I hate to sound like a pompous PC gamer, but that revolutionary Kojima "watershed" was a minor effort in storytelling compared to Wing Commander III....
You appear to have missed my point here. True, Wing Commander used FMV cut scenes with big name actors. But this was essentially a cinematic set piece used to tell the story. Dragon's lair consists entirely of such set pieces. As I said, MGS was not made to be, nor is it, a cinematic experience. It represents a medium of entertainment unique to video games.
Metal Gear Solid did something significantly different to FMV content titles like Wing Commander. Most importantly, it rendered its story scenes using the in game engine. This cannot be underestimated. Metal Gear Solid gave developers the confidence to put their polygons right up there on screen in every scene, drastically reducing reliance on FMV and freeing up hundreds of megabytes on disc for other content(As you say WCIII needed four CDs). The use of in game engines for cut scene rendering in games like Halo, Final Fantasy X and ultimately up to modern titles like Gears of War can be traced back to Metal Gear Solid. Admittedly, in-game renders had been used before, but not with confidence. Developers frequently turned to FMV for key moments (In fact FFX continued to do this).
Bringing this back to the main story, I will make the following comment. PC games were once a hotbed of innovation, but this tends to be of a technical nature. While technologies and polygon counts improve, PC developers continue to make games and content that at its core has remained unchanged for almost 20 years. FPS and RTS games dominate the PC gaming industry. A game like MGS could never have happened to the PC, because its content simply differed too radically from the accepted standards.
Now, console gaming does suffer fads as well. But these tend to be much shorter in duration. Platformers, RPGs, FPSs, Adventure games, etc have all risen and fallen in popularity the console landscape. Even though they are restricted by technical limitations, there is a variety of innovative content on consoles and always has been. To my mind, only PC game developers like Blizzard and Valve push content boundaries over technical boundaries in this way.
These aren't absolutes, but overall my opinion is that PC gaming has failed to move beyond its core audience of computer geeks willing to spend 2-3 hours just getting titles to play properly. Console gaming has reached out farther, and not simply in a Wii casual gamer sense. It has a wider selections of genres and pushes content boundaries in a way that PC gaming does not. Ask yourself; where are the Metal Gear Solids, Ocarina of Times, and LittleBigPlanets of the PC world? Without them, what is the future of the PC as a gaming console?
That's @#$%ing bull@#$&!.... Theoretical physics in the field of high-energy certainly has advanced considerably.
Then give me one result of major significance made in theoretical physics since the completion of the standard model in the early 1970s? I'm not talking about results from experimental physics confirming predictions such as the top quark, or even experiments contradicting it like finding neutrino mass. I mean theoretical results fundamental physics that have advanced beyond the (known) deficiencies of the Standard Model?
There are none. There has been much effort and speculation, but the reality is almost 40 years of searching has failed to produce any work of lasting significance for the field. The Standard Model remains the standard. Compare this to the history of theoretical physics since Newton. Has there ever existed such a long period of drought at the highest levels of theoretical physics?
Does every game need to have a story? A movie or a fiction book without story, that is bad. But for a game it shouldn't be a negative criticism if it doesn't have one.
It's an old but true quote that story in video games is like story in pornography. It's expected to be there, but really only the flimsiest pretense of setting is necessary. Many early video games got on quite well with a handful of paragraphs in the manual.
I can recall playing Sonic 3 in 1994 and thinking it had a great "story" for a platformer, as in addition to the manual paragraphs, it used in game "cut scenes" to advance what shred of a plot there was. Interestingly, the game told its micro-tale without using a single word of text. The on-screen actions and emotions of the characters were like those from a silent film, without the captions.
Nevertheless, I did and still do consider the "story" in that game to be more than sufficient and moreover very suited to the type of game it was. I imagine it's similar for other games like Doom.
The watershed for storytelling in video games was probably Metal Gear Solid in 1998. After Hideo Kojima blew everyone away with his storytelling, developers started offering ever more elaborate and "cinematic" storylines in their games which ate up ever larger portions of the budget. The trouble came from two important flaws 1) Hideo Kojima never made a "cinematic" game. The resulting end product of MGS was a very different form of entertainment from a film. People focused too much on the cutscenes,(which were still quite different from raw film) and missed out on the wider package offered. It became usual to see ever more pompous and over produced cut scenes strapped on to games that never lived up to the "epic" tone set in them. 2) Most directors are not Hideo Kojima. This was probably the more pertinent point. Developers wanted to make epic (action)storylines in the mould of Metal Gear Solid, but simply lacked the writing ability to pull it off. Even Kojima himself managed to foul this up in MGS2. The end result is a pretentious and overbearing plot that gets in the way of the game and severely reduces enjoyment and playability.
I think a good example the benefits and pitfalls of story in games is given by the juxtaposition between Gears of War 1 and 2 on the Xbox. The first game has a minimalist story. Characters are barely introduced and have almost no development, detail on the setting is shamelessly scant, and where the plot is not entirely one dimensional, it contains gaping holes. Yet it works in the context of the game that Gears of War is, and I would argue works very well.
Gear of War 2 by contrast, suffers from an overblown and overproduced story that makes a mockery of the proceedings. Attempts to develop characters are almost comically absurd, the setting is wildly different tending towards the spectacular, the plot is incohesive and convoluted throughout and leaves loose ends everywhere. The end result, while eye candy laden, detracts significantly from the game. People just wanted to play as Marcus Fenix and shoot aliens; instead they ended up unsatisfied and confused. The developers desire to create an "epic" story instead created an epic farce. Smaller was definitely better in this case.
