Come to Korea. I've been to pro Starcraft matches where the audience is in the thousands, and the TV matches are watched like regular sports. There's a corner store down the road from my house where people buy beer and sit and watch the live broadcasts of games on a flat screen from the tables outside.
The top Starcraft players earn a lot of money, and their sport is considerably more difficult to master than basketball.
Audiences for pro gaming will improve in the states once the kind of games that Americans play start being programmed so that they are watchable on TV. That means allowing a spectator camera that provides a dynamic view of the game, and not just following the player cams, like the current crap.
It so happens that Starcraft can accommodate a spectator cam quite easily. That's why there are a couple of TV channels here that show games more or less all the time.
That would be a bad idea. It's a game, not a word processor. Blizzard don't want to field the avalanche of complaints if it were discovered that some addon, which you have to pay for, gave users an advantage in game.
In all these discussions, people forget that WoW is a game, and as such has to conform to general norms of fairness between the participants.
Then again, it's arguable that WoW is still a game. Being in a raiding guild is more like some mindless job in a Chinese factory. I reckon the gold farmers are the smart ones - at least they get paid for being yelled at by their guild leader.
The real life comparison is important, since a lot of the unfairness in online social gaming occurs because of the anonymity and the ability of people to create new accounts to bypass handicapping systems. In Warhawk, people were creating new accounts simply in order to enter noob servers and stomp people. That's silly and self defeating, especially for a game with a small playerbase.
If you want online gaming to be fair, then it will have to be fair the same way sports are fair, by rigorous policing of permitted equipment and making sure folks karma follows them around.
Fairness in design is much less of a problem in most games.
In this case the "shit you don't like" is a de facto eugenics policy. I would have thought we'd learned from the last century that eugenics is very problematic.
No rational person wants to place blind trust the state to enact a eugenics policy allowing it an extreme degree of control over the physiology of the newborn.
Similarly, no rational person wants the same thing to happen by proxy as rich people design their children. The point about names is a good one. Giving a child a horrible name is a form of mild child abuse. Designing a child as one would design one's home interior (and that's how a lot of people who would do this think) would be much worse.
If neither the government or individuals can be trusted with something, that's usually a sign for rational prohibition. There are some places we just shouldn't go, people being how they are.
It's almost worth downloading a pirated copy and then sending the publisher the cash by mail along with an anonymous letter saying "I wanted to buy your game, but I needed to be sure I got a version that would work and was a fair deal".
Why didn't someone tell me that I would have to scroll though 90% of the page to get to posts that were actually about Warhammer Online rather than complaining about World of Warcraft?
Can I humbly request that the title of any Slashdot post about an MMO includes in brackets after the title the following: "(i.e. bitching about World of Warcraft)"
Most of the site's problems could be solved by having paid, professional administrators who do not directly edit, but solve disputes. That way, it would be difficult for some of the rampant POV pushers to get their way (as is the case on Israel/Palestine articles). It would also be much easier to break up organized groups of editors (the whole "wisdom of crowds" thing works better when people edit as individuals free of the pressures of groupthink).
It won't happen though. Wikipedia is run by nutcases, and everyone knows that the owner will change pages in exchange for sex.
According to your account, Israel and Egypt just don't want to open their borders with Gaza.
That's all fine and dandy and no-one says they have to, but there's this big fucking blue thing called the Mediterranean sea that Gaza backs on to. Presumably, if Gaza is "free", that counts as an open border 12 miles from the coast.
Oh wait... it isn't? I wonder why that is. Oh it's because it is being blockaded by Israel. Free borders my ass.
And there your whole argument is exposed for the pathetic bullshit it is. Presumably, according to your logic, if the US refused to open its border with Canada, and in addition stationed battle fleets to blockade the entire Canadian coast, it would somehow just be a case of the US exercising its own rights.
You conveniently forgot the ethnic cleansing (your post below is complete BS). You conveniently forgot that the Jews were far less than a majority of the population of Palestine and only owned a very small portion of the land, and yet were given 55% of the territory of Palestine in the partition.
