"The gov abandoned the idea of a state regulated militia in favor of a federally regulated national guard. If the right to bear arms only applies to a state regulated militia, then we lost our right to bear arms many years ago."
this is simply the national government adjusting to the fact that our national security is no longer under constant threat which is to say we are no longer under threat of invasion by the british, native americans or anybody else. of course one could ask, "what about terrorism?". I would suggest that the threat of terrorism in this country is overblown by many and that due to modern terrorism's covert nature (in most cases) having an armed populous would not be terribly usefull anyways.
Gun confiscation leads to a loss of freedom, increased crime, and the government moving to the left
let me just say how laughable your grouping of the government moving to the left in with increased crime and the like, implying that it's as bad as the rest. talk about wearing your political bias on your sleave.
This has already happened in England and Australia. After Great Britain banned most guns in 1997, making armed self-defense punishable as murder, violence skyrocketed because criminals know that law abiding citizens have been disarmed. Armed crime rose 10% in 1998. The Sunday Times of London reported on the new black market in guns: "Up to 3 million illegal guns are in circulation in Britain, leading to a rise in drive-by shootings and gangland-style execution." There has been such a heavy increase in the use of knives for violent attacks that new laws have been passed giving police the power to search anyone for knives in designated areas.
when i look at government studies in the UK on the subject of violent crime, it looks as if these rates have fallen a significant amount over the last few years inspite of this horrible crime inducing handgun ban (source: http://www.crimestatistics.org.uk/output/Page63.as p). couldnt find a violent crime timeline for australia so i cant say anything in regards to that.
everything i've ever seen in regards to gun control and violent crime is that we are far from a final verdict on the subject. I've seen studies in which it look's like one would be a fool to ban guns and i've also seen studies which would lead to the opposite conclusion.
me personaly, i think it's obsurd to give the average citizen the ability to easily doll out the death sentence at will. this is what we have the courts for (and to a lesser extent the police).
it was a cheap and easy way for the person to post this material (not to mention the huge exposure potential on youtube). if you know of an audio only vesion of youtube please let me know, because i dont know about it.
i know that in this day in age most feel that cell phones are essential but i personaly just find them annoying and over priced. people got along just fine (and i still do) using pay phones and the phones at whatever location they might be at. as a full time college student who pays his own bills i shake my head in disgust every time i hear a fellow student complaining about being broke and yet paying 40 dollars a month for something they dont need (especially since most have a land lines).
it's like me spending tons of money on micro brew (which i do) and then complaining about not having cash (which i dont).
"Basically every other game currently available is just not worth mentioning."
i think it's more that you're just not interested in any other titles for the system right now. a number of other titles have been getting very positive reviews both from the gaming media and gamers. Raymond and trauma center are just two off the top of my head.
Re:The 360 is console done right, Wii is console .
on
Two Weeks with the Wii
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· Score: 1
"But that's still not enough for me to discount my 360, which is fun, has better graphics and has achievements (again they are important, don't ask me why)."
what on earth are achievements? you mention this term a few times in your post and i have no idea what you're talking about.
"Looking at the release schedule for the next year for the Wii it looks like there is a ton of shovelware coming from gaming companies with a few gems."
honestly i think that's been true of literaly every gaming system. looking at both the ps3 and 360 launch scheduals for the next few months i only find i'm interested in maybe 10-20 percent of the games. i think you're asking a bit much from a system if you expect to be interested in even 50 percent of its titles. not only are tastes in games relative to the individual but there are also just alot of crappy games made for every system.
while the pre alphas typicaly had game play featuring all of the game's major features for review purposes, it certainly wasnt "most of the game", over at ubisoft. I spent some time as a QA lead over at Ubi and every developer i worked with at this stage explicitly stated that they did not want QA feedback on the game yet because most of the game didnt work and they already knew that. At this point it would be just me (with my assistant depending on how 'big' the game was) writing my test plan.
