove the causal relationship between soccer and violence, while you still want the soccer clubs to foot the bill, it is not surprising that your suggestion is successfully contested. It is the same as saying: "Over 90% of all crimes are committed by men, so why should women pay for a police force? Let there be a special criminality-taxation only for males." This has actually been suggested by several fundamentalist feminists, but, of course, this has never been implemented, because it is not about a distinction between men and women, but between criminals and non-criminals. Just as your suggestion is not about those who visit soccer matches and those who do not, but about those who go on a rampage and those who go home peacefully.
It is easy to feel attacked in your personal freedom but when you attack your enemy for claiming your violent you are only proving his point.
"You are violent!"
"No, I'm not!"
"See? You protest, so you prove my point!"
"You are violent!"
*silence*
"You have nothing to say? I guess that means you agree."
you defend yourself against a few aggressive animals and thats it, no human killing in TombRaider1 at all
Not exactly true, but there are very few humans to kill in Tombraider I, indeed. Although Lara was not too squeamish to pop a cap in the heads of several of Natla's goons, while she could have easily incapacitated them by other means. I thought that actually she was too needlessly violent at certain moments. But, yeah, neat game, sucky sequels (partially because of all the human opponents in the sequels).
WarMongering Idiots on one side and Religious Fundamentalist Psychos on the other cause terrorism.
From the point of view of a European, "Warmongering Idiots" and "Religious Fundamentalist Psychos" are great descriptions of the current Bush administration.
So, in China piracy is rampant, and Warner cannot sell any movie at its usual price. Thus, they decrease the price to a considerably more reasonable $1.50. Does that mean that in the US and in Europe, we have been paying too much for these DVDs all along? That we did not pirate enough? It seems consumers should start pirating much more, to get those reasonable prices over here too. Thanks, Warner, for showing us the light.
Warner is rewarding a country for having a legion of pirates. As a consequence, Warner is punishing us for being legitimate buyers. That really annoys me.
And about bringing him back: yes, it can be that easy, but it would be cheap, and if there is one thing DS9 tried to avoid it was being cheap. There were no easy answers. (This all opposed to Voyager, of course).
It will be hard to bring Sisko back, but there is not really a need for that. His role diminished as the series went on. I'd say let Avery Brooks direct, he did some good episodes.
It should not be hard to bring Odo back. Actually, I think it would be pretty cool to rake up the Founders again. They gave up way too easy in the final DS9 episode. Now they are cured, why not let them start another assault on the Federation? Odo can be brought in on both sides. Plus, a big war would obviously bring O'Brien back from Earth, and Worf from the Klingons. The rest is still on the station, AFAIK, so we're cool.
However, it will be pretty hard to get a movie financed that requires its audience to have followed a seven-seasons-tv-series. And I fear that any DS9 movie that fails to do justice to its heritage will suck.
So perhaps better not.
Personally, I think the greatest potential is in a Star Trek movie series that is not rooted in any of the tv series. Unfortunately, all series took a few episodes to get up to speed, and I would hate to get four sucky movies before the good movie arrives. We already had about eight sucky Star Trek movies (two were cool).
Does this guy really think that Madonna will rape her public LESS if she has more CD profits? That she will consider NOT making maximum profits for giving a concert? Really, she will ask a thousand bucks for a ticket if she can get away with it. There is not really an alternative for a Madonna concert (at least not one that features Madonna), so she can ask what she can get away with. With CD's, of course, this is different: the higher the CD is priced, the more people will download its contents.
MS has no choice but to play the patent game... unless you can suggest an alternative couse of action for them.
Of course they have an alternative course of action: They can lobby against software patents. If companies such as Microsoft push hard enough, software patents will get revoked. Of course, in the past they thought software patents were a good idea and lobbied to get them installed.
I love these patent-attacks against Microsoft. Not because I dislike Microsoft or because I like software patents. But because that is the quickest way to get the 800 lbs. gorilla on our side.
More extras? Good luck with that. Producing extras costs money, and producers are less and less willing to spend that money. In the early days, they had to cater to the afficinados, who craved for this stuff. Nowadays, DVDs are targeted at Joe Average, who couldn't care less about extras. Warner, for instance, does not really include extras anymore (for some years now), just the movie and perhaps a TV "behind-the-scenes special" intended to promote the movie. Yeah, an extra DVD for popular Harry Potter movies (filled with cheaply produced trash, by the way), but forget about extras for movies your really want to see. Ah, well, there is always Criterion.
So, while there are still studios willing to provide extras with DVDs, expecting that they will increase the amount and quality (especially the latter) of extras is just wishful thinking.
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And if you wonder why I installed the nude patch: it makes the game more realistic, in the sense that it feels quite ridiculous that every female would wear the same wrap-around bikini under her clothes. There is also a fun part in the game where a trickster god asks you to turn a party into chaos by using a spell which removes everyone's clothes. In my view the chaos is much less if every female keeps her top. True, these are subtle differences, but in a game that tries to evoke a feeling of realism, it certainly counts. But, it should be said, in no way are these nude female tops erotic. I mean, Bethesda did not implement "jiggly physics", they did not go for ridiculous boob sizes (my guess is that all women have a B-cup in Oblivion), and the females are responding in the same way as men overall (one exception is the all-female-thieves band that rip off males only). In that sense, Oblivion is one of the tamest games I know (at least on the eroticism scale), even with topless females.
