To put this in perspective, this $6m cut will save the average US taxpayer about $0.024/year.
Meanwhile, the Iraq War has cost the average taxpayer about $12,000 each over the last five years. With that money, you could fund Arecibo at its current level for more then 300,000 years.
That article reminds me of a story I heard one time on an episode of The West Wing.
"You know, you remind me of the man that lived by the river. He heard a radio report that the river was going to rush up and flood the town. And that all the residents should evacuate their homes. But the man said, 'I'm religious. I pray. God loves me. God will save me.' The waters rose up. A guy in a row boat came along and he shouted, 'Hey, hey you! You in there. The town is flooding. Let me take you to safety.' But the man shouted back, 'I'm religious. I pray. God loves me. God will save me.' A helicopter was hovering overhead. And a guy with a megaphone shouted, 'Hey you, you down there. The town is flooding. Let me drop this ladder and I'll take you to safety.' But the man shouted back that he was religious, that he prayed, that God loved him and that God will take him to safety. Well... the man drowned. And standing at the gates of St. Peter, he demanded an audience with God. 'Lord,' he said, 'I'm a religious man, I pray. I thought you loved me. Why did this happen?' God said, 'I sent you a radio report, a helicopter, and a guy in a rowboat. What the hell are you doing here?'"
"The government claims that this intelligence-gathering by Customs is the same as looking in a suitcase."
I'm pretty sure copying data off of your laptop or blackberry would be more like looking in your suitcase and then confiscating everything in it. Which probably wouldn't fly with many folks.
What advantage would a robot have to harming a human in a world that is completely dominated by humans? It would probably result in their memory being wiped (a robot death). That logic works great until we build enough of the little buggers to even out the odds, then we're all hosed.
I've worked in a large retail store, and I can tell you with pretty reasonable certainty that the point of such detectors is not to detect people shoplifting, but to give the greeters or store security an excuse to stop people they suspect may be stealing. I've even heard tales of security setting the alarms off on purpose to give themselves an excuse to go after someone they know to be stealing (someone who may have removed the tags from the merchendise).
But aside from that, I think previous posters have hit it on the nose when saying that they mostly function as a detterant, and retailers don't really care how reliable they are.
Now what if those little kids sitting in the back with their gameboys aren't as innocent as they seem...? Coming to a stop at a red ligh--TURBO INJECTOR TO FULL!!!
Certainly there is a degree of accuracy, but I have seen some servers go from "4000 horde, 1000 alliance" to "5000 alliance, 3000 horde" to "2500 horde, 7500 aliance" all in the span of a few days. I'm not sure why this is, but I certainly doubt that it's people deleting and recreating opposing faction characters.
I think it's a useful tool for an estimate only, but not real hard data.
The 1.4 million character stat from wow-census.com in the./ article body is inaccurate and should NOT be used to formulate any sort of statistics regarding the population of WoW. It only covers a very small fraction of players who are online and nearby at the same time players are running the census program. It should be taken as a very rough estimate at the very most.
Is this kind of petty moneymaking really what the fathers of patent law intended? When is a court going to take a stand on this crap? We're talking about the legal ownership of common ideas here. I can see some places where it is useful, like velcro and the shape of a coke bottle, where the idea is actually unique - but being able to patent the use of an ICON to access a HELP page? - Both very common computer terms stiched together by an uninspiring and unoriginal idea. What's next, someone patenting the use of a 'Submit button' to pass data through a form? Whoops, slashdot's gotta a cease and desist notice knocking.
Well except in character creation. One word "boring".
I partially agree. Yes, the options in WoW are limited. But then you have to think about the processor power required to morph some guy's nose 1 pixel larger and multiply that by 100 guys all standing in the same area. What a waste of my precious processor cycles. Besides, there's an actual GAME to play in WoW, so you're never really standing around staring at eachother's avatars for hours on end. In SWG's favour it's a cool feature, yeah, but so what? Doesn't affect the gameplay, or really even the game experience, at all.