You conveniently forgot the fact that there were very few Jews in Palestine circa 1920 and the only reason there were more in 1948 was the fact that the colonial authority was letting them in en masse against the wishes of the locals. And there's the Jewish terrorism and collusion with the British in the 30s to suppress the Arab revolt (a revolt caused by the fact that the British were selling out their country from under them to a bunch of foreigners).
Neither side covered itself in glory at the time, and nor have they since. That does not change the fact that the Arabs were treated shabbily so that Europeans could recompense Jews for a crime that Europeans committed.
Israeli historians have been writing about this for 20 years. It's not like we all don't know. Frankly, the majority of informed people are sick to death of hearing the bullshit that people like you spout.
Look, it is extremely unlikely, even given the truth about the past, that any eventual settlement will constitute a full right of return for the Arabs to their lands (and they are theirs under any reasonable interpretation of history). Given that fact, there is no point bullshitting about the crime committed against the Arabs of Palestine. It was horrific and were it to happen today, condemnation would likely be universal.
The past has very little to contribute to the solution of current problems, which is basically two giant refugee camps of insanely pissed people with very limited life prospects that nobody wants, and who aren't going away. As every sane person knows, we have the best shot of solving it with a two state solution based on the 1967 borders (with some land swaps). It might not work, but it's the best chance there is.
Whining about whose fault it was half a century ago is in practical terms of only academic interest. As it happens, you are wrong, but it doesn't matter anyway, because it has little to do with solving the problem.
It's only more expensive if you discount the costs to the environment, which will be borne by future generations. It's not like environmentalists have not been saying for years that fossil fuels are artificially cheap because some of the cost is externalized. It is not "forcing people to use something that is more expensive", but "making them pay the cost of what they use".
We don't live in a sane society. Most people don't care if the government does this, because they believe that the government will only ever look at your email if you do something wrong.
People talk about freedom, but they don't care about it as long as no-one is stopping them buying useless shit to fill up their house with.
All the parties game the system. It's how politics in Thailand works. The new guy is just as, if not more, corrupt than the old one. The whole thing is a joke. Thaksin's replacement was removed after being convicted of a conflict of interest (he was moonlighting as a chef on a television cooking show â" that's so pathetic that words fail me).
The difference is that Thaksin's lot were voted in with a majority, and he'd more or less kept most of his campaign promises. Hell, he'd even completed a previous term, and his party had been voted an absolute majority (both almost unheard of there). That's not to say he wasn't bent. They're all bent. But it's better to have a bent leader who represents the will of the majority than a bent leader who doesn't and who is more or less installed as the result of a coup, eh?
The antics of the current government have set democracy in Thailand back 40 years. For that, they should hang.
He should have been honest and said: "Hi, I'm your new Prime Minister who was installed by the military and the middle classes, because the poor majority of our country finally got it into their stupid heads to get together and vote for a party that more or less represented their interests. This is not allowed. Democracy is not about having a government that gets the most votes, but about serving the interests of the middle class and wealthy."
It's the same old sad story.
This guy and his supporters deserve something more than a reply to a text message.
"So you believe a nation can (or even has to) continue using a centuries old constitution with disregard for the changes that happened during that time?"
Yeah. What worries me is why you think anyone who believes that is worth reasoning with.
Libertarianism is kind of like bizarro Scientology â" the Scientologists try to keep their ideas secret and threaten lawsuits to stop it being printed on internet forums, while the Libertarians won't shut up and spam every internet forum, poll and newspaper comment site with their lunacy â" Scientologists are wealthy, successful and often attractive Hollywood celebrities, Libertarians are poverty stricken, reclusive, pale residents of parents' basements, etc.
That just proves that no matter how much men and materiel you give a bunch of cowardly, ignorant, casualty-averse idiots, they won't win jack.
I mean, anyone.... anyone... could have gone down to a local public library and acquired a better understanding of the political and ethnic situation in Iraq and Afghanistan than the people in charge of the invasions had.