Obviously, the same rule does not hold across all video games. RPGs require a significant story. But even here, overproduction and poor writing can create an epic farce that taints the whole game. The prime example is Final Fantasy VIII; Your characters are all teenagers attending assassins' high school, and you fight the sorceress who was actually your matron in the orphanage where you grew up, who was actually being controlled by another sorceress, so she could rescue another sorceress and cause "time compression", and when that failed you simply allow the second sorceress to take over a party member who happened to be yet another sorceress so that they could go back in time to allow the third sorceress to cau
Back in college I briefly took a creative writing course which was filled with snobs clutching their leatherbound Infinite Jest copies who used words like "perspectival" and "serendipitous."
Surprisingly many respectable physicists talking, about this dumb nature abores the Higgs theory.
Its becoming a hallmark of theoretical physics. Underproducing and over-respected scholars prattling on about any nonsense they can dress up in sophistic argument.
Theoretical physics has produced essentially no results for 40 years. Even when faced with outright contradictions of the standard model, i.e. neutrino mass, they do little but concoct the same convoluted models that lead to nowhere. String theory is the prime example of this, but things like loop quantum gravity and dark matter are no less terminal. For four decades physicists have produced theories that raise only more questions and don't answer anything.
In light of this, it's easy to see why nonsense such as the multi-verse, the anthropic principle, and of course this travesty come out of the mouths of men and women who are tired of seeing their more rigorous efforts achieve little and less. By proposing these theories, they can reach virtually the same results and conclusion they otherwise would (i.e nothing of value), yet need expend only a fraction of the effort. PLus, by dressing it all up even a little, they can wow the odd committee and perhaps get a bit more funding.
Meanwhile, despite the odds against it, science moves on.
Maybe the should have thought of that before deciding to be bigots?
They have a right to be bigots, but you do not have a right to know about it.
People are more than their convictions on singular issues, and persecuting them for signing one petition is wrong. I don't care how wronged you think others have been. This is still wrong. This is a dark road which has been walked down many times before to and ill end. Instead of engaging people in debate or trying to make their case in the public arena, people are instead choosing to intimidate their opponents into acquiescence. I cannot see how any honest person can see this as being justified.
Why a US government agency needs an "investment arm?"
Because US intelligence agencies are probably 10 to 15 years behind in terms of their data gathering and data mining abilities.
Let me put it to you this way. Would a company like Google, with the amount of data it has and the way it uses it, have been allowed to exist during the cold war? Not a chance. At the very least, Google would have extremely close connections to the establishment and it would be far more likely that it would have found itself coralled, curtailed or shut down by now. In the days when intelligence services were actually intelligent, the porous nature of the internet combined with the archival properties of computers would have been recognised as a powerful combination.
I would wager that top men in the CIA and indeed FBI can barely use email, and simply cannot fathom the web. Under their watch, Microsoft, Yahoo, Ad agencies, banks, marketers and above all the mighty Google have been allowed to amass compile and index a wealth of information on the populace that would have put the Stazi to shame, and they have not one whit of an idea what is contained there. If Google were an intelligence agency, it would be the most powerful one on earth. If the CIA was a search company, they would be outperformed by undergraduate CS students.
This speaks to a wider issue of the relevance of the CIA in the current world. It has proven itself incompetent at dealing with terrorists, and modern industrial spies. It cannot even match the capabilities of companies in its own country. The only real foe it ever faced, the USSR, is 20 years in the grave. The organisation is bloated and incompetent, good for the odd coup in a banana republic, but little else.
Right now, it is trying to find a role for itself in the new world. This initiative says to me that they intend to be the vast indexers and archiver that Google is, trolling people's data and storing it for later use and of course misuse. I'm seeing a future, more J. Edgar Hoover like CIA, armed with 20 years of secrets, scandals and embarrassing connections, making its presence and influence felt in the political, economic and social spheres.
The CIA should have been downsized after the wall fell. That mistake is going to end up costing the USA in the long term.
If they are not ashamed to have signed it then what's the problem?
Maybe they're afraid that signing may now have left them open to reprisals and other unpleasant repercussions? Maybe they're afraid enough not to sign such a thing again?
The reason is the same as the reasoning behind secret ballots when voting for candidate; you're denying people the right to persue referenedums because what whatever notion is popular of the day
No. What you're doing is holding people to account for their political stances and/or vote and doing so is fundamentally and utterly wrong. The purpose for this list is entirely transparent. Entirely. It seeks to intimidate people into not supporting cause they believe in, and to open up their lives to harassment and ostracism because they have gone against societies current grain. This is voter intimidation plain and simple, by the new digital blockleiters; internet distributed harassment and pressure, directly to your neighbours PC.
People have a right to disagree with gay marriage, and they have a right to campaign against it. If you don't like it, then you can go to the bother of setting up your own campaign instead of trying to short circuit debate and free society by pulling off this angry flash mob bullshit. I support rallies and demonstrations against groups, companies and even churches with whom others might have political or other disagreements. But when you bring it down the the level of individuals, as far as I am concerned, you have descended to the level of brownshirts and should be treated as such.