I guess it would if you turned the computer off without its consent. The question is how much say a computer has in determining what is done to it. I give a surgeon permission to turn me off for a while if an operation must be performed on me. If I am going to add extra memory to an intelligent computer for which it needs rebooting, I am going to politely ask if it would not mind being turned off for half an hour or so. And I expect the computer would agree, if I can make clear that it would benefit from the move. But I should not do so only because I think it is a good idea.
A fun project, and potentially a good step on the road towards human-like intelligence. However, the "2-year-old" remark is again one of those far-fetched promises that is a loooooooooooooong way off. Making a robot-arm play with a rubber ducky is one thing, letting a robot understand what a rubber ducky is, is quite another. Making a robot crawl is one thing, but letting a robot crawl with a self-conscious purpose, again is quite another.
Fortunately, one of the researcher in TFA admits that 20 computers with a neural network on each is no replacement for a human brain. But the 2-year-old remark follows later, and is evidently entered as a way to generate funding. It sounds cool, but it is not what the result of this project will be. I assume the researchers know this all too well. Or perhaps they have no children of their own.
I do not see how this is supposed to be an invention. It is not an invention, it is an just an application. It does not advance the state of the art. The USPTO would be completely incompetent if it would award a patent for this.
Oh wait...
Absolutely true. They do not care as long as it works right. And judging from the support "mundanes" ask from me to solve problems in their Windows setup, they seem to be of the opinion that Windows doesn't work right. Yes, they usually do not blame Windows. They just say "my computer doesn't work right anymore, please fix it for me." But give 'm a machine that runs both Windows and OSX, and soon they'll realise that one part of their machine is breaking down, while the other part runs fine. Guess what, as soon as they cannot really work in Windows anymore (which will happen soon enough without proper maintenance), they will just switch to working with OSX. And they will not phone me anymore, because that is way more difficult than just turning on the part that works and does everything they need.
Probably not. If it were, it would LOOK better.
Yeah, like, you have to pay a guard 1000 gold coins (or a thieves guild doyen 500), which you get from selling one miserable deadric item (which you probably lifted from the dead body, which is actually not considered stealing), and everything is hunky-dorey again. Until you stab the next citizen.
Accountability? Hogwash. Mind you, I don't think that players would like it if they could not get off with a small fine, so from a gameplaying point-of-view it is probably a good choice.
And I agree, it is a great game.
Now boobs consist of tens of thousands of polygons, and the physics engine makes them jiggle realistically! Think of what this does for gameplay!
Was.
Actually, IBM is still MUCH bigger than MS. It is not owned by the richest man in the world, but it is a HUGE company. Perhaps MS is bigger in software, I don't know, but as an IT company, MS is dwarfed by IBM.
Actually, MS innovates a lot. The fact that you do not see that, is because you confuse "innovating" with "inventing". "Inventing" means doing something new. MS does nothing new. So they coined the term "innovating" to refer to slapping a label saying "new and improved" on an existing product.
Yes, that is pretty standard for all console makers - except for Microsoft, which is losing money even when you take games sold into account. Of course, they accepted as much for the Xbox, indeed to create a market. They are hoping that the 360 will at least play even when games are taken into account. This may be, but the matter is still open, and I don't think it looks good. It will probably depend a lot on how the competitors release their new products.
Since so few of them are available and their price is ridiculously high, it is no wonder they are bought by rich game/Microsoft fanatics, who are typically the ones who buy the most games. So your holy ratio should not be measured at this point in history.
Xbox LIVE has been a monumental hit with more downloads/day than iTunes already.
May I ask where you got this statistic from? I cannot outright deny it, but it seems pretty fishy, comparing the number of people that use iTunes with the number of XBox owners. What entails a "download" from XBox live? Is that something people actually pay for? Are these things you download once, or are these things you download regularly (as iTunes provides)?
Hard to say it wasn't a success.
Hard to say it was. It has been out for only a few months, there is no history to measure yet. People who were vying to get a 360 initially but could not get one because of the low supply, have become less interested over time and are looking out for the Revolution. There are VERY few games that need a 360 to run, and the 360 runs a whole lot of games NOT. And Microsoft is still WAY in the red on the whole Xbox venture. It will be a long time before it is a financial success, let alone a success with the gaming public.
So, Hollywood will only make remakes of movies that were good in the first place. Which makes it pretty hard to create a remake that is better than the original.
Hollywood's solution to that is fivefold:
All this to make the movie appeal to a "young audience." Unfortunately, the gross of the "young audience" is mainly interested in trash, which Hollywood's fivefold solution will help to emerge.