" It's currently at a stage that he calls Pre-Alpha Five. In non-geek, this means that the game is finally at a point where EA employees outside of his team can play it from beginning to end, though they must endure rough transitions and levels of difficulty that have yet to be tuned."
now it's been a little while but back when i worked for ubisoft, pre alpha deffinitly did not mean you could play it from beginning to end. pre alpha meant you could play certain small portions of the game at certain times. game testers barely saw the game at all at this point because there wasnt anything for them to work with. what he's talking about makes the game seem like it's almost ready for beta (the stage after alpha but before they start producing release canidates).
anybody else out there in the game industry? am i out of date with current terminology, are these terms highly relative to the company one works for (i know they are somewhat but this seems to be a bit much), or is something odd going on here?
i dont mean to be critical but you really need to do something about your computer if you're running a 2ghz machine that slows down when playing civ2. my old p3 600mgz with 256mb of pc133 ram ran that game with absolutly zero slow down on the largest map settings (you can actually make the maps a little bigger than the maximum setting in the game by using the scenario editor btw) with max number of ai and all the bells and whistles turned on. either you have some pretty heavey adware/spyware on your computer or there's something else wrong.
"When they talk about that kind of thing costing a lot, they are talking about it costing a lot because of the complexity, which simply isn't there in the multimedia portions of galciv2."
i guess my point kind of is that i don't think they need to be spending the kind of money they are on modern game graphics. nintendo has it right. keep the system slow so there's a lower cap for what people can do on it vs the other systems. this makes the system cheaper to develop for, for everybody.
"My point was that the models in this game have low poly counts and are thus not expensive to produce. They do not even have large, complex textures."
i know you said that in your first post. my reply was that low poly count does not equal bad looking:). developers, in my oppinion, are spending entirely too much money on computer art.
"This game cost basically nothing to make compared to any recent major release."
exactly my point. this game is a recent major release (came out earlier this year) and has done incredibly well both criticaly and sales wise.
"It doesn't do anything that computers couldn't do ten years ago (albeit perhaps more high-end ones then... but look at how far computing has advanced today.)"
not true at all. the ai for one, is far more advanced than anyone was seeing in games even 5 years ago.
"That game probably has zero models over 300 polys. I can do that kind of modeling. Newer systems are allowing models with thousands of polys, from which lower-resolution meshes can be automatically generated when needed."
A game's graphics can have a low poly count and still look good. High poly counts do not automaticaly mean a better look for a game. The thing about galciv2 that i think xornand was getting at was that galciv2 competes well on almost every measurable level with most modern games and does so on a modest budget. yes there are games with better graphics out there, but galciv still looks good.
I might also add that for a turn based strategy game, the game's sales have been amazing.
Without getting into specifics, california schools are bad because of how the property tax laws work out here. it's not a regional thing (although inner city schools here, as in the rest of the country, are horrible relative to most suburban schools), it's a statewide problem.
My point in the earlier post was that economic prosperity is not always the absolute determinant in determining school prosperity. some times the voters (as in california) or some governing body screws over the school system.
"That means wealthier states spend more money and have better educational system."
That's not true. California is the one of the most prosperous states in the union and has a terrible educational system. To bring it down to an even smaller level, i live in sonoma county in california (about 50 miles north of SF) which is one of the most expensive places in the country to live. Our schools here suck.
we randomly test food coming into the country to enforce our sanitary standards. it's sort of hard to test a dvd player coming into the country for how much in the way of pollutants were released into the environment during its production.
the only way to properly do something like this would be to send US inspectors to the factories in other countries. not only would this be incredibly expensive but something tells me most countries (especially china) wouldnt be too receptive to that kind of proposal.
I'll have to admit, I've never really quite gotten most of the complaints against the lord of the ring movies. It seems to me that allot of the people complaining are expecting every little bit and piece of the book to end up in the movie. given that movies and books are extremely different artistic mediums, really the only thing a person should expect from a movie version of a book is that it stays true to the spirit of the book. this, i think, the movies did a rather good job with.