What saddens me the most is just how many supposedly educated people support this type of thing. It sometimes seems as though the western public has developed the thought processes of a petulant child; emotional, vindictive, inconsiderate and with total disregard for the accepted decorum of adult debate. When did it become acceptable to stoop to this kind of thing? Are there no reasonable political groups left in the world?
There is a "normal". Its is not however, a statistical result. Rather it is closer to a Platonic ideal, an archetypical state of being that all aspire to, yet few if any achieve. Intelligent, sophisticated, gregarious, athletic, witty, educated, admired, adventurous, wise, inspirational, a pillar of society; in short everything the Modern Major General should be.
When people say "normal", what they really mean is "ideal". "Why can't I/you be more normal?!", really means "Why can't I/you be closer to perfection!!". The concepts of individuality and uniqueness is for most people, platitudes. In reality, they strive for unreasonable goals and live in perpetual disappointment with their own and others "shortcomings".
Our industrial society, saturated as it is with millions of identical items, widgets and products, cannot really accept habits or traits that fall outside the norm. Witness the rise of "disorders" like Aspergers or ADHD; habits and attitudes which cannot be accepted as a normal part of the human condition, and which must be medicated to bring them closer to the ideal or "normal". If you do not conform to the tolerances specified by what is seen on television, cinema or in the New Yorker magazine, you are a defective widget and must be either corrected or replaced.
Some programmers have traits or habits not usually seen in the general populace. Invariably you will find that the problem is rarely these traits in and of themselves, but rather the discomfort of others who when faced with such deviations from the norm actually become offended and will seek redress. For a long time, our society catered to this outrage and imposed conformity towards the contemporary ideal. Happily we've stopped doing this, and we're all better off because of it. However, there remain many who can become visibly distressed whenever the world does not agree with their own conceptions. Often they will fight to change the world rather than change their minds.
The truth is we are all individuals. And the real truth is that this is more than just a platitude.
An universally, every single one of these attempts failed; miserably.
If a console does not have functionality on day one, or by default, then you cannot tack on additional requirements, especially when it comes to games. Developers already worried about how small your console demographic really is cannot risk further decimating their audience by requiring people to buy some new fangled, overpriced gadget in order to play your game. People are not going to be willing to fork out double the cost on an accessory and a game, when they could just buy two regular game, usually of higher wuality, for the same price. Light gun game makers have known this for years, and often package the game with the accessory to try and make the package more digestable.
The Wii broke through the gadget impasse by making the gadget an integral part of the console from day one. Sony and Microsoft have done this to a lesser degree by making wireless controllers and in Sony's case "motion sensors" available from launch. But they cannot catch up to Nintendo on the gadget front until the next cycle. It's not possible to get all owners to upgrade their consoles at once so that developers aren't looking at a decimated pool of players. Baring an exceptional few, developers will make games for the console they know everyone definitely has, and they are right to do so.
We are not witnessing a change in the old regime of video games, at least, not from Sony and Microsoft. What we are seeing is envy from these two companies. They want the player numbers and console sales that Nintendo has. What they don't realise, or want to admit, is such numbers will neccessary mean a precipitous drop in the overall quality of game titles and consistent marketing of gadgets, widgets and dongles which may catch casual buyers but which will not attract and hold the longer term game players that the console needs to truly survive. The Wii has become a tired, cliched dead end, or real interest to no-one who actually choose video games over other pastimes. It can and will be replaced by an even blander and cheaper new console or console-like platform at the first opportunity. Nintendo has lost its loyal fan base and is now reliant on an extremely fickle and detached user base with no attachment to the brand.
Gimicks are gimicks. They are not the future of video games. In modern games, I need to control movement of a character in 3D environment, while maintaining camera control and awareness, and while maintaining quick acess to broad array of functionality and abilities, all while making room for meta and system controls. How do I do this by waving my arms or shaking the controller? How would you perform all the functions needed in say, Super Mario World with a motion control system, while retaining the same level of responsiveness and control. You can't. The standard controller is a proven method of such control and this has not happened by accident but rather by design, and it would be the height of folly to disregard that.
Sony and Microsoft complain that modern games are "too hard" for potential new players to understand or control, so we need new control methods. This is like arguments that maths is too difficult, so we shouldn't bother having people learn it. Yes, it's hard to learn how to control video games. But for decades now people have done just that, despite the difficulty. Why? Because they truly love to play video games and have put in the effort to become good at doing so. Just like people who actually like so called "difficult" things like maths will put in the effort to become better. People who cannot control video games are people who were never interested enough to bother learning how, yet now you want to disregard the former group for this latter, albeit larger one?
For the long term sake of your business, which of these groups should you be trying to hold onto? By focusing on these peripherals instead of on core games, what kind of foundation are building for your business over the next ten years?
That is quite a sweeping generalization. I am not sure which generation you are referring to, but if it is my own (I am 23)
Yours was the "or more", of which I'm not entirely certain about. The generation to which I was refering was the so called "Generation X", people currently in their late twenties to early fourties. I'm talking about people who would closer to the parents of these girls, not the girls themselves. Perhaps I wasn't very clear in the post. In fact I wasn't.
Personally, I feel people in this age group typically, tend to be over-opinionated, underskilled, quick to litigate and generally shallow and emotional in their thinking and politics. Now, sometimes I find myself in agreement with them on many issues, but overall their attitudes, methods and discussions seem juvenile and ineffective. They don't really accomplish anything yet always behave as if they do and are entitled to more credit than they deserve.
