"Sorry, I don't think so. Toys are timeless and they can take you places where you cannot normally go. "
I think you're getting overemotional about toys, the truth is toys are just manifestations of our thoughts and desires. A virtual toy is really no different metaphysically then a "real" toy. Real toys allow you to do things and experience things video games can't, but so do video games allow you to experience "toys" (the metaphysical idea of what all toys are) in new ways.
The truth is while toy's are great fun, like lego, transformers, etc. They cannot currently compete with video games because of physical and other technological limitations of a toys ability to move, express itself, and travel.
A video game's only limit is the creators ideas and computational power, in the real world, physical, manfacturing and technological constraints really hamper toy development. Next is cost and quality of the toy versus what you could get out of a virtual toy package.
I used to have a radio controlled motorboat and RC car I used to play with, they were great but they eventually break down or bust, and you always want to do the *craziest* stuff with toys, you want to abuse them and see them do those "super heroic" things machines you see on cartoons or on TV in the movies do, and you do, do that until you either bust it or it eventually wears out.
Both virtual and real toys have their places, and each one will have its own 'revolutions'. But at some point I think the "toys" will no longer be toys (robots, AI, etc) and our "dolls" will take on a life of their own through AI in the future, the merging of metaphysical toy world and the real toy world.
I agree with you some toys *are* timeless, in that you can see, touch and feel them. But I don't think we should nitpick over which one is better, they both exist in the same world of ideas. And I toast with you to that!
"What D&D still rules at is emergent gameplay- IE, setting the gigantic boss villain on fire by collapsing the house on her, etc. Rather than focusing on simple "dice mechanics," game devs should be putting their money towards physics engines and other things that will let players PLAY with the world."
The problem with these scenarios is that it takes the fun out of the interaction, while collapsing a house on a boss villain to set her on file *is cool*. In a video game it's not anything we haven't seen before. It's ho'hum and old hat.
The real challenge and fun comes from emotional stimulation and challenges, and bosses wouldn't be challenging in the same way without the underlying dice mechanics/mathematics that riddles all modern video game RPG's and MMO's.
The truth is some RPG's are about story, other RPG's are about fighting and battle mechanics.... it's where the developer chooses to focus their resources and specialize in terms of where the fun in their game should be had.
Ideally I'd love to have the UltimateGame(tm) but even the ultimate game would get boring after the 20th or 50th time playing it. The real hook of games is in emotional addicting qualities of how the game reward system and battle is set up. You get over a games graphics very quickly when you actually play a game and if there is no substance to it, you will feel dulled sense of enjoyment playing it.
You got hooked on the graphics, but you realized the game was bittersweet.
Some games would translate well as spectator sports... Quake 3 or other competitive FPS games can definitely be spectator sports, the camera's (and levels) just need to be re-worked to deal with the angles, shots, and following the players.
Many mod makers for such games have already done it. Some games would be difficult to translate due to the nature of the game (Starcraft, other RTS games). But games like UT2004, Quake, et, and other similar games would translate OK. Racing games might translate alright also if the camera could be re-worked and probably be a hell of a lot less boring the Nascar. Need for speed Most wanted anyone?
"Your $600 video card [pricegrabber.com] does just as well, if not just a little better than, a $600 console. How much was your processor, memory, hard drive, dvd drive, motherboard, network card, and case? And before we forget, how much did your copy of Windows cost you?"
Once again, comparing apples and oranges. This is not going to be a Politically correct post, because lets face it Gamers are some of the stingiest bunch in the universe when it comes to purchasing games. They do buy games and pirate but they are not going to reward crap. There is too many games and not enough money (and time) to play them all, enter piracy.
** If you're a serious gamer (both PC and console), you don't give a shit about what platform the game is on. You are at some point going to pirate console games, period.
** With that PC, I can RIP games for my consoles, so that money I spent on my PC is saving me money on all my overall gaming habits. The cost of a PC is easily amortized by the fact of what you get out of owning a PC, and access to ripping peripherals and software (DVD, blu-ray, HD-DVD) period.
** The PC does other things like... you know... cracking and RIPPING GAMES, which is widespread in the REAL WORLD(TM) not in corporate capitalist fantasy land where every individual purchases games at their full retail price.