With that said the one thing i do hope jackson does better in the hobbit (assuming he does make it) is represent dwarves a little better. while i certainly understand that there were silly elements associated with dwarves in the ring trilogy, i felt in the movie they got in the way of the fact that dwarves are some of the most badass warriors in the tolkien universe. glimli was just too silly to be taken seriously in this respect. I know dwarves are even sillier in tolkien's hobbit, i just hope whoever ends up making the hobbit movie doesnt play this up to the detriment of the other qualities dwarves posses.
never mind the long history of western colonial oppression. never mind american meddling in the regions politics (iran, iraq, lebanon, etc) and support to oppressive regimes (the saudis are a good example). never mind massive american support to israel, a country that continues to oppress muslims in the region. never mind that all of this predates all of your listed events.
wait... it seems more like they're reacting to our aggression....
(my apologies that this is a bit off topic from the parent story)
To the average joe it is an essential part of the computer. nobody is going to buy a computer with some "weird off brand OS called 'linux'". the average joe has had a hard enough time trying to figure out how to use windows. he's not about to start using something else.
it's not very hard to go online and get a enough information to form some sort of opinion (however basic it might be) on the candidates running and the initiatives on the ballot (if you live in one of those states).
i am literally disgusted by people who dont vote because they don't know about the issues. it's a nights worth of reading once a year to help make your country a better place. it's your civic duty and the very least you can do for your country.
the command and conquer series was doing campaigns of the style used in starcraft well before starcraft was released. even dune 2 (the first base building rts) had done a campaign like this. you didnt have units with names in dune 2 but otherwise it was the same idea. the gameplay in SC was revolutionary but the campaign itself had been done several times before
Also, those were hardly compelling characters in starcraft.
Slashdot Mirror
"extreme" gamers can some times set the trends that more casual players will follow, however. it's still too soon to tell where this will all go.
"The gov abandoned the idea of a state regulated militia in favor of a federally regulated national guard. If the right to bear arms only applies to a state regulated militia, then we lost our right to bear arms many years ago."
s p). couldnt find a violent crime timeline for australia so i cant say anything in regards to that.
this is simply the national government adjusting to the fact that our national security is no longer under constant threat which is to say we are no longer under threat of invasion by the british, native americans or anybody else.
of course one could ask, "what about terrorism?". I would suggest that the threat of terrorism in this country is overblown by many and that due to modern terrorism's covert nature (in most cases) having an armed populous would not be terribly usefull anyways.
Gun confiscation leads to a loss of freedom, increased crime, and the government moving to the left
let me just say how laughable your grouping of the government moving to the left in with increased crime and the like, implying that it's as bad as the rest. talk about wearing your political bias on your sleave.
This has already happened in England and Australia. After Great Britain banned most guns in 1997, making armed self-defense punishable as murder, violence skyrocketed because criminals know that law abiding citizens have been disarmed. Armed crime rose 10% in 1998. The Sunday Times of London reported on the new black market in guns: "Up to 3 million illegal guns are in circulation in Britain, leading to a rise in drive-by shootings and gangland-style execution." There has been such a heavy increase in the use of knives for violent attacks that new laws have been passed giving police the power to search anyone for knives in designated areas.
when i look at government studies in the UK on the subject of violent crime, it looks as if these rates have fallen a significant amount over the last few years inspite of this horrible crime inducing handgun ban (source: http://www.crimestatistics.org.uk/output/Page63.a
everything i've ever seen in regards to gun control and violent crime is that we are far from a final verdict on the subject. I've seen studies in which it look's like one would be a fool to ban guns and i've also seen studies which would lead to the opposite conclusion.
me personaly, i think it's obsurd to give the average citizen the ability to easily doll out the death sentence at will. this is what we have the courts for (and to a lesser extent the police).
it was a cheap and easy way for the person to post this material (not to mention the huge exposure potential on youtube). if you know of an audio only vesion of youtube please let me know, because i dont know about it.
i know that in this day in age most feel that cell phones are essential but i personaly just find them annoying and over priced. people got along just fine (and i still do) using pay phones and the phones at whatever location they might be at. as a full time college student who pays his own bills i shake my head in disgust every time i hear a fellow student complaining about being broke and yet paying 40 dollars a month for something they dont need (especially since most have a land lines).
it's like me spending tons of money on micro brew (which i do) and then complaining about not having cash (which i dont).