A matter for parents and possibly high school guidance counselors, or on the rare outside case for a psychiatrist, but not for the courts.
This is where you are wrong. An entire generation or more has been raised to believe in its own innate and unearned importance, and bolstered with a solid and unshakable faith in its responsibility-less intrinsic rights. They truly believe that they are entitled to do whatsoever they please, whenever they please to, and that they are educated and savvy enough to inject their opinions in any arena they see fit, and how dare anyone presume to tell them otherwise. Their rights are absolute at all times, without qualification of any kind.
If you disagree with them, or are simply in their way, they're not going to engage in productive discussion or debate. That would imply that you are somehow their equal. Instead, they will call upon the full force of the great edifice of the Law, which exists solely to defend their inalienable right to _make_ the world bend to their will. As free, intelligent and independent citizens, they have every right to bring the full force of the State to bear in crushing you and your impudent challenges to their unique and inestimable way of life.
The rest of your post is just as ridiculous. Japan would never have been "contained" in 1945. Fanatical supporters of the Emperor were still coming out of the hills in the 1970's. Contain? Yeah, right.
Yet, compare Japan to Germany in 1945. Were the followers of the Emperor really so much more fanatical than the followers of the Furher? Was their fanaticism, tenacity or cruelty really so much greater than the likes of the Waffen SS? I doubt it. The notion of the nigh impregnable Japnese homeland, particularly in 1945, is probably a myth.
Compare the American wars against Japan and Germany. About 180,000 US soldiers were killed in the European theater. About 110,000 were killed in the Pacific theater. In Europe allied forces were not even facing the full brunt of Germany's forces. Moreover, while battles in the pacific were extremely bloody, the nature of the theater meant that small islands were effectively fortresses which the sides were forced to fight over. There were no fronts and the density of troops was quite high. Japan is an island, and mountainous, but it is not that small.
By 1945, the Japanese mainland defenders were low on ammunition and oil, and had taken to arming civilians with, essentially, pitchforks and were expecting them to put up an adequate resistance. Ludicrous plans like mass waves of Kamikazi boats and planes were being suggested, evidence of a military command increasingly divorced from reality. For all the talk of surrender being "unthinkable" to the Japanese mindset, it was the elephant in the room in every cabinet discussion. The similarities to Germany are actually quite striking.
I'm not suggesting that an invasion of Japan in 1945 would be without casualties. But I don't think it is justified to say that such an invasion would have been bloodier for allied forces than say, the Western front in Europe after D-Day. The Japanese army was on the point of collapse. The civilian population was hugely demoralized. The Soviets were also poised to invade from the North. The notion that somehow the invasion was going to turn into a bloody gauntlet for every mile to Tokyo seems to be a myth based far more on fiction than on fact.
As to the 1/4 million purple hearts, I would suspect that had a lot more to do suppliers contractors than it had to do with accurate assessment of future casualties. But what do I know?
I got an email from a guy at MSU who was writing a textbook, and had already started using my code to handle the illustrations. He wanted to check whether it was okay under the license, since he didn't intend to release his own book under a CC license.
No open source licence of any kind has ever put restrictions on the output of a program or of code. If he uses your code to make illustrations, those are his illustrations, as if they were drawn by hand, and he can do with or licence them as he pleases. If this wasn't the case, then every picture ever made with the GIMP would be GPL'd!
Why shouldn't they get the source code to a program they are using, even if it is over SSH? Isn't that the whole point of the Open source and the GPL. Software authors granting the same rights they enjoy to their users? When did having the program you're using running on your own computer become a prerequisite for obtaining GPL rights?
No, I'm not joking. This is what it actually involves. Or at least, that's what they were proposing as an experiment two years ago. I doubt they've improved much on their thinking over the interim.
Great! Now I can regale and browbeat others with authoritative sounding misinformation wherever I go. Cafe discourses and dinner discussions will never be the same again!
Strange, you seem to be speaking as though sexualizing a feminine symbol is unhealthy.
That's not the point I'm trying to make. I'm all for the healthy embrace of feminine sexuality, but that doesn't mean that its appropriate to embrace it anywhere, anytime, with anyone.
My point is that the producers of the Simpsons feel perfectly alright with taking the same TV show character they sold to people when they were children, and then reselling that same character back to those same people as a sex symbol when they are adults. Something just seems wrong about this to me. However, I do accept your point about Marge representing women, and that in that sense there is a whole suite of meanings and roles associated with women. Nevertheless, crassly trying to sell all of these meanings in the same character, to the same people, strikes me as cynical and incongruous.
Perhaps something could be said for the Playboy article in terms of the celebration of beauty of middle aged women and/or mothers, or hell even animated characters. But I'm inclined to think that such matters are far from the minds of the creators and readers of the piece.
I too have a vision. It involves electricity becoming mondo-expensive and people switching to energy saving devices en-masse. Governments around the world turning to nuclear, and where convenient, hydro and air power, not because they have low carbon emissions (that's only a plus), but because they are actually cheaper! People finally turning away from 1800's oil and coal based technologies and moving, triumphantly towards 1950's engineering solutions!!
The big fans are not 20-somethings anymore. We're 30- and 40-somethings.
This story disturbs me in more ways than one. Look there's only one reason why things get put into Playboy magazine; so people can masturbate to them(while reading the articles). Not that they aren't entitled to. But this story is particularly creepy for three reasons.
1) Marge Simpson's image being in Playboy means that enough men find her(it?) sexually attractive enough for the magazine to give her a centrefold. 2) Given Playboy's demographic, most of these men (20-40), started watching the Simpson's 20 years ago. 3) Knowing this, the Producers of the Simpon's OK'd this publication.
I think I can officially say that I will probably never be able to watch that show again. This is one bridge too far, even for a show that sold itself out years ago. The idea of an entire demographic of Simpson's fans out there with the hots for Marge, a character from their children's TV shows, and the producers being willing to cater to them, is simply too perturbing a thought to take. This is even worse that that Princess Lei in the gold bikini thing. At least Lei wasn't married with three children!
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You appear to have missed my point here. True, Wing Commander used FMV cut scenes with big name actors. But this was essentially a cinematic set piece used to tell the story. Dragon's lair consists entirely of such set pieces. As I said, MGS was not made to be, nor is it, a cinematic experience. It represents a medium of entertainment unique to video games.
Metal Gear Solid did something significantly different to FMV content titles like Wing Commander. Most importantly, it rendered its story scenes using the in game engine. This cannot be underestimated. Metal Gear Solid gave developers the confidence to put their polygons right up there on screen in every scene, drastically reducing reliance on FMV and freeing up hundreds of megabytes on disc for other content(As you say WCIII needed four CDs). The use of in game engines for cut scene rendering in games like Halo, Final Fantasy X and ultimately up to modern titles like Gears of War can be traced back to Metal Gear Solid. Admittedly, in-game renders had been used before, but not with confidence. Developers frequently turned to FMV for key moments (In fact FFX continued to do this).
Bringing this back to the main story, I will make the following comment. PC games were once a hotbed of innovation, but this tends to be of a technical nature. While technologies and polygon counts improve, PC developers continue to make games and content that at its core has remained unchanged for almost 20 years. FPS and RTS games dominate the PC gaming industry. A game like MGS could never have happened to the PC, because its content simply differed too radically from the accepted standards.
Now, console gaming does suffer fads as well. But these tend to be much shorter in duration. Platformers, RPGs, FPSs, Adventure games, etc have all risen and fallen in popularity the console landscape. Even though they are restricted by technical limitations, there is a variety of innovative content on consoles and always has been. To my mind, only PC game developers like Blizzard and Valve push content boundaries over technical boundaries in this way.
These aren't absolutes, but overall my opinion is that PC gaming has failed to move beyond its core audience of computer geeks willing to spend 2-3 hours just getting titles to play properly. Console gaming has reached out farther, and not simply in a Wii casual gamer sense. It has a wider selections of genres and pushes content boundaries in a way that PC gaming does not. Ask yourself; where are the Metal Gear Solids, Ocarina of Times, and LittleBigPlanets of the PC world? Without them, what is the future of the PC as a gaming console?
Then give me one result of major significance made in theoretical physics since the completion of the standard model in the early 1970s? I'm not talking about results from experimental physics confirming predictions such as the top quark, or even experiments contradicting it like finding neutrino mass. I mean theoretical results fundamental physics that have advanced beyond the (known) deficiencies of the Standard Model?
There are none. There has been much effort and speculation, but the reality is almost 40 years of searching has failed to produce any work of lasting significance for the field. The Standard Model remains the standard. Compare this to the history of theoretical physics since Newton. Has there ever existed such a long period of drought at the highest levels of theoretical physics?
It's an old but true quote that story in video games is like story in pornography. It's expected to be there, but really only the flimsiest pretense of setting is necessary. Many early video games got on quite well with a handful of paragraphs in the manual.
I can recall playing Sonic 3 in 1994 and thinking it had a great "story" for a platformer, as in addition to the manual paragraphs, it used in game "cut scenes" to advance what shred of a plot there was. Interestingly, the game told its micro-tale without using a single word of text. The on-screen actions and emotions of the characters were like those from a silent film, without the captions.
Nevertheless, I did and still do consider the "story" in that game to be more than sufficient and moreover very suited to the type of game it was. I imagine it's similar for other games like Doom.
The watershed for storytelling in video games was probably Metal Gear Solid in 1998. After Hideo Kojima blew everyone away with his storytelling, developers started offering ever more elaborate and "cinematic" storylines in their games which ate up ever larger portions of the budget. The trouble came from two important flaws
1) Hideo Kojima never made a "cinematic" game. The resulting end product of MGS was a very different form of entertainment from a film. People focused too much on the cutscenes,(which were still quite different from raw film) and missed out on the wider package offered. It became usual to see ever more pompous and over produced cut scenes strapped on to games that never lived up to the "epic" tone set in them.
2) Most directors are not Hideo Kojima. This was probably the more pertinent point. Developers wanted to make epic (action)storylines in the mould of Metal Gear Solid, but simply lacked the writing ability to pull it off. Even Kojima himself managed to foul this up in MGS2. The end result is a pretentious and overbearing plot that gets in the way of the game and severely reduces enjoyment and playability.
I think a good example the benefits and pitfalls of story in games is given by the juxtaposition between Gears of War 1 and 2 on the Xbox. The first game has a minimalist story. Characters are barely introduced and have almost no development, detail on the setting is shamelessly scant, and where the plot is not entirely one dimensional, it contains gaping holes. Yet it works in the context of the game that Gears of War is, and I would argue works very well.
Gear of War 2 by contrast, suffers from an overblown and overproduced story that makes a mockery of the proceedings. Attempts to develop characters are almost comically absurd, the setting is wildly different tending towards the spectacular, the plot is incohesive and convoluted throughout and leaves loose ends everywhere. The end result, while eye candy laden, detracts significantly from the game. People just wanted to play as Marcus Fenix and shoot aliens; instead they ended up unsatisfied and confused. The developers desire to create an "epic" story instead created an epic farce. Smaller was definitely better in this case.
Obviously, the same rule does not hold across all video games. RPGs require a significant story. But even here, overproduction and poor writing can create an epic farce that taints the whole game. The prime example is Final Fantasy VIII; Your characters are all teenagers attending assassins' high school, and you fight the sorceress who was actually your matron in the orphanage where you grew up, who was actually being controlled by another sorceress, so she could rescue another sorceress and cause "time compression", and when that failed you simply allow the second sorceress to take over a party member who happened to be yet another sorceress so that they could go back in time to allow the third sorceress to cau
I see what you did there.
Its becoming a hallmark of theoretical physics. Underproducing and over-respected scholars prattling on about any nonsense they can dress up in sophistic argument.
Theoretical physics has produced essentially no results for 40 years. Even when faced with outright contradictions of the standard model, i.e. neutrino mass, they do little but concoct the same convoluted models that lead to nowhere. String theory is the prime example of this, but things like loop quantum gravity and dark matter are no less terminal. For four decades physicists have produced theories that raise only more questions and don't answer anything.
In light of this, it's easy to see why nonsense such as the multi-verse, the anthropic principle, and of course this travesty come out of the mouths of men and women who are tired of seeing their more rigorous efforts achieve little and less. By proposing these theories, they can reach virtually the same results and conclusion they otherwise would (i.e nothing of value), yet need expend only a fraction of the effort. PLus, by dressing it all up even a little, they can wow the odd committee and perhaps get a bit more funding.
Meanwhile, despite the odds against it, science moves on.
They have a right to be bigots, but you do not have a right to know about it.
People are more than their convictions on singular issues, and persecuting them for signing one petition is wrong. I don't care how wronged you think others have been. This is still wrong. This is a dark road which has been walked down many times before to and ill end. Instead of engaging people in debate or trying to make their case in the public arena, people are instead choosing to intimidate their opponents into acquiescence. I cannot see how any honest person can see this as being justified.
Because US intelligence agencies are probably 10 to 15 years behind in terms of their data gathering and data mining abilities.
Let me put it to you this way. Would a company like Google, with the amount of data it has and the way it uses it, have been allowed to exist during the cold war? Not a chance. At the very least, Google would have extremely close connections to the establishment and it would be far more likely that it would have found itself coralled, curtailed or shut down by now. In the days when intelligence services were actually intelligent, the porous nature of the internet combined with the archival properties of computers would have been recognised as a powerful combination.
I would wager that top men in the CIA and indeed FBI can barely use email, and simply cannot fathom the web. Under their watch, Microsoft, Yahoo, Ad agencies, banks, marketers and above all the mighty Google have been allowed to amass compile and index a wealth of information on the populace that would have put the Stazi to shame, and they have not one whit of an idea what is contained there. If Google were an intelligence agency, it would be the most powerful one on earth. If the CIA was a search company, they would be outperformed by undergraduate CS students.
This speaks to a wider issue of the relevance of the CIA in the current world. It has proven itself incompetent at dealing with terrorists, and modern industrial spies. It cannot even match the capabilities of companies in its own country. The only real foe it ever faced, the USSR, is 20 years in the grave. The organisation is bloated and incompetent, good for the odd coup in a banana republic, but little else.
Right now, it is trying to find a role for itself in the new world. This initiative says to me that they intend to be the vast indexers and archiver that Google is, trolling people's data and storing it for later use and of course misuse. I'm seeing a future, more J. Edgar Hoover like CIA, armed with 20 years of secrets, scandals and embarrassing connections, making its presence and influence felt in the political, economic and social spheres.
The CIA should have been downsized after the wall fell. That mistake is going to end up costing the USA in the long term.
Maybe they're afraid that signing may now have left them open to reprisals and other unpleasant repercussions? Maybe they're afraid enough not to sign such a thing again?
Mission Accomplished.
No. What you're doing is holding people to account for their political stances and/or vote and doing so is fundamentally and utterly wrong. The purpose for this list is entirely transparent. Entirely. It seeks to intimidate people into not supporting cause they believe in, and to open up their lives to harassment and ostracism because they have gone against societies current grain. This is voter intimidation plain and simple, by the new digital blockleiters; internet distributed harassment and pressure, directly to your neighbours PC.
People have a right to disagree with gay marriage, and they have a right to campaign against it. If you don't like it, then you can go to the bother of setting up your own campaign instead of trying to short circuit debate and free society by pulling off this angry flash mob bullshit. I support rallies and demonstrations against groups, companies and even churches with whom others might have political or other disagreements. But when you bring it down the the level of individuals, as far as I am concerned, you have descended to the level of brownshirts and should be treated as such.
What saddens me the most is just how many supposedly educated people support this type of thing. It sometimes seems as though the western public has developed the thought processes of a petulant child; emotional, vindictive, inconsiderate and with total disregard for the accepted decorum of adult debate. When did it become acceptable to stoop to this kind of thing? Are there no reasonable political groups left in the world?
There is a "normal". Its is not however, a statistical result. Rather it is closer to a Platonic ideal, an archetypical state of being that all aspire to, yet few if any achieve. Intelligent, sophisticated, gregarious, athletic, witty, educated, admired, adventurous, wise, inspirational, a pillar of society; in short everything the Modern Major General should be.
When people say "normal", what they really mean is "ideal". "Why can't I/you be more normal?!", really means "Why can't I/you be closer to perfection!!". The concepts of individuality and uniqueness is for most people, platitudes. In reality, they strive for unreasonable goals and live in perpetual disappointment with their own and others "shortcomings".
Our industrial society, saturated as it is with millions of identical items, widgets and products, cannot really accept habits or traits that fall outside the norm. Witness the rise of "disorders" like Aspergers or ADHD; habits and attitudes which cannot be accepted as a normal part of the human condition, and which must be medicated to bring them closer to the ideal or "normal". If you do not conform to the tolerances specified by what is seen on television, cinema or in the New Yorker magazine, you are a defective widget and must be either corrected or replaced.
Some programmers have traits or habits not usually seen in the general populace. Invariably you will find that the problem is rarely these traits in and of themselves, but rather the discomfort of others who when faced with such deviations from the norm actually become offended and will seek redress. For a long time, our society catered to this outrage and imposed conformity towards the contemporary ideal. Happily we've stopped doing this, and we're all better off because of it. However, there remain many who can become visibly distressed whenever the world does not agree with their own conceptions. Often they will fight to change the world rather than change their minds.
The truth is we are all individuals. And the real truth is that this is more than just a platitude.
An universally, every single one of these attempts failed; miserably.
If a console does not have functionality on day one, or by default, then you cannot tack on additional requirements, especially when it comes to games. Developers already worried about how small your console demographic really is cannot risk further decimating their audience by requiring people to buy some new fangled, overpriced gadget in order to play your game. People are not going to be willing to fork out double the cost on an accessory and a game, when they could just buy two regular game, usually of higher wuality, for the same price. Light gun game makers have known this for years, and often package the game with the accessory to try and make the package more digestable.
The Wii broke through the gadget impasse by making the gadget an integral part of the console from day one. Sony and Microsoft have done this to a lesser degree by making wireless controllers and in Sony's case "motion sensors" available from launch. But they cannot catch up to Nintendo on the gadget front until the next cycle. It's not possible to get all owners to upgrade their consoles at once so that developers aren't looking at a decimated pool of players. Baring an exceptional few, developers will make games for the console they know everyone definitely has, and they are right to do so.
We are not witnessing a change in the old regime of video games, at least, not from Sony and Microsoft. What we are seeing is envy from these two companies. They want the player numbers and console sales that Nintendo has. What they don't realise, or want to admit, is such numbers will neccessary mean a precipitous drop in the overall quality of game titles and consistent marketing of gadgets, widgets and dongles which may catch casual buyers but which will not attract and hold the longer term game players that the console needs to truly survive. The Wii has become a tired, cliched dead end, or real interest to no-one who actually choose video games over other pastimes. It can and will be replaced by an even blander and cheaper new console or console-like platform at the first opportunity. Nintendo has lost its loyal fan base and is now reliant on an extremely fickle and detached user base with no attachment to the brand.
Gimicks are gimicks. They are not the future of video games. In modern games, I need to control movement of a character in 3D environment, while maintaining camera control and awareness, and while maintaining quick acess to broad array of functionality and abilities, all while making room for meta and system controls. How do I do this by waving my arms or shaking the controller? How would you perform all the functions needed in say, Super Mario World with a motion control system, while retaining the same level of responsiveness and control. You can't. The standard controller is a proven method of such control and this has not happened by accident but rather by design, and it would be the height of folly to disregard that.
Sony and Microsoft complain that modern games are "too hard" for potential new players to understand or control, so we need new control methods. This is like arguments that maths is too difficult, so we shouldn't bother having people learn it. Yes, it's hard to learn how to control video games. But for decades now people have done just that, despite the difficulty. Why? Because they truly love to play video games and have put in the effort to become good at doing so. Just like people who actually like so called "difficult" things like maths will put in the effort to become better. People who cannot control video games are people who were never interested enough to bother learning how, yet now you want to disregard the former group for this latter, albeit larger one?
For the long term sake of your business, which of these groups should you be trying to hold onto? By focusing on these peripherals instead of on core games, what kind of foundation are building for your business over the next ten years?
Sex offenders?
AHA! But they weren't Strip-Scanned(TM)!!
Please. Call me Larry.
Yours was the "or more", of which I'm not entirely certain about. The generation to which I was refering was the so called "Generation X", people currently in their late twenties to early fourties. I'm talking about people who would closer to the parents of these girls, not the girls themselves. Perhaps I wasn't very clear in the post. In fact I wasn't.
Personally, I feel people in this age group typically, tend to be over-opinionated, underskilled, quick to litigate and generally shallow and emotional in their thinking and politics. Now, sometimes I find myself in agreement with them on many issues, but overall their attitudes, methods and discussions seem juvenile and ineffective. They don't really accomplish anything yet always behave as if they do and are entitled to more credit than they deserve.
Basically, I'm talking about old Grungers.