Right, so if the ship had been legally docked at the Port of Los Angeles and had been attacked and sunk there by the French Secret Service, killing a crew member, the US government and US citizens would not be angry about it because the ship's owners had been annoying the French government?
Yeah right. Pull the other one.
The French had every right to arrest the protesters in French territorial waters if they chose to do so. They had no right to commit a terrorist murder in New Zealand, a country which was supposedly an ally. I'm not the only one who wouldn't mind taking a shot or two at those responsible.
You might want to read a bit more about that one. The problem in that case was that the French decided that it would be a good idea to test nuclear weapons in the South Pacific, which mortally pissed off pretty much everyone who lived there. If it was so safe, why couldn't they test the blasted things in France. It wasn't just Greenpeace. The New Zealand government had sent ships to the test site to protest in previous years. Why stand by as some European nonces shit in our back yard?
European nuclear powers had a well-known history of contempt for people in the South Pacific. Britain, for example, tested nuclear weapons in Australia without bothering to inform the Aboriginals who lived near the test site that they should get out of the way. So you can guess that the French were not popular.
New Zealand was a supposed ally of France and there are thousands of New Zealanders buried in war cemeteries in France and Belgium, which is where they died helping defend France against invasion. So to have the French security forces commit a terrorist attack and murder on New Zealand soil just because they couldn't hack a rusty old boat sailing up and down near their nuclear test site was in my opinion a bit much.
The French officials responsible for this are lower than shit. If I had the chance, I would put a bullet in their heads. So would a lot of other people I know.
Slashdot Mirror
Come to Korea. I've been to pro Starcraft matches where the audience is in the thousands, and the TV matches are watched like regular sports. There's a corner store down the road from my house where people buy beer and sit and watch the live broadcasts of games on a flat screen from the tables outside.
The top Starcraft players earn a lot of money, and their sport is considerably more difficult to master than basketball.
Audiences for pro gaming will improve in the states once the kind of games that Americans play start being programmed so that they are watchable on TV. That means allowing a spectator camera that provides a dynamic view of the game, and not just following the player cams, like the current crap.
It so happens that Starcraft can accommodate a spectator cam quite easily. That's why there are a couple of TV channels here that show games more or less all the time.
Thanks.
That page is one of the funniest things I've read this week.
That would be a bad idea. It's a game, not a word processor. Blizzard don't want to field the avalanche of complaints if it were discovered that some addon, which you have to pay for, gave users an advantage in game.
In all these discussions, people forget that WoW is a game, and as such has to conform to general norms of fairness between the participants.
Then again, it's arguable that WoW is still a game. Being in a raiding guild is more like some mindless job in a Chinese factory. I reckon the gold farmers are the smart ones - at least they get paid for being yelled at by their guild leader.
The real life comparison is important, since a lot of the unfairness in online social gaming occurs because of the anonymity and the ability of people to create new accounts to bypass handicapping systems. In Warhawk, people were creating new accounts simply in order to enter noob servers and stomp people. That's silly and self defeating, especially for a game with a small playerbase.
If you want online gaming to be fair, then it will have to be fair the same way sports are fair, by rigorous policing of permitted equipment and making sure folks karma follows them around.
Fairness in design is much less of a problem in most games.
In this case the "shit you don't like" is a de facto eugenics policy. I would have thought we'd learned from the last century that eugenics is very problematic.
No rational person wants to place blind trust the state to enact a eugenics policy allowing it an extreme degree of control over the physiology of the newborn.
Similarly, no rational person wants the same thing to happen by proxy as rich people design their children. The point about names is a good one. Giving a child a horrible name is a form of mild child abuse. Designing a child as one would design one's home interior (and that's how a lot of people who would do this think) would be much worse.
If neither the government or individuals can be trusted with something, that's usually a sign for rational prohibition. There are some places we just shouldn't go, people being how they are.
No, but he comes from a real country. ;-)
I like Dylan, but he does sometimes sound like a bucket full of wasps.
It's almost worth downloading a pirated copy and then sending the publisher the cash by mail along with an anonymous letter saying "I wanted to buy your game, but I needed to be sure I got a version that would work and was a fair deal".