"Why can't I just shoot him with the Uzi?"
because he'd just block the bullets with his sword, duh.
"Basically every other game currently available is just not worth mentioning."
i think it's more that you're just not interested in any other titles for the system right now. a number of other titles have been getting very positive reviews both from the gaming media and gamers. Raymond and trauma center are just two off the top of my head.
"But that's still not enough for me to discount my 360, which is fun, has better graphics and has achievements (again they are important, don't ask me why)."
what on earth are achievements? you mention this term a few times in your post and i have no idea what you're talking about.
"Looking at the release schedule for the next year for the Wii it looks like there is a ton of shovelware coming from gaming companies with a few gems."
honestly i think that's been true of literaly every gaming system. looking at both the ps3 and 360 launch scheduals for the next few months i only find i'm interested in maybe 10-20 percent of the games. i think you're asking a bit much from a system if you expect to be interested in even 50 percent of its titles. not only are tastes in games relative to the individual but there are also just alot of crappy games made for every system.
while the pre alphas typicaly had game play featuring all of the game's major features for review purposes, it certainly wasnt "most of the game", over at ubisoft. I spent some time as a QA lead over at Ubi and every developer i worked with at this stage explicitly stated that they did not want QA feedback on the game yet because most of the game didnt work and they already knew that. At this point it would be just me (with my assistant depending on how 'big' the game was) writing my test plan.
" It's currently at a stage that he calls Pre-Alpha Five. In non-geek, this means that the game is finally at a point where EA employees outside of his team can play it from beginning to end, though they must endure rough transitions and levels of difficulty that have yet to be tuned."
now it's been a little while but back when i worked for ubisoft, pre alpha deffinitly did not mean you could play it from beginning to end. pre alpha meant you could play certain small portions of the game at certain times. game testers barely saw the game at all at this point because there wasnt anything for them to work with. what he's talking about makes the game seem like it's almost ready for beta (the stage after alpha but before they start producing release canidates).
anybody else out there in the game industry? am i out of date with current terminology, are these terms highly relative to the company one works for (i know they are somewhat but this seems to be a bit much), or is something odd going on here?
i dont mean to be critical but you really need to do something about your computer if you're running a 2ghz machine that slows down when playing civ2. my old p3 600mgz with 256mb of pc133 ram ran that game with absolutly zero slow down on the largest map settings (you can actually make the maps a little bigger than the maximum setting in the game by using the scenario editor btw) with max number of ai and all the bells and whistles turned on. either you have some pretty heavey adware/spyware on your computer or there's something else wrong.
"When they talk about that kind of thing costing a lot, they are talking about it costing a lot because of the complexity, which simply isn't there in the multimedia portions of galciv2."
i guess my point kind of is that i don't think they need to be spending the kind of money they are on modern game graphics. nintendo has it right. keep the system slow so there's a lower cap for what people can do on it vs the other systems. this makes the system cheaper to develop for, for everybody.
if you can name one in recent years that is not civilization (or galciv2 :) ), i'll be pretty impressed. i know i cant.
At least once a year you see an RPG and an RTS that sells reasonably well, released. not so with turn based strategy.
"My point was that the models in this game have low poly counts and are thus not expensive to produce. They do not even have large, complex textures."
:). developers, in my oppinion, are spending entirely too much money on computer art.
i know you said that in your first post. my reply was that low poly count does not equal bad looking
"This game cost basically nothing to make compared to any recent major release."
exactly my point. this game is a recent major release (came out earlier this year) and has done incredibly well both criticaly and sales wise.
"It doesn't do anything that computers couldn't do ten years ago (albeit perhaps more high-end ones then... but look at how far computing has advanced today.)"
not true at all. the ai for one, is far more advanced than anyone was seeing in games even 5 years ago.