... Star Wars Galaxies is still just a bunch of boring planets with boring professions and no real reason to advance at all. I played the game for nine months of beta and three months of retail and all I really got was twelve months older. I've been following it for ages and I'm still not sure what the real purpose of the game is. I know MMORPGs are suppose to be less linear then they're single player counterparts, but SWG takes it to the extreme. They plop you down in an empty, boring, EMPTY landscape and say "Go!" and then expect you to have fun.
Faction bases? They're exactly the same as before except some of them will have defenders! Looting changes? What loot? Crap you sell at vendor for 5 credits in a world where a new shirt will cost you 1000? PvP changes? Isn't that how covert and overt factions worked before, just without the ability to accidentally become overt? Veteran Rewards?.. okay, I can't really complain about free stuff. But geez, none of this stuff really excites me, and I was hardcore into Star Wars Galaxies before beta.
If it weren't for the Star Wars licence, I don't think SWG ever would have made it out of the starting gate. It's just not a fun game.
The article claims that the watchdog groups say 60-90% of ALL games are violent, however what the page actually says is 60-90% of THE MOST POPULAR games are violent. This sounds more believable to me, when you factor in GTA and HALO's marketshare.
This is not to say I'm siding with the watchdog, because it's an even less useful point then the misquote. Video games that are popular are popular because people buy them. If people are buying violent video games more then others, that's not the manufacturer or retailer or anybody's fault but the buyer's. Manufacturers make what people want them to make, or else they'd make no money.
I definately agree with the article's claims that these watchdog groups are incredibly out of touch with what parents want. I worked in retail last christmas, and on one of our busiest days of the season a group of 6 or 7 'violent-game protesters' came into the store. They were all women, probably 60-70 years old, and they kept chanting about how video games make our kids violent. I kept wanting to remind them that it was their generation that participated in world war 2, korea, and vietnam, not mine. And it's their generation right now that's invading Iraq and showing us that, apparently, the only way to solve some problems is through violence. See? I can generalize too.
If they thought microsoft was bad for not letting them develop these expansion packs in the first place, just wait until SOE demands they place a large 'Star Wars Galaxies' advertisement billboard in the middle of the marketplace.
Actually, I'm very impressed by how Bliz handled the newb zone rush. I can't say I ever had a problem waiting for spawns. It appears they somehow created a ratio in which if there are more players in the area, more monsters/items spawn. A very good idea on the part of Blizzard.
I would be surprised if even a third of the 500,000 open beta signups played much at all. I know personally that four people in my house signed up, and only two of us played for any respectable amount of time. The big differences between open beta and retail is that now people are paying for their characters, AND their characters are permanent, so there's no real reason *not* to play.
*shrug*. I think over the next week, the queues will dissapear, the lag with whisk itself away, and we can all go back to playing the game we've come to love.
To be fair, Blizzard has commented on nearly all of those.
Talens, Warlock pets, Racial traits, Horde content updates, and NYI quest rewards are all supposedly in the next patch, which should be out sometime before open beta.
Raid content is supposedly being saved for retail (so people will have something new to do). Hero classes as well.
And as you said, even in it's current state, WoW is ten times better then some games that have been out for over a year. I'm looking at you, SWG.
We are starting to see a new trend in MMORPGs wherein certain aspects of the game take place entirely in personal (or group) instances. COH, WoW, and many other games are doing this on a small scale, but the up-and-coming Guild Wars takes this idea to the max. What are your thoughts on the role of instances in the future of online games? Aren't they taking the 'Massive' out of Massively Multiplayer?
The wording is kind of funny...
The issue we had with the Patriot Act in BC is that various loopholes allow for the FBI/CIA/Secret Service/[insert conspiracy here] to obtain records and data on Canadian citizens working for US owned companies in B.C.. As well, (as far as I know) certain stipulations of the Patriot Act make it somehow illegal for these companies to tell their employees that they are being probed. Obviously, this is something most Canadians would object to. It's also something most Americans should be objecting to, but I guess it's the price you pay for 'Freedom'.