This is where you are wrong. An entire generation or more has been raised to believe in its own innate and unearned importance, and bolstered with a solid and unshakable faith in its responsibility-less intrinsic rights. They truly believe that they are entitled to do whatsoever they please, whenever they please to, and that they are educated and savvy enough to inject their opinions in any arena they see fit, and how dare anyone presume to tell them otherwise. Their rights are absolute at all times, without qualification of any kind.
If you disagree with them, or are simply in their way, they're not going to engage in productive discussion or debate. That would imply that you are somehow their equal. Instead, they will call upon the full force of the great edifice of the Law, which exists solely to defend their inalienable right to _make_ the world bend to their will. As free, intelligent and independent citizens, they have every right to bring the full force of the State to bear in crushing you and your impudent challenges to their unique and inestimable way of life.
Yet, compare Japan to Germany in 1945. Were the followers of the Emperor really so much more fanatical than the followers of the Furher? Was their fanaticism, tenacity or cruelty really so much greater than the likes of the Waffen SS? I doubt it. The notion of the nigh impregnable Japnese homeland, particularly in 1945, is probably a myth.
Compare the American wars against Japan and Germany. About 180,000 US soldiers were killed in the European theater. About 110,000 were killed in the Pacific theater. In Europe allied forces were not even facing the full brunt of Germany's forces. Moreover, while battles in the pacific were extremely bloody, the nature of the theater meant that small islands were effectively fortresses which the sides were forced to fight over. There were no fronts and the density of troops was quite high. Japan is an island, and mountainous, but it is not that small.
By 1945, the Japanese mainland defenders were low on ammunition and oil, and had taken to arming civilians with, essentially, pitchforks and were expecting them to put up an adequate resistance. Ludicrous plans like mass waves of Kamikazi boats and planes were being suggested, evidence of a military command increasingly divorced from reality. For all the talk of surrender being "unthinkable" to the Japanese mindset, it was the elephant in the room in every cabinet discussion. The similarities to Germany are actually quite striking.
I'm not suggesting that an invasion of Japan in 1945 would be without casualties. But I don't think it is justified to say that such an invasion would have been bloodier for allied forces than say, the Western front in Europe after D-Day. The Japanese army was on the point of collapse. The civilian population was hugely demoralized. The Soviets were also poised to invade from the North. The notion that somehow the invasion was going to turn into a bloody gauntlet for every mile to Tokyo seems to be a myth based far more on fiction than on fact.
As to the 1/4 million purple hearts, I would suspect that had a lot more to do suppliers contractors than it had to do with accurate assessment of future casualties. But what do I know?
No open source licence of any kind has ever put restrictions on the output of a program or of code. If he uses your code to make illustrations, those are his illustrations, as if they were drawn by hand, and he can do with or licence them as he pleases. If this wasn't the case, then every picture ever made with the GIMP would be GPL'd!
Why shouldn't they get the source code to a program they are using, even if it is over SSH? Isn't that the whole point of the Open source and the GPL. Software authors granting the same rights they enjoy to their users? When did having the program you're using running on your own computer become a prerequisite for obtaining GPL rights?
The experiment involves Tarot cards.
No, I'm not joking. This is what it actually involves. Or at least, that's what they were proposing as an experiment two years ago. I doubt they've improved much on their thinking over the interim.
Great! Now I can regale and browbeat others with authoritative sounding misinformation wherever I go. Cafe discourses and dinner discussions will never be the same again!
That's not the point I'm trying to make. I'm all for the healthy embrace of feminine sexuality, but that doesn't mean that its appropriate to embrace it anywhere, anytime, with anyone.
My point is that the producers of the Simpsons feel perfectly alright with taking the same TV show character they sold to people when they were children, and then reselling that same character back to those same people as a sex symbol when they are adults. Something just seems wrong about this to me. However, I do accept your point about Marge representing women, and that in that sense there is a whole suite of meanings and roles associated with women. Nevertheless, crassly trying to sell all of these meanings in the same character, to the same people, strikes me as cynical and incongruous.
Perhaps something could be said for the Playboy article in terms of the celebration of beauty of middle aged women and/or mothers, or hell even animated characters. But I'm inclined to think that such matters are far from the minds of the creators and readers of the piece.
I too have a vision. It involves electricity becoming mondo-expensive and people switching to energy saving devices en-masse. Governments around the world turning to nuclear, and where convenient, hydro and air power, not because they have low carbon emissions (that's only a plus), but because they are actually cheaper! People finally turning away from 1800's oil and coal based technologies and moving, triumphantly towards 1950's engineering solutions!!
Wow. I'll bet the guys at Cern are feeling pretty foolish right about now.
This story disturbs me in more ways than one. Look there's only one reason why things get put into Playboy magazine; so people can masturbate to them(while reading the articles). Not that they aren't entitled to. But this story is particularly creepy for three reasons.
1) Marge Simpson's image being in Playboy means that enough men find her(it?) sexually attractive enough for the magazine to give her a centrefold.
2) Given Playboy's demographic, most of these men (20-40), started watching the Simpson's 20 years ago.
3) Knowing this, the Producers of the Simpon's OK'd this publication.
I think I can officially say that I will probably never be able to watch that show again. This is one bridge too far, even for a show that sold itself out years ago. The idea of an entire demographic of Simpson's fans out there with the hots for Marge, a character from their children's TV shows, and the producers being willing to cater to them, is simply too perturbing a thought to take. This is even worse that that Princess Lei in the gold bikini thing. At least Lei wasn't married with three children!