** Not everyone buys their PC (or PC parts) new.
No one except those who can afford it (or want it bad enough) buy the latest video card. The people that own the top end are a VERY small percentage of the market. Most capable video cards are under $200 and many now reaching $100 price point, 6x less then the PS3 and 5x less then the xbox, and since most people NEED computers nowadays, the extra "cost" is negligable since they need it to access the worlds most important utility: The internet. Next the person that bought a new system could have been sitting on their last one for enough years to get a decent amount of use per $ out of it.
Now let's turn it around shall we? What about all the EXTRA controllers you need for your console if you want to play party games? (oops there goes another $100-200), what about online services? Online content downloads? Oh and that extra $10-15 PER GAME in the full retail price of your console games. Oh lets not forget the price of the modchips you are going to buy either now or later in the cycle after many more of the games have been released.
Gaming as a hobby may cost more on the PC in terms of hardware, but it decreases your total cost of ownership in terms of games you can own and play on your own time through ripping and burning and saving you money in gas and game purchase/rental fees on the gaming turds that were not good enough to buy.
Everyone OWNS a PC for other things besides gaming and the overall use of a PC (not just games) will keep getting better as computational power increases and software developers find new ways to exploit that.
Personally I don't think its intelligence and classical music, I think it has more to do with RANGE of music. And that when people say "classical" they don't MEAN classical, they mean music that uses real instruments typically associated with classical. Many arrangements and music from video games that is done with classical instruments doesn't really make "classical" songs.
"ecause when you start to look for the secret procedure behind friendship, you start looking at people as if they were abstract personalities, with some quanitifiable set of properties, and you stop looking at them as human beings. And this attitude can prevent you from actually connecting with them. It's completely absurd"
It's not absurd, the whole pickup community is based around guys who are inept, many of which who's minds do not get positive psychological rewards from socializing (or they would be out there wouldn't they?).
Just because you need to understand how socializing works in the abstract doesn't mean you stop treating people as if they weren't "human", but you do have to realize that people's behaviour is simply an expression of genetically programmed evolutionary forces at work that most people don't even understand, they simply do not even understand their own behaviour 99% of the time. They just get feelings and do the behaviour.
Mystery's theories on how women work are enormously powerful if you are a social guru or are out every night, you'll see what he says again and again, and you start seeing people like robots, and they are, biological machines programmed by evolution to survive and adapt to their environments. Their is NOTHING wrong seeing people for how they truly are, it's only romanticism that gets in a way of a persons objectivity.
Like I said, just because you understand the abstraction does not mean you do not treat people as less then human, but it is a fact that many guys do not get positive feedback from socializing, they'd rather be playing WoW, studying physics, or solving the worlds problems, but they have biological and psychological needs that need to be satisfied.
"Personally I just blame canada... i mean come on, they aren't even a real country anyways;)"
If a country is determined by the size of it's population, IRAQ then also, must not be a country. Yet you invaded IRAQ... or perhaps was iraq just a remote village?:P
I do believe this is kind of misguided thinking... If I were you I'd go and have some psychometric tests done so you know what you're up against and be able to manuever around any weaknesses that may crop up. WAIS-III adult intelligence test would be a good start and ask them to test your memory.
I do not believe at any time when someone is asking for career advice that their own abilities, strengths and weaknesses, should not be checked against the REQUIREMENTS of that career choice. You should to know what you are in for or you may find yourself swamped and unhappy with unforseen lack of enjoyment of aspects of work you once enjoyed, or it was not what you thought it wsa going to be.
... on all new computers. I've been seeing 3.5" flash drives now being sold, I just hope they catch on and become the new "floppy replacement".
I'm all for USB and thumb drives and whatever, but the flash all-in-one 3.5" flash drives make a lot of sense in terms of being able both to read and write from the media.
"I'm personally against the political use of such systems."
The truth is as bombs get even bigger, any weapon system becomes a moot point. It's time to start tackling the real problem and downfall of society: Men and women's genetically inherited behaviour.
After all if someone gets a big enough bomb and is suicidal enough, no defense on earth is going to matter. We should be working on gentically weeding out irrational and warlike characteristics from the human race. Some may "Cry eugenics" but the truth is human beings can easily become wretched creatures they are underneath the "civility" because the are running genetic behavioural programs they've inherited from the past in a modern environment... which is dangerous to say the least.
The truth is civlization has not even begun yet, we still have prisons and war because most human beings lack the ability, knowledge, will and the technology to make a better world.
The point your missing is that it is impossible hard for a human being to control all those units individually, the nature of those games (the god / 3rd person perspective) REQUIRES those features. The original warcraft did unit control on an individual basis. The fact is game designers just took away the "annoying" parts of managing so many units, in Warcraft 3 they brought back micro management with a vengeance.
The truth is gaming is about interacitivity, and the fact that interacitivity is going the way of the dodo in some genre's means game designers as a whole are dumbing down their games to the point where the aren't even games anymore. Because you are not DOING anything, you are simply watching computer run the levels for you. At that point what is the point of gaming? At that point.. there is none.
"That doesn't mean that interactivity isn't important, what it however means is that pixel-perfect control isn't needed or even good for a game."
I agree but more and more games are taking players OUT of the game. See FF12, where you just run around navigating the whole game. That was the most tedious FF I have ever played, I was not involved all I did was navigate I did not feel my actions had impact on the world, as everything was automatically done for me.
The problem with automating gaming too much is that you mind as well just put a bot into the game and have the bot run the level perfectly for you.
It's interesting you mention prince of persia's 'automatic' features, the fact is the took the ANNOYING parts of the game away (i.e. missing the jumps if you barely make it to the edge) the fact is you can STILL MISS JUMPS, prince just makes the jumping parts of the game easier by putting a rule into the game saying "If he was x close to ledge, grab ledge". That's it, the do NOT take the interactivity away.
Prince of persia sands of time in my opinion is the pinnacle of great game design. As well as god of war. Two games that rate AAA on my gaming list of what gaming really is about at its core: Interactivity.
"This is quite true. I'm constantly amazed at how many people who should know better end up with misinformation. In fact, I think it happens to everyone to varying degrees. The problem with citing Wikipedia (or any Encyclopedia for that matter) is that it is a non-authoritive source. It becomes unclear"
The truth is, human minds are not built for truth. Discovering truth, analyzing and processing every little bit of information that comes our way is computationally impossible. So people take shortcuts and take things said by other people on 'trust' or 'blind faith' because they simply could not live a normal life analyzing every bit of information for falsehood and incongruency. Darwin said it best, the human mind is not well suited to dealing with truth, it is an artifact of how arbitrary human minds are they are malleable and fairly logicless unless they are taught to be logical, and even then its not so black and white between what is rational and what isn't.
In science this is called the problem of demarcation.
"Unfortunately I suck at games. My coordination is all over the place. I have NO patience."
And unfortunately, it's people like yourself that take away what makes games great: Interactivity and the depth of control and manipulation you have over you virtual character. That sense of control, the challenges that you overcome while learning a game are what make games great to begin with.
Imagine prince of persia on "automatic" where the computer navigates the level and fights for you. Not a game I would want to play anytime soon. Yet Japanese RPG's are going increasingly the way of automated gameplay. I hate automated gameplay with a passion, why not just put the character on autopilot and watch the whole game?
The whole draw for me to video games was that I was *actually involved* in that sword swing, I chose where to swing, how hard, what spell to cast. The greatness of video games is in the greatness of decision making, even if those decisions are abstracted by pressing buttons and pulling joystick levers, it is still just as satisfying as clicking through menu's in Civilization 4 when deciding how to manage and grow a City.
Take decisions and control away from gamers, and you don't have gaming anymore. You have computer generated 3D movies, and bad ones at that. Where you navigate a few menu's and then hit "autopilot", sit back, eat your dinner, go to the bathroom.
I'm sorry but gaming is about interactivity, if you can't commit time to gaming then you're not playing the right games for you and should rethink your hobby completely. The whole reason games are what they are is because it allows one to interact in and do things and make interesting in world.
"At 20GB this alone will limit pirates as having even 100 of these movies will take up about 2TB of space."
Thats what compression codecs like DivX are for, not everyone downloads DVD's so they can play them on everyones DVD player. Many DVD players now play DivX and I wish DivX and other codecs were standard on DVD players, you save a shit tonne of money putting many movies on one DVD disc instead of wasting enormous resources.
IMHO it should be required that all DVD players play computer compressed files like DivX.
"I am intensely uncomfortable with the morality in that statement: that it is acceptable to have a separate group of people being paid less than minimum wage in order to make living easier for the rest of the country. I am making no statement regarding immigration, legal or not. I just think that the concept of "well, we have to keep a lesser class of people around because they accept wages below the norm in order to make products cheaper" is not a valid argument."
... you just have to pick the a good sample of users, take a cross section of general users, and a cross section of the power users. Have the tech literate and slightly programming lituerate power users, decode what the other general user group is trying to say. Because the real problem is in conceptualization and actually verbalizing what you want to say, and the other problem is have the users clearly defined the problem they are having with your software, its function and it's interface? That's what you really need, you need someone to help REFINE what they are thinking and what is being said and make it clear and coherent by assembling the bits and pieces of information they are giving you.
I'm sure there would be some among the most savvy tech literate people who've dabbled in a bit of programming like Visual basic or some other language who are dedicated... these users will get frustrated with user interfaces and start inventing their own, on drawpads, or might pop into visual basic and just draw out an interface and plop down controls without code, and have some kind of rough sketch of how it should work, find these users *asap*.
"I consider paper ballots as where the person actually makes a mark with ink on a piece of paper,"
Who counts the votes anyway? I still think any election can be stolen given enough economic power, and the corporations have long since had enough money to put people in their pockets. I don't buy that paper (marking a paper with a pen) is more secure then digital elections, you could do digital elections provided there were some other secure digital method to verify votes... I always thought satellite data should just load a program to load pictures of voters, i.e. who you vote for should be public knowledge, it's insane that a person should have to hide their vote in a country with 300,000,000 people. Democracy is having a really rough time scaling in my opinion, right now it's nothing like a democracy... it's a Commerce-ocracy, those who have the money make the rules.
Re:Joe McCarthy would be proud
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Wikinomics
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"the essence of communistm isn't "violent taxation", its sharing."
Exactly, and its a shame that idealogues never realize, that it's not the systems themselves that are the problems, but the actors and their capabilities, you can have a communist society, a capitalist society, a socialist society, or what have you, as long as you have people that 1) Are capable of maintaining that society 2) The principles by which the society operates are congruent with or incentivize action to maintain society and progress it forward. and 3) Are principled and caring people that have decent ethical principles (but not inflexible).
James madison said it best:
"If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."
The same could be said of any economic system and idealogy, because Might is the parent of economic power, and economic power is the parent of political power. And ALL economic transactions are political transactions... hence the phrase "vote with your wallet".
"I know a few people, myself included who dislike reading e-books due to the nature of the screen"
The problem is not with the screen, it's with the interface. A book on a computer should be 3D and handle just like a book in the real world. Except you dont have to apply force to keep the book open or the pages from flopping over.
I don't understand why wikipedia can't collect enough money and then survive off the interest, what does it cost to run wikipedia? All they need is enough money to generate enough interest to pay for itself and a bit more, then ask for donations when they need to expand again.
"I would just as soon see ads for stuff that I am actually interested in. When I go to a store and the salesman knows me well enough to actually be helpful I chalk that up to good service. Why should a website be any different?"
The difference is that they have very likely have enormous amounts of personal and personally identifiable information that can be sold to other companies, and employees or groups/divisions within Microsoft who can be bribed by other companies which could very easily have emails copied or simultaneously relayed to other mail servers.
Take for example vonage, they PUBLICALLY put a persons FULL NAME on outgoing email addresses. I was so pissed off when I got my first email and it had my full name in it sent to a public email service. Many other companies do this Willy nilly without stopping to think of the privacy implications, or if they have they purposely do it for data mining purposes, for theirs or other companies.
I wouldn't be surprised of intelligence agencies all over the world are creaming their pants at all the data they are going to be able to collect for propagandistic purposes (read: "public relations"). I shudder to think of all the mathematical and statistical correlations they are going to find and then abuse it willy nilly, even more then they are now.
It's very trivial to discover who people are, especially if you're combing and data mining their email for details to build reports to give to advertisers. Not only that, it's trivially simpler to correlate who people are with email and their IP addresses. So much private information passes through the email system, I would not be surprised if their are entire databases decribing everything about a person, their interests and their life that they have revealed through public email system to private friends, lovers and colleagues over the internet.
You cannot have privacy in a modern economy everyone leaves breadcrumbs everywhere by interacting with businesses.
Slashdot Mirror
"Sorry, I don't think so. Toys are timeless and they can take you places where you cannot normally go. "
I think you're getting overemotional about toys, the truth is toys are just manifestations of our thoughts and desires. A virtual toy is really no different metaphysically then a "real" toy. Real toys allow you to do things and experience things video games can't, but so do video games allow you to experience "toys" (the metaphysical idea of what all toys are) in new ways.
The truth is while toy's are great fun, like lego, transformers, etc. They cannot currently compete with video games because of physical and other technological limitations of a toys ability to move, express itself, and travel.
A video game's only limit is the creators ideas and computational power, in the real world, physical, manfacturing and technological constraints really hamper toy development. Next is cost and quality of the toy versus what you could get out of a virtual toy package.
I used to have a radio controlled motorboat and RC car I used to play with, they were great but they eventually break down or bust, and you always want to do the *craziest* stuff with toys, you want to abuse them and see them do those "super heroic" things machines you see on cartoons or on TV in the movies do, and you do, do that until you either bust it or it eventually wears out.
Both virtual and real toys have their places, and each one will have its own 'revolutions'. But at some point I think the "toys" will no longer be toys (robots, AI, etc) and our "dolls" will take on a life of their own through AI in the future, the merging of metaphysical toy world and the real toy world.
I agree with you some toys *are* timeless, in that you can see, touch and feel them. But I don't think we should nitpick over which one is better, they both exist in the same world of ideas. And I toast with you to that!
"What D&D still rules at is emergent gameplay- IE, setting the gigantic boss villain on fire by collapsing the house on her, etc. Rather than focusing on simple "dice mechanics," game devs should be putting their money towards physics engines and other things that will let players PLAY with the world."
The problem with these scenarios is that it takes the fun out of the interaction, while collapsing a house on a boss villain to set her on file *is cool*. In a video game it's not anything we haven't seen before. It's ho'hum and old hat.
The real challenge and fun comes from emotional stimulation and challenges, and bosses wouldn't be challenging in the same way without the underlying dice mechanics/mathematics that riddles all modern video game RPG's and MMO's.
The truth is some RPG's are about story, other RPG's are about fighting and battle mechanics.... it's where the developer chooses to focus their resources and specialize in terms of where the fun in their game should be had.
Ideally I'd love to have the UltimateGame(tm) but even the ultimate game would get boring after the 20th or 50th time playing it. The real hook of games is in emotional addicting qualities of how the game reward system and battle is set up. You get over a games graphics very quickly when you actually play a game and if there is no substance to it, you will feel dulled sense of enjoyment playing it.
You got hooked on the graphics, but you realized the game was bittersweet.
Some games would translate well as spectator sports... Quake 3 or other competitive FPS games can definitely be spectator sports, the camera's (and levels) just need to be re-worked to deal with the angles, shots, and following the players.
Many mod makers for such games have already done it. Some games would be difficult to translate due to the nature of the game (Starcraft, other RTS games). But games like UT2004, Quake, et, and other similar games would translate OK. Racing games might translate alright also if the camera could be re-worked and probably be a hell of a lot less boring the Nascar. Need for speed Most wanted anyone?
It'd be interesting to experiment thats for sure.
"Your $600 video card [pricegrabber.com] does just as well, if not just a little better than, a $600 console. How much was your processor, memory, hard drive, dvd drive, motherboard, network card, and case? And before we forget, how much did your copy of Windows cost you?"
Once again, comparing apples and oranges. This is not going to be a Politically correct post, because lets face it Gamers are some of the stingiest bunch in the universe when it comes to purchasing games. They do buy games and pirate but they are not going to reward crap. There is too many games and not enough money (and time) to play them all, enter piracy.
** If you're a serious gamer (both PC and console), you don't give a shit about what platform the game is on. You are at some point going to pirate console games, period.
** With that PC, I can RIP games for my consoles, so that money I spent on my PC is saving me money on all my overall gaming habits. The cost of a PC is easily amortized by the fact of what you get out of owning a PC, and access to ripping peripherals and software (DVD, blu-ray, HD-DVD) period.
** The PC does other things like... you know... cracking and RIPPING GAMES, which is widespread in the REAL WORLD(TM) not in corporate capitalist fantasy land where every individual purchases games at their full retail price.
** Not everyone buys their PC (or PC parts) new.
No one except those who can afford it (or want it bad enough) buy the latest video card. The people that own the top end are a VERY small percentage of the market. Most capable video cards are under $200 and many now reaching $100 price point, 6x less then the PS3 and 5x less then the xbox, and since most people NEED computers nowadays, the extra "cost" is negligable since they need it to access the worlds most important utility: The internet. Next the person that bought a new system could have been sitting on their last one for enough years to get a decent amount of use per $ out of it.
Now let's turn it around shall we? What about all the EXTRA controllers you need for your console if you want to play party games? (oops there goes another $100-200), what about online services? Online content downloads? Oh and that extra $10-15 PER GAME in the full retail price of your console games. Oh lets not forget the price of the modchips you are going to buy either now or later in the cycle after many more of the games have been released.
Gaming as a hobby may cost more on the PC in terms of hardware, but it decreases your total cost of ownership in terms of games you can own and play on your own time through ripping and burning and saving you money in gas and game purchase/rental fees on the gaming turds that were not good enough to buy.
Everyone OWNS a PC for other things besides gaming and the overall use of a PC (not just games) will keep getting better as computational power increases and software developers find new ways to exploit that.
"between intellegence and classical music."
Personally I don't think its intelligence and classical music, I think it has more to do with RANGE of music. And that when people say "classical" they don't MEAN classical, they mean music that uses real instruments typically associated with classical. Many arrangements and music from video games that is done with classical instruments doesn't really make "classical" songs.
"ecause when you start to look for the secret procedure behind friendship, you start looking at people as if they were abstract personalities, with some quanitifiable set of properties, and you stop looking at them as human beings. And this attitude can prevent you from actually connecting with them. It's completely absurd"
It's not absurd, the whole pickup community is based around guys who are inept, many of which who's minds do not get positive psychological rewards from socializing (or they would be out there wouldn't they?).
Just because you need to understand how socializing works in the abstract doesn't mean you stop treating people as if they weren't "human", but you do have to realize that people's behaviour is simply an expression of genetically programmed evolutionary forces at work that most people don't even understand, they simply do not even understand their own behaviour 99% of the time. They just get feelings and do the behaviour.
Mystery's theories on how women work are enormously powerful if you are a social guru or are out every night, you'll see what he says again and again, and you start seeing people like robots, and they are, biological machines programmed by evolution to survive and adapt to their environments. Their is NOTHING wrong seeing people for how they truly are, it's only romanticism that gets in a way of a persons objectivity.
Like I said, just because you understand the abstraction does not mean you do not treat people as less then human, but it is a fact that many guys do not get positive feedback from socializing, they'd rather be playing WoW, studying physics, or solving the worlds problems, but they have biological and psychological needs that need to be satisfied.
http://www.themysterymethod.com/forum/index.php
http://www.bristollair.com/
... Why hardware is soft? :)
"Personally I just blame canada... i mean come on, they aren't even a real country anyways ;)"
:P
If a country is determined by the size of it's population, IRAQ then also, must not be a country. Yet you invaded IRAQ... or perhaps was iraq just a remote village?
"Your age is irrelevant."
I do believe this is kind of misguided thinking... If I were you I'd go and have some psychometric tests done so you know what you're up against and be able to manuever around any weaknesses that may crop up. WAIS-III adult intelligence test would be a good start and ask them to test your memory.
I do not believe at any time when someone is asking for career advice that their own abilities, strengths and weaknesses, should not be checked against the REQUIREMENTS of that career choice. You should to know what you are in for or you may find yourself swamped and unhappy with unforseen lack of enjoyment of aspects of work you once enjoyed, or it was not what you thought it wsa going to be.
... on all new computers. I've been seeing 3.5" flash drives now being sold, I just hope they catch on and become the new "floppy replacement".
I'm all for USB and thumb drives and whatever, but the flash all-in-one 3.5" flash drives make a lot of sense in terms of being able both to read and write from the media.
"I'm personally against the political use of such systems."
The truth is as bombs get even bigger, any weapon system becomes a moot point. It's time to start tackling the real problem and downfall of society: Men and women's genetically inherited behaviour.
After all if someone gets a big enough bomb and is suicidal enough, no defense on earth is going to matter. We should be working on gentically weeding out irrational and warlike characteristics from the human race. Some may "Cry eugenics" but the truth is human beings can easily become wretched creatures they are underneath the "civility" because the are running genetic behavioural programs they've inherited from the past in a modern environment... which is dangerous to say the least.
The truth is civlization has not even begun yet, we still have prisons and war because most human beings lack the ability, knowledge, will and the technology to make a better world.
The point your missing is that it is impossible hard for a human being to control all those units individually, the nature of those games (the god / 3rd person perspective) REQUIRES those features. The original warcraft did unit control on an individual basis. The fact is game designers just took away the "annoying" parts of managing so many units, in Warcraft 3 they brought back micro management with a vengeance.
The truth is gaming is about interacitivity, and the fact that interacitivity is going the way of the dodo in some genre's means game designers as a whole are dumbing down their games to the point where the aren't even games anymore. Because you are not DOING anything, you are simply watching computer run the levels for you. At that point what is the point of gaming? At that point.. there is none.
"That doesn't mean that interactivity isn't important, what it however means is that pixel-perfect control isn't needed or even good for a game."
I agree but more and more games are taking players OUT of the game. See FF12, where you just run around navigating the whole game. That was the most tedious FF I have ever played, I was not involved all I did was navigate I did not feel my actions had impact on the world, as everything was automatically done for me.
The problem with automating gaming too much is that you mind as well just put a bot into the game and have the bot run the level perfectly for you.
It's interesting you mention prince of persia's 'automatic' features, the fact is the took the ANNOYING parts of the game away (i.e. missing the jumps if you barely make it to the edge) the fact is you can STILL MISS JUMPS, prince just makes the jumping parts of the game easier by putting a rule into the game saying "If he was x close to ledge, grab ledge". That's it, the do NOT take the interactivity away.
Prince of persia sands of time in my opinion is the pinnacle of great game design. As well as god of war. Two games that rate AAA on my gaming list of what gaming really is about at its core: Interactivity.
"This is quite true. I'm constantly amazed at how many people who should know better end up with misinformation. In fact, I think it happens to everyone to varying degrees. The problem with citing Wikipedia (or any Encyclopedia for that matter) is that it is a non-authoritive source. It becomes unclear"
The truth is, human minds are not built for truth. Discovering truth, analyzing and processing every little bit of information that comes our way is computationally impossible. So people take shortcuts and take things said by other people on 'trust' or 'blind faith' because they simply could not live a normal life analyzing every bit of information for falsehood and incongruency. Darwin said it best, the human mind is not well suited to dealing with truth, it is an artifact of how arbitrary human minds are they are malleable and fairly logicless unless they are taught to be logical, and even then its not so black and white between what is rational and what isn't.
In science this is called the problem of demarcation.
"Unfortunately I suck at games. My coordination is all over the place. I have NO patience."
And unfortunately, it's people like yourself that take away what makes games great: Interactivity and the depth of control and manipulation you have over you virtual character. That sense of control, the challenges that you overcome while learning a game are what make games great to begin with.
Imagine prince of persia on "automatic" where the computer navigates the level and fights for you. Not a game I would want to play anytime soon. Yet Japanese RPG's are going increasingly the way of automated gameplay. I hate automated gameplay with a passion, why not just put the character on autopilot and watch the whole game?
The whole draw for me to video games was that I was *actually involved* in that sword swing, I chose where to swing, how hard, what spell to cast. The greatness of video games is in the greatness of decision making, even if those decisions are abstracted by pressing buttons and pulling joystick levers, it is still just as satisfying as clicking through menu's in Civilization 4 when deciding how to manage and grow a City.
Take decisions and control away from gamers, and you don't have gaming anymore. You have computer generated 3D movies,
and bad ones at that. Where you navigate a few menu's and then hit "autopilot", sit back, eat your dinner, go to the bathroom.
I'm sorry but gaming is about interactivity, if you can't commit time to gaming then you're not playing the right games for you and should rethink your hobby completely. The whole reason games are what they are is because it allows one to interact in and do things and make interesting in world.
"At 20GB this alone will limit pirates as having even 100 of these movies will take up about 2TB of space." Thats what compression codecs like DivX are for, not everyone downloads DVD's so they can play them on everyones DVD player. Many DVD players now play DivX and I wish DivX and other codecs were standard on DVD players, you save a shit tonne of money putting many movies on one DVD disc instead of wasting enormous resources. IMHO it should be required that all DVD players play computer compressed files like DivX.