Slashdot Mirror
To put this in perspective, this $6m cut will save the average US taxpayer about $0.024/year. Meanwhile, the Iraq War has cost the average taxpayer about $12,000 each over the last five years. With that money, you could fund Arecibo at its current level for more then 300,000 years.
No... you'd have two nickels.
That article reminds me of a story I heard one time on an episode of The West Wing.
"You know, you remind me of the man that lived by the river. He heard a radio report that the river was going to rush up and flood the town. And that all the residents should evacuate their homes. But the man said, 'I'm religious. I pray. God loves me. God will save me.' The waters rose up. A guy in a row boat came along and he shouted, 'Hey, hey you! You in there. The town is flooding. Let me take you to safety.' But the man shouted back, 'I'm religious. I pray. God loves me. God will save me.' A helicopter was hovering overhead. And a guy with a megaphone shouted, 'Hey you, you down there. The town is flooding. Let me drop this ladder and I'll take you to safety.' But the man shouted back that he was religious, that he prayed, that God loved him and that God will take him to safety. Well... the man drowned. And standing at the gates of St. Peter, he demanded an audience with God. 'Lord,' he said, 'I'm a religious man, I pray. I thought you loved me. Why did this happen?' God said, 'I sent you a radio report, a helicopter, and a guy in a rowboat. What the hell are you doing here?'"
Redshift
... to have the special meta tag required to get the page to render in IE6/7's "Standards" mode.
And now thanks to Slashdot, nobody at all can access the union's webpage. gg Microsoft JET Database Engine.
I've worked in a large retail store, and I can tell you with pretty reasonable certainty that the point of such detectors is not to detect people shoplifting, but to give the greeters or store security an excuse to stop people they suspect may be stealing. I've even heard tales of security setting the alarms off on purpose to give themselves an excuse to go after someone they know to be stealing (someone who may have removed the tags from the merchendise).
But aside from that, I think previous posters have hit it on the nose when saying that they mostly function as a detterant, and retailers don't really care how reliable they are.
Now what if those little kids sitting in the back with their gameboys aren't as innocent as they seem...? Coming to a stop at a red ligh--TURBO INJECTOR TO FULL!!!
Certainly there is a degree of accuracy, but I have seen some servers go from "4000 horde, 1000 alliance" to "5000 alliance, 3000 horde" to "2500 horde, 7500 aliance" all in the span of a few days. I'm not sure why this is, but I certainly doubt that it's people deleting and recreating opposing faction characters.
I think it's a useful tool for an estimate only, but not real hard data.
The 1.4 million character stat from wow-census.com in the ./ article body is inaccurate and should NOT be used to formulate any sort of statistics regarding the population of WoW. It only covers a very small fraction of players who are online and nearby at the same time players are running the census program. It should be taken as a very rough estimate at the very most.
This is great news for my company! We sell tinfoil pants! Come and get 'em, repressed and paranoid college students!
Is this kind of petty moneymaking really what the fathers of patent law intended? When is a court going to take a stand on this crap? We're talking about the legal ownership of common ideas here. I can see some places where it is useful, like velcro and the shape of a coke bottle, where the idea is actually unique - but being able to patent the use of an ICON to access a HELP page? - Both very common computer terms stiched together by an uninspiring and unoriginal idea. What's next, someone patenting the use of a 'Submit button' to pass data through a form? Whoops, slashdot's gotta a cease and desist notice knocking.
Where do we draw the line?
Well except in character creation. One word "boring".
I partially agree. Yes, the options in WoW are limited. But then you have to think about the processor power required to morph some guy's nose 1 pixel larger and multiply that by 100 guys all standing in the same area. What a waste of my precious processor cycles. Besides, there's an actual GAME to play in WoW, so you're never really standing around staring at eachother's avatars for hours on end. In SWG's favour it's a cool feature, yeah, but so what? Doesn't affect the gameplay, or really even the game experience, at all.
... because the Q/A testers who make sure they work are having too much fun twisting and popping the UMD drive out of every unit they test.
... Star Wars Galaxies is still just a bunch of boring planets with boring professions and no real reason to advance at all. I played the game for nine months of beta and three months of retail and all I really got was twelve months older. I've been following it for ages and I'm still not sure what the real purpose of the game is. I know MMORPGs are suppose to be less linear then they're single player counterparts, but SWG takes it to the extreme. They plop you down in an empty, boring, EMPTY landscape and say "Go!" and then expect you to have fun.
.. okay, I can't really complain about free stuff. But geez, none of this stuff really excites me, and I was hardcore into Star Wars Galaxies before beta.
Faction bases? They're exactly the same as before except some of them will have defenders! Looting changes? What loot? Crap you sell at vendor for 5 credits in a world where a new shirt will cost you 1000? PvP changes? Isn't that how covert and overt factions worked before, just without the ability to accidentally become overt? Veteran Rewards?
If it weren't for the Star Wars licence, I don't think SWG ever would have made it out of the starting gate. It's just not a fun game.
Now, World of Warcraft... Blizzard did it right.
The article claims that the watchdog groups say 60-90% of ALL games are violent, however what the page actually says is 60-90% of THE MOST POPULAR games are violent. This sounds more believable to me, when you factor in GTA and HALO's marketshare.
This is not to say I'm siding with the watchdog, because it's an even less useful point then the misquote. Video games that are popular are popular because people buy them. If people are buying violent video games more then others, that's not the manufacturer or retailer or anybody's fault but the buyer's. Manufacturers make what people want them to make, or else they'd make no money.
I definately agree with the article's claims that these watchdog groups are incredibly out of touch with what parents want. I worked in retail last christmas, and on one of our busiest days of the season a group of 6 or 7 'violent-game protesters' came into the store. They were all women, probably 60-70 years old, and they kept chanting about how video games make our kids violent. I kept wanting to remind them that it was their generation that participated in world war 2, korea, and vietnam, not mine. And it's their generation right now that's invading Iraq and showing us that, apparently, the only way to solve some problems is through violence. See? I can generalize too.
These 'watchdog' groups piss me off.
If they thought microsoft was bad for not letting them develop these expansion packs in the first place, just wait until SOE demands they place a large 'Star Wars Galaxies' advertisement billboard in the middle of the marketplace.
Actually, I'm very impressed by how Bliz handled the newb zone rush. I can't say I ever had a problem waiting for spawns. It appears they somehow created a ratio in which if there are more players in the area, more monsters/items spawn. A very good idea on the part of Blizzard.
I would be surprised if even a third of the 500,000 open beta signups played much at all. I know personally that four people in my house signed up, and only two of us played for any respectable amount of time. The big differences between open beta and retail is that now people are paying for their characters, AND their characters are permanent, so there's no real reason *not* to play. *shrug*. I think over the next week, the queues will dissapear, the lag with whisk itself away, and we can all go back to playing the game we've come to love.
To be fair, Blizzard has commented on nearly all of those. Talens, Warlock pets, Racial traits, Horde content updates, and NYI quest rewards are all supposedly in the next patch, which should be out sometime before open beta. Raid content is supposedly being saved for retail (so people will have something new to do). Hero classes as well. And as you said, even in it's current state, WoW is ten times better then some games that have been out for over a year. I'm looking at you, SWG.
We are starting to see a new trend in MMORPGs wherein certain aspects of the game take place entirely in personal (or group) instances. COH, WoW, and many other games are doing this on a small scale, but the up-and-coming Guild Wars takes this idea to the max. What are your thoughts on the role of instances in the future of online games? Aren't they taking the 'Massive' out of Massively Multiplayer?
Imagine the headline: Slashdot polls won by serious option (re: not cowboyneal). World assumed to end soon.
The wording is kind of funny... The issue we had with the Patriot Act in BC is that various loopholes allow for the FBI/CIA/Secret Service/[insert conspiracy here] to obtain records and data on Canadian citizens working for US owned companies in B.C.. As well, (as far as I know) certain stipulations of the Patriot Act make it somehow illegal for these companies to tell their employees that they are being probed. Obviously, this is something most Canadians would object to. It's also something most Americans should be objecting to, but I guess it's the price you pay for 'Freedom'.