Here are some movies that should be remade:
Furthermore, any movie based on one of Philip K. Dick's books could use a remake, that does not shy away from the more philosophical sides of his stories. True, Blade Runner is cool, but losing Mercer and thereby totally ignoring the last three chapters of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" were big disappointments for me.
Ah, but there is a direct connection between smoke and harm. Everyone who smokes harms his health, and the health of the people around them. However, whether the quoted study is correct or not, it only states that gamers are more likely to drink and get high. So while the smoking study says something about ALL smokers, the gaming study says something about SOME gamers. And those gamers that do not drink or use drugs (such as myself) are annoyed that they are automatically labeled as heavy drinkers and drug users according to the study. Perhaps the study does not say that, but it IS the way it is interpreted by people. As you so adequately demonstrate with the comparison with smoking studies.
To test the effects of violent games on gamers lets use another hobby but one where we have very clear examples of the violence it generates. Soccer.
Very, very, VERY bad example. There is no way to know whether soccer generates violence (as you think is the case), or that violent people use soccer matches as an excuse to go on a rampage. Actually, I personally think it is the latter. If audiences were forbidden for soccer matches, the hooligans would find another place to get together. Maybe they go to tennis matches, or hockey matches, or - who knows - LAN parties. And there will be violence there.
Hell, even simpler suggestion. Let the soccer clubs pay for the police presence. They make billions they can afford it. Good luck again.
Considering that you cannot prove the causal relationship between soccer and violence, while you still want the soccer clubs to foot the bill, it is not surprising that your suggestion is successfully contested. It is the same as saying: "Over 90% of all crimes are committed by men, so why should women pay for a police force? Let there be a special criminality-taxation only for males." This has actually been suggested by several fundamentalist feminists, but, of course, this has never been implemented, because it is not about a distinction between men and women, but between criminals and non-criminals. Just as your suggestion is not about those who visit soccer matches and those who do not, but about those who go on a rampage and those who go home peacefully.
It is easy to feel attacked in your personal freedom but when you attack your enemy for claiming your violent you are only proving his point.
"You are violent!"
"No, I'm not!"
"See? You protest, so you prove my point!"
"You are violent!"
*silence*
"You have nothing to say? I guess that means you agree."
Damned if you do...
Not exactly true, but there are very few humans to kill in Tombraider I, indeed. Although Lara was not too squeamish to pop a cap in the heads of several of Natla's goons, while she could have easily incapacitated them by other means. I thought that actually she was too needlessly violent at certain moments. But, yeah, neat game, sucky sequels (partially because of all the human opponents in the sequels).
One who isn't in dominatrix types.
From the point of view of a European, "Warmongering Idiots" and "Religious Fundamentalist Psychos" are great descriptions of the current Bush administration.
Hmmm...
Warner is rewarding a country for having a legion of pirates. As a consequence, Warner is punishing us for being legitimate buyers. That really annoys me.
And about bringing him back: yes, it can be that easy, but it would be cheap, and if there is one thing DS9 tried to avoid it was being cheap. There were no easy answers. (This all opposed to Voyager, of course).
It will be hard to bring Sisko back, but there is not really a need for that. His role diminished as the series went on. I'd say let Avery Brooks direct, he did some good episodes.
It should not be hard to bring Odo back. Actually, I think it would be pretty cool to rake up the Founders again. They gave up way too easy in the final DS9 episode. Now they are cured, why not let them start another assault on the Federation? Odo can be brought in on both sides. Plus, a big war would obviously bring O'Brien back from Earth, and Worf from the Klingons. The rest is still on the station, AFAIK, so we're cool.
However, it will be pretty hard to get a movie financed that requires its audience to have followed a seven-seasons-tv-series. And I fear that any DS9 movie that fails to do justice to its heritage will suck.
So perhaps better not.
Personally, I think the greatest potential is in a Star Trek movie series that is not rooted in any of the tv series. Unfortunately, all series took a few episodes to get up to speed, and I would hate to get four sucky movies before the good movie arrives. We already had about eight sucky Star Trek movies (two were cool).
Does this guy really think that Madonna will rape her public LESS if she has more CD profits? That she will consider NOT making maximum profits for giving a concert? Really, she will ask a thousand bucks for a ticket if she can get away with it. There is not really an alternative for a Madonna concert (at least not one that features Madonna), so she can ask what she can get away with. With CD's, of course, this is different: the higher the CD is priced, the more people will download its contents.
Of course they have an alternative course of action: They can lobby against software patents. If companies such as Microsoft push hard enough, software patents will get revoked. Of course, in the past they thought software patents were a good idea and lobbied to get them installed.
I love these patent-attacks against Microsoft. Not because I dislike Microsoft or because I like software patents. But because that is the quickest way to get the 800 lbs. gorilla on our side.
And I thought I made a brilliant joke when I labeled this movie "Dances With Tanukis".
So, while there are still studios willing to provide extras with DVDs, expecting that they will increase the amount and quality (especially the latter) of extras is just wishful thinking.
Here's a fib that starts with zero: