I didn't finish ME either, due in part to my 360 dying, but mostly because the rover shit is stupid and poorly designed. Driving a shitty rover around so I can stop by the same checkpoints, get out and interact with an object, then get back in and do it again, then move on to do it all over on what is effectively the same map with different colored grass and rocks hundreds of times isn't fun.
I've never understood how people can actually give a shit about Half-Life. The only good thing to ever come out of it was Counterstrike. The story is stupid and there were plenty of other, better FPS games out there.
As far as I'm concerned it's right up there with Halo as far as FPSs go. Overrated garbage hyped up for no reason that can't hold a candle to Duke 3D or Goldeneye.
The point is that you don't try to please all of those competing interests.
Back in the vanilla days, there was only one difficulty level for content. There were no heroics. There were no badges that had to be farmed on a daily basis for welfare gear. Blues meant something and purples were something most players never actually saw. PVP only existed in the world and battles between the factions were long lasting, had real implications on the PvE part of the game, and wasn't affected by some twink faggot's balance issues. There was no such thing as nerfing a class' PvE ability just because it happens to screw over another class in PvP, because PvP was part of the environment and not a focus of the game itself.
One of the reasons WoW worked so much better back then is because Blizzard wasn't holding anyone's hands because something might be too hard or confusing. The world was huge. You could level from 1-60 without even setting foot in half of the regions, so there was always something new to see. Dungeons and raids were meant to be a challenge, and there was no pulling punches. If you wanted to get to MC, you first had to go through LBRS and then to UBRS, and none of it got any easier when new raids were released. It took real honest to god work to get to end game content, and there was no coasting along for the ride and getting carried simply because the content was actually difficult and the gear rewards weren't handed out like candy. Getting to Naxx actually meant that you accomplished something, and once you got there it took even more work to finish it. Most people never got there, so there was still some prestige and wonder associated with the feat. Compare that to today where a half decent tank and a half decent healer can carry three retards who can't stay out of the fire through any dungeon in the game and then be able to faceroll through the raids as well just by derping through five mans over and over for weeks so they can buy their welfare epics and sit in the LFG for a 10 man.
The biggest difference between then and now is that back when WoW was good, Blizzard wasn't catering to anyone. They made the game as they envisioned it and presented it to the players as is.
Even if the Macbook Air were the single best selling notebook, it's only because there are dozens of other vendors fighting over the other 90% of the market and each one has dozens of different notebook models each geared towards a different segment of the market.
Macs don't even register in the top 5% of high-end PCs. They only get respectable numbers if you only count pre-built PCs. The vast majority of high-end PCs are custom built and wouldn't get counted in the first place.
Furthermore, tablets are stupid and nobody on Slashdot cares about them.
tl;dr you can make anything look good if you're selective about the data you include.
We're talking early 90s for the windows based configuration tools, and 70s for the actual hardware it resides on...
I'll never understand why companies do that shit. Upgrading hardware and software isn't so much of a pain in the ass that it's worth the massive drop in productivity and capability over the years.
If they can't function without hardware that dates back to the Apollo program and software that was obsolete when Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was on the air, someone isn't doing their job.
It's like selling a V8 with two cylinders disabled by the on-board computer as a V6 and then charging the customers for an upgrade that activates them and unlocks the original V8 power.
While the graphics are impressive, I think the real innovation here is that using this technology, a developer could make the entire world realistically destructible by giving different materials different levels of attraction between "atoms" and giving the game a really good physics engine.
Imagine if the game were actually calculating the physics behind a bullet's impact with a rock, and the rock reacted appropriately by throwing off chips or cracking. Imagine shooting a hillside with a tank and leaving a dynamic crater. Imagine grenades damaging characters with real shrapnel instead of just having a pre-set kill radius.
I dunno much about the way that Steam does things, but when the Pokemon GTS was hacked, and then hacked again for B/W, the DS contacting the Nintendo servers was easily solved by just changing the dns for the console to point to your own PC where you're running a dummy authentication server. Steam could probably be defeated the same way.
WoW has had people running private servers since the beginning.
Hell, the Pokemon community has managed to reverse engineer and hijack the wireless communications of the DS to create their own private GTS servers for sending pokemon to and from their own PCs or distributing event pokemon.
What makes you think that the shenanigans you suggested couldn't be easily circumvented by more serious crackers? They already rewrite a significant portion of the code to get around the DRM anyway.
My 3300lb Camaro gets better than that with a 3.8L V6 from almost fifteen years ago. I managed to get 35mpg going down from Reno to Porterville last month too.
Ford's new 305hp V6 Mustangs get even better gas mileage than that.
Hey, she repeated back everything Pinkie said to put in. It isn't her fault that Pinkie not only wasn't listening but didn't take so much as a single look into the bowl.
It's not just Youtube videos that they tolerate. The older fanbase has taken to making its own merchandise to make up for the fact that Hasbro isn't catering to it. Shirts, plush toys, et cetera. Hasbro hasn't done anything about it, and as far as I can recall has even given one such group a license to do it.
At the SDCC, people were wearing their bootleg swag and as far as Hasbro was concerned, not a single fuck was given. I guess they don't care about what the periphery demographics do with their IP so long as they keep buying the toys.
Longer, even. My '98 Camaro just had its engine replaced at 175,000 miles (The local shop shit the bed and let an easily fixed problem turn into a blown engine), and the only thing that the transmission has needed was a new clutch.
Sure, that's OK for the $250 - $5000 dollar physician bill. Doesn't work too well for the $20,000 - $200,000 hospital bill. Are medical costs inflated? Sure, but the underlying issue is that we're doing more for people.
No, the underlying issue is that the Feds entering the medical insurance industry and having a blank cheque to do with as they wish are why hospital bills are $20,000 - $200,000. Do you really think that the bills would have ever gotten that high if Uncle Sam wasn't footing the bill? Private insurers would have told the hospital to climb a wall of dicks if the Feds weren't creating a precedent by forking out the cash every time without question.
We probably could. We would be a nice, debt free third world country. A neat place to live if you're one of the lucky ones (lots of places are nice places to live if you're lucky). But your last statement lets me understand that you've swallowed too much of the Rand Flavored Kool-Aid. Nice talking points, not a very useful way to run a large country.
First of all, you don't understand what the term Third World means. Second of all, we'd never end up as some developing world shithole just because we stopped being a welfare state. The country was more than capable of running itself before progressivism and the income tax, and it'd be just as capable today if we went back to a Constitutional government that only does what is expressly authorized in the Constitution. The people do not need the government to hold their hands and hand them cheques every month, and under the Constitution it has absolutely no business doing so. Without entitlements, bureaucracy, and corruption we would have no need for the income tax and any government budget would be adequately handled via tariffs and luxury taxes. There is no Kool-Aid here. The country should be primarily run at a state and local level, not at the Federal level by thousands of clueless bureaucrats.
Yes, like a Barry Goldwater conservative. It's the branch of conservatism that guys like Ron and Rand Paul adhere to. Unlike the Neocons, Paleocons actually follow through with the small government, stay out of your business platforms that they run on.
As far as medicaid/medicare, unemployment, and disability, that isn't the Federal government's responsibility and it's the single biggest factor in the overspending plaguing the nation. Back in the days before such Federal shenanigans, you didn't even need insurance to see the doctor or get a broken arm fixed. Ron Paul still doesn't accept medicare or medicaid when he's practicing medicine; instead he'll work something out with the individual just as doctors did in ages past. Private charities, the local church, friends, and family were usually enough support for those who needed help.
If we eliminate entitlements and let communities take over for caring for the needy and then cut the rest of the budget, defense included, to a fraction of its former self, we could pay off the debt within a decade or so and then possibly eliminate the IRS entirely. It might not be what I'd do personally if I were in charge, but it's better than the alternative.
Don't associate those of us paleoconservative and libertarian Republicans with the standard crony capitalism big government neocon Republicans that have hijacked the party. Hell, Democrats are just as guilty of crony capitalism if not moreso, they just have a different stable of bedfellows to sell us out to.
We paleoconservatives and libertarians would rather reduce government to the minimum workable size and thus reduce or remove the ability of corporations to use corruption to get ahead at the expense of the American people, regardless of if the corruption is at the hands of Republicans or Democrats.
Personally, I have no problem raising taxes on the upper crust that holds most of the wealth. We'll never pay off the debt unless we milk the people who have made billions gaming the system for everything they have. The issue is that the Democrats tend to want to fuck over the small business owners too, who more often than not report the earnings of their businesses on their own personal tax returns. Raising taxes on them will hurt the economy significantly. Raising taxes on CEOs, bankers, brokers, athletes, and entertainers who make millions of dollars for doing nothing productive will not. You can't just set fire to the yard to kill a few overgrown weeds.
Of course unlike the other free marketeers who are in the pocket of various industries, I'm not worried about jobs being shipped overseas if we raise taxes, because back before the government instituted the income tax most of the government's income was from tariffs. If we would just impose tariffs on imports from places that don't have the same wage and safety standards that we do and make it more expensive to ship shit in from China and India, the jobs will return, and I don't mean $8/hr jobs that you can't reliably live on.
Furthermore, taxes wouldn't be as necessary if the government would stop spending money on things that aren't its business. People didn't need medical insurance before the government got into the business and allowed hospitals to jack prices through the roof since they knew full well that the Feds would pay anything they were charged. Or do you really think that market forces require hospitals to charge you $90 for the same aspirin that you can get for $0.04 at the local drug store? Even the private insurance companies wouldn't stand for such shenanigans if the government wasn't competing with them using our tax dollars.
Slashdot Mirror
You can never finish Civilization. Even if you win a game, your soul already belongs to Firaxis and you will keep playing for just one more turn...
Just one more turn...
Bears? You're worried about bears? Hell, while I've been typing this cougars have shown up out of nowhere and killed my horse. Twice.
I didn't finish ME either, due in part to my 360 dying, but mostly because the rover shit is stupid and poorly designed. Driving a shitty rover around so I can stop by the same checkpoints, get out and interact with an object, then get back in and do it again, then move on to do it all over on what is effectively the same map with different colored grass and rocks hundreds of times isn't fun.
I've never understood how people can actually give a shit about Half-Life. The only good thing to ever come out of it was Counterstrike. The story is stupid and there were plenty of other, better FPS games out there.
As far as I'm concerned it's right up there with Halo as far as FPSs go. Overrated garbage hyped up for no reason that can't hold a candle to Duke 3D or Goldeneye.
People still go wardriving?
The point is that you don't try to please all of those competing interests.
Back in the vanilla days, there was only one difficulty level for content. There were no heroics. There were no badges that had to be farmed on a daily basis for welfare gear. Blues meant something and purples were something most players never actually saw. PVP only existed in the world and battles between the factions were long lasting, had real implications on the PvE part of the game, and wasn't affected by some twink faggot's balance issues. There was no such thing as nerfing a class' PvE ability just because it happens to screw over another class in PvP, because PvP was part of the environment and not a focus of the game itself.
One of the reasons WoW worked so much better back then is because Blizzard wasn't holding anyone's hands because something might be too hard or confusing. The world was huge. You could level from 1-60 without even setting foot in half of the regions, so there was always something new to see. Dungeons and raids were meant to be a challenge, and there was no pulling punches. If you wanted to get to MC, you first had to go through LBRS and then to UBRS, and none of it got any easier when new raids were released. It took real honest to god work to get to end game content, and there was no coasting along for the ride and getting carried simply because the content was actually difficult and the gear rewards weren't handed out like candy. Getting to Naxx actually meant that you accomplished something, and once you got there it took even more work to finish it. Most people never got there, so there was still some prestige and wonder associated with the feat. Compare that to today where a half decent tank and a half decent healer can carry three retards who can't stay out of the fire through any dungeon in the game and then be able to faceroll through the raids as well just by derping through five mans over and over for weeks so they can buy their welfare epics and sit in the LFG for a 10 man.
The biggest difference between then and now is that back when WoW was good, Blizzard wasn't catering to anyone. They made the game as they envisioned it and presented it to the players as is.
Run msconfig.
Disable all the excess bullshit in the services and startup tabs.
Reboot.
Bam. Thirty seconds.
That's a steaming load of shit and you know it.
Even if the Macbook Air were the single best selling notebook, it's only because there are dozens of other vendors fighting over the other 90% of the market and each one has dozens of different notebook models each geared towards a different segment of the market.
Macs don't even register in the top 5% of high-end PCs. They only get respectable numbers if you only count pre-built PCs. The vast majority of high-end PCs are custom built and wouldn't get counted in the first place.
Furthermore, tablets are stupid and nobody on Slashdot cares about them.
tl;dr you can make anything look good if you're selective about the data you include.
I'll never understand why companies do that shit. Upgrading hardware and software isn't so much of a pain in the ass that it's worth the massive drop in productivity and capability over the years.
If they can't function without hardware that dates back to the Apollo program and software that was obsolete when Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was on the air, someone isn't doing their job.
It's like selling a V8 with two cylinders disabled by the on-board computer as a V6 and then charging the customers for an upgrade that activates them and unlocks the original V8 power.
While the graphics are impressive, I think the real innovation here is that using this technology, a developer could make the entire world realistically destructible by giving different materials different levels of attraction between "atoms" and giving the game a really good physics engine.
Imagine if the game were actually calculating the physics behind a bullet's impact with a rock, and the rock reacted appropriately by throwing off chips or cracking. Imagine shooting a hillside with a tank and leaving a dynamic crater. Imagine grenades damaging characters with real shrapnel instead of just having a pre-set kill radius.
They can't sue you without any lawyers. Send their extortion racket lawyers straight to Hell where they belong.
I dunno much about the way that Steam does things, but when the Pokemon GTS was hacked, and then hacked again for B/W, the DS contacting the Nintendo servers was easily solved by just changing the dns for the console to point to your own PC where you're running a dummy authentication server. Steam could probably be defeated the same way.
WoW has had people running private servers since the beginning.
Hell, the Pokemon community has managed to reverse engineer and hijack the wireless communications of the DS to create their own private GTS servers for sending pokemon to and from their own PCs or distributing event pokemon.
What makes you think that the shenanigans you suggested couldn't be easily circumvented by more serious crackers? They already rewrite a significant portion of the code to get around the DRM anyway.
My 3300lb Camaro gets better than that with a 3.8L V6 from almost fifteen years ago. I managed to get 35mpg going down from Reno to Porterville last month too.
Ford's new 305hp V6 Mustangs get even better gas mileage than that.
Hey, she repeated back everything Pinkie said to put in. It isn't her fault that Pinkie not only wasn't listening but didn't take so much as a single look into the bowl.
Anything that will damage a plastic lung will destroy a flesh and blood lung.
You vastly underestimate the body's ability to deal with trauma.
So they can save electricity by taking the light bulbs out of their fridges.
It's not just Youtube videos that they tolerate. The older fanbase has taken to making its own merchandise to make up for the fact that Hasbro isn't catering to it. Shirts, plush toys, et cetera. Hasbro hasn't done anything about it, and as far as I can recall has even given one such group a license to do it.
At the SDCC, people were wearing their bootleg swag and as far as Hasbro was concerned, not a single fuck was given. I guess they don't care about what the periphery demographics do with their IP so long as they keep buying the toys.
Nopony is perfect.
Well, except Applejack.
Longer, even. My '98 Camaro just had its engine replaced at 175,000 miles (The local shop shit the bed and let an easily fixed problem turn into a blown engine), and the only thing that the transmission has needed was a new clutch.
You realize that we never lost a single battle in Vietnam, right?
The war was "lost" by the National Guard units at home who apparently didn't have the balls to shoot enough hippies to win the war.
No, the underlying issue is that the Feds entering the medical insurance industry and having a blank cheque to do with as they wish are why hospital bills are $20,000 - $200,000. Do you really think that the bills would have ever gotten that high if Uncle Sam wasn't footing the bill? Private insurers would have told the hospital to climb a wall of dicks if the Feds weren't creating a precedent by forking out the cash every time without question.
First of all, you don't understand what the term Third World means. Second of all, we'd never end up as some developing world shithole just because we stopped being a welfare state. The country was more than capable of running itself before progressivism and the income tax, and it'd be just as capable today if we went back to a Constitutional government that only does what is expressly authorized in the Constitution. The people do not need the government to hold their hands and hand them cheques every month, and under the Constitution it has absolutely no business doing so. Without entitlements, bureaucracy, and corruption we would have no need for the income tax and any government budget would be adequately handled via tariffs and luxury taxes. There is no Kool-Aid here. The country should be primarily run at a state and local level, not at the Federal level by thousands of clueless bureaucrats.
Yes, like a Barry Goldwater conservative. It's the branch of conservatism that guys like Ron and Rand Paul adhere to. Unlike the Neocons, Paleocons actually follow through with the small government, stay out of your business platforms that they run on.
As far as medicaid/medicare, unemployment, and disability, that isn't the Federal government's responsibility and it's the single biggest factor in the overspending plaguing the nation. Back in the days before such Federal shenanigans, you didn't even need insurance to see the doctor or get a broken arm fixed. Ron Paul still doesn't accept medicare or medicaid when he's practicing medicine; instead he'll work something out with the individual just as doctors did in ages past. Private charities, the local church, friends, and family were usually enough support for those who needed help.
If we eliminate entitlements and let communities take over for caring for the needy and then cut the rest of the budget, defense included, to a fraction of its former self, we could pay off the debt within a decade or so and then possibly eliminate the IRS entirely. It might not be what I'd do personally if I were in charge, but it's better than the alternative.
Don't associate those of us paleoconservative and libertarian Republicans with the standard crony capitalism big government neocon Republicans that have hijacked the party. Hell, Democrats are just as guilty of crony capitalism if not moreso, they just have a different stable of bedfellows to sell us out to.
We paleoconservatives and libertarians would rather reduce government to the minimum workable size and thus reduce or remove the ability of corporations to use corruption to get ahead at the expense of the American people, regardless of if the corruption is at the hands of Republicans or Democrats.
Personally, I have no problem raising taxes on the upper crust that holds most of the wealth. We'll never pay off the debt unless we milk the people who have made billions gaming the system for everything they have. The issue is that the Democrats tend to want to fuck over the small business owners too, who more often than not report the earnings of their businesses on their own personal tax returns. Raising taxes on them will hurt the economy significantly. Raising taxes on CEOs, bankers, brokers, athletes, and entertainers who make millions of dollars for doing nothing productive will not. You can't just set fire to the yard to kill a few overgrown weeds.
Of course unlike the other free marketeers who are in the pocket of various industries, I'm not worried about jobs being shipped overseas if we raise taxes, because back before the government instituted the income tax most of the government's income was from tariffs. If we would just impose tariffs on imports from places that don't have the same wage and safety standards that we do and make it more expensive to ship shit in from China and India, the jobs will return, and I don't mean $8/hr jobs that you can't reliably live on.
Furthermore, taxes wouldn't be as necessary if the government would stop spending money on things that aren't its business. People didn't need medical insurance before the government got into the business and allowed hospitals to jack prices through the roof since they knew full well that the Feds would pay anything they were charged. Or do you really think that market forces require hospitals to charge you $90 for the same aspirin that you can get for $0.04 at the local drug store? Even the private insurance companies wouldn't stand for such shenanigans if the government wasn't competing with them using our tax dollars.