"That game probably has zero models over 300 polys. I can do that kind of modeling. Newer systems are allowing models with thousands of polys, from which lower-resolution meshes can be automatically generated when needed."
A game's graphics can have a low poly count and still look good. High poly counts do not automaticaly mean a better look for a game.
The thing about galciv2 that i think xornand was getting at was that galciv2 competes well on almost every measurable level with most modern games and does so on a modest budget. yes there are games with better graphics out there, but galciv still looks good.
I might also add that for a turn based strategy game, the game's sales have been amazing.
Without getting into specifics, california schools are bad because of how the property tax laws work out here. it's not a regional thing (although inner city schools here, as in the rest of the country, are horrible relative to most suburban schools), it's a statewide problem.
My point in the earlier post was that economic prosperity is not always the absolute determinant in determining school prosperity. some times the voters (as in california) or some governing body screws over the school system.
"That means wealthier states spend more money and have better educational system."
That's not true. California is the one of the most prosperous states in the union and has a terrible educational system. To bring it down to an even smaller level, i live in sonoma county in california (about 50 miles north of SF) which is one of the most expensive places in the country to live. Our schools here suck.
we randomly test food coming into the country to enforce our sanitary standards. it's sort of hard to test a dvd player coming into the country for how much in the way of pollutants were released into the environment during its production.
the only way to properly do something like this would be to send US inspectors to the factories in other countries. not only would this be incredibly expensive but something tells me most countries (especially china) wouldnt be too receptive to that kind of proposal.
just what the world needs, another mmo...
what i'd like to see is a solid single player shadowrun rpg. sort of a like the genesis version only made for this generation of hardware.
of course good luck getting any honest answers or figures out of china (or any other country) on how much their industry pollutes.
I'll have to admit, I've never really quite gotten most of the complaints against the lord of the ring movies. It seems to me that allot of the people complaining are expecting every little bit and piece of the book to end up in the movie. given that movies and books are extremely different artistic mediums, really the only thing a person should expect from a movie version of a book is that it stays true to the spirit of the book. this, i think, the movies did a rather good job with.
With that said the one thing i do hope jackson does better in the hobbit (assuming he does make it) is represent dwarves a little better. while i certainly understand that there were silly elements associated with dwarves in the ring trilogy, i felt in the movie they got in the way of the fact that dwarves are some of the most badass warriors in the tolkien universe. glimli was just too silly to be taken seriously in this respect. I know dwarves are even sillier in tolkien's hobbit, i just hope whoever ends up making the hobbit movie doesnt play this up to the detriment of the other qualities dwarves posses.
never mind the long history of western colonial oppression. never mind american meddling in the regions politics (iran, iraq, lebanon, etc) and support to oppressive regimes (the saudis are a good example). never mind massive american support to israel, a country that continues to oppress muslims in the region. never mind that all of this predates all of your listed events.
wait... it seems more like they're reacting to our aggression....
(my apologies that this is a bit off topic from the parent story)
bump parent
there really is no promblem here.
To the average joe it is an essential part of the computer. nobody is going to buy a computer with some "weird off brand OS called 'linux'". the average joe has had a hard enough time trying to figure out how to use windows. he's not about to start using something else.
This person shouldnt be uninformed to begin with.
seriously.
it's not very hard to go online and get a enough information to form some sort of opinion (however basic it might be) on the candidates running and the initiatives on the ballot (if you live in one of those states).
i am literally disgusted by people who dont vote because they don't know about the issues. it's a nights worth of reading once a year to help make your country a better place. it's your civic duty and the very least you can do for your country.
the command and conquer series was doing campaigns of the style used in starcraft well before starcraft was released. even dune 2 (the first base building rts) had done a campaign like this. you didnt have units with names in dune 2 but otherwise it was the same idea. the gameplay in SC was revolutionary but the campaign itself had been done several times before
Also, those were hardly compelling characters in starcraft.