"I am intensely uncomfortable with the morality in that statement: that it is acceptable to have a separate group of people being paid less than minimum wage in order to make living easier for the rest of the country. I am making no statement regarding immigration, legal or not. I just think that the concept of "well, we have to keep a lesser class of people around because they accept wages below the norm in order to make products cheaper" is not a valid argument."
http://www.syti.net/GB/SilentWeaponsGB.html
... you just have to pick the a good sample of users, take a cross section of general users, and a cross section of the power users. Have the tech literate and slightly programming lituerate power users, decode what the other general user group is trying to say. Because the real problem is in conceptualization and actually verbalizing what you want to say, and the other problem is have the users clearly defined the problem they are having with your software, its function and it's interface? That's what you really need, you need someone to help REFINE what they are thinking and what is being said and make it clear and coherent by assembling the bits and pieces of information they are giving you.
I'm sure there would be some among the most savvy tech literate people who've dabbled in a bit of programming like Visual basic or some other language who are dedicated... these users will get frustrated with user interfaces and start inventing their own, on drawpads, or might pop into visual basic and just draw out an interface and plop down controls without code, and have some kind of rough sketch of how it should work, find these users *asap*.
"I consider paper ballots as where the person actually makes a mark with ink on a piece of paper,"
Who counts the votes anyway? I still think any election can be stolen given enough economic power, and the corporations have long since had enough money to put people in their pockets. I don't buy that paper (marking a paper with a pen) is more secure then digital elections, you could do digital elections provided there were some other secure digital method to verify votes... I always thought satellite data should just load a program to load pictures of voters, i.e. who you vote for should be public knowledge, it's insane that a person should have to hide their vote in a country with 300,000,000 people. Democracy is having a really rough time scaling in my opinion, right now it's nothing like a democracy... it's a Commerce-ocracy, those who have the money make the rules.
"the essence of communistm isn't "violent taxation", its sharing."
Exactly, and its a shame that idealogues never realize, that it's not the systems themselves that are the problems, but the actors and their capabilities, you can have a communist society, a capitalist society, a socialist society, or what have you, as long as you have people that 1) Are capable of maintaining that society 2) The principles by which the society operates are congruent with or incentivize action to maintain society and progress it forward. and 3) Are principled and caring people that have decent ethical principles (but not inflexible).
James madison said it best:
"If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."
The same could be said of any economic system and idealogy, because Might is the parent of economic power, and economic power is the parent of political power. And ALL economic transactions are political transactions... hence the phrase "vote with your wallet".
"I know a few people, myself included who dislike reading e-books due to the nature of the screen"
The problem is not with the screen, it's with the interface. A book on a computer should be 3D and handle just like a book in the real world. Except you dont have to apply force to keep the book open or the pages from flopping over.
I don't understand why wikipedia can't collect enough money and then survive off the interest, what does it cost to run wikipedia? All they need is enough money to generate enough interest to pay for itself and a bit more, then ask for donations when they need to expand again.
""Episodic content" was already around for a long time in the form of expansion packs (and related tactics.) For example:"
Huge difference between then and now, the "Episodic content" was a FREE demo most of the time where as they encouraged you to purchase the FULL GAME.
If they are going to release "episodes" the first episode should be FREE.
"I would just as soon see ads for stuff that I am actually interested in. When I go to a store and the salesman knows me well enough to actually be helpful I chalk that up to good service. Why should a website be any different?"
The difference is that they have very likely have enormous amounts of personal and personally identifiable information that can be sold to other companies, and employees or groups/divisions within Microsoft who can be bribed by other companies which could very easily have emails copied or simultaneously relayed to other mail servers.
Take for example vonage, they PUBLICALLY put a persons FULL NAME on outgoing email addresses. I was so pissed off when I got my first email and it had my full name in it sent to a public email service. Many other companies do this Willy nilly without stopping to think of the privacy implications, or if they have they purposely do it for data mining purposes, for theirs or other companies.
I wouldn't be surprised of intelligence agencies all over the world are creaming their pants at all the data they are going to be able to collect for propagandistic purposes (read: "public relations"). I shudder to think of all the mathematical and statistical correlations they are going to find and then abuse it willy nilly, even more then they are now.
It's very trivial to discover who people are, especially if you're combing and data mining their email for details to build reports to give to advertisers. Not only that, it's trivially simpler to correlate who people are with email and their IP addresses. So much private information passes through the email system, I would not be surprised if their are entire databases decribing everything about a person, their interests and their life that they have revealed through public email system to private friends, lovers and colleagues over the internet.
You cannot have privacy in a modern economy everyone leaves breadcrumbs everywhere by interacting with businesses.