But as an Apple user, I don't have this problem.
"This is stated explicitly in the customer agreement, under the heading "Fraud"."
Yours or theirs? :-(
Why didn't someone tell me that I would have to scroll though 90% of the page to get to posts that were actually about Warhammer Online rather than complaining about World of Warcraft?
Can I humbly request that the title of any Slashdot post about an MMO includes in brackets after the title the following: "(i.e. bitching about World of Warcraft)"
It's because they read books that aren't the Bible or bad sci-fi novels. Everyone knows that only terrorists do that.
The stock answer is it is because the system is so delicately balanced that our small contribution puts it out of balance.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natural-emissions.htm
They managed to put a dude on the moon in 8 years.
"if they implement face recognition, I want CCTVs to state in a loud, offcial voice "I see you, [Insert Name]!"
That's just crying out to be hacked in order to add "shaking that ass" on the end.
Most of the site's problems could be solved by having paid, professional administrators who do not directly edit, but solve disputes. That way, it would be difficult for some of the rampant POV pushers to get their way (as is the case on Israel/Palestine articles). It would also be much easier to break up organized groups of editors (the whole "wisdom of crowds" thing works better when people edit as individuals free of the pressures of groupthink).
It won't happen though. Wikipedia is run by nutcases, and everyone knows that the owner will change pages in exchange for sex.
Bullshit.
According to your account, Israel and Egypt just don't want to open their borders with Gaza.
That's all fine and dandy and no-one says they have to, but there's this big fucking blue thing called the Mediterranean sea that Gaza backs on to. Presumably, if Gaza is "free", that counts as an open border 12 miles from the coast.
Oh wait... it isn't? I wonder why that is. Oh it's because it is being blockaded by Israel. Free borders my ass.
And there your whole argument is exposed for the pathetic bullshit it is. Presumably, according to your logic, if the US refused to open its border with Canada, and in addition stationed battle fleets to blockade the entire Canadian coast, it would somehow just be a case of the US exercising its own rights.
You conveniently forgot the ethnic cleansing (your post below is complete BS). You conveniently forgot that the Jews were far less than a majority of the population of Palestine and only owned a very small portion of the land, and yet were given 55% of the territory of Palestine in the partition.
You conveniently forgot the fact that there were very few Jews in Palestine circa 1920 and the only reason there were more in 1948 was the fact that the colonial authority was letting them in en masse against the wishes of the locals. And there's the Jewish terrorism and collusion with the British in the 30s to suppress the Arab revolt (a revolt caused by the fact that the British were selling out their country from under them to a bunch of foreigners).
Neither side covered itself in glory at the time, and nor have they since. That does not change the fact that the Arabs were treated shabbily so that Europeans could recompense Jews for a crime that Europeans committed.
Israeli historians have been writing about this for 20 years. It's not like we all don't know. Frankly, the majority of informed people are sick to death of hearing the bullshit that people like you spout.
Look, it is extremely unlikely, even given the truth about the past, that any eventual settlement will constitute a full right of return for the Arabs to their lands (and they are theirs under any reasonable interpretation of history). Given that fact, there is no point bullshitting about the crime committed against the Arabs of Palestine. It was horrific and were it to happen today, condemnation would likely be universal.
The past has very little to contribute to the solution of current problems, which is basically two giant refugee camps of insanely pissed people with very limited life prospects that nobody wants, and who aren't going away. As every sane person knows, we have the best shot of solving it with a two state solution based on the 1967 borders (with some land swaps). It might not work, but it's the best chance there is.
Whining about whose fault it was half a century ago is in practical terms of only academic interest. As it happens, you are wrong, but it doesn't matter anyway, because it has little to do with solving the problem.
It's only more expensive if you discount the costs to the environment, which will be borne by future generations. It's not like environmentalists have not been saying for years that fossil fuels are artificially cheap because some of the cost is externalized. It is not "forcing people to use something that is more expensive", but "making them pay the cost of what they use".
We don't live in a sane society. Most people don't care if the government does this, because they believe that the government will only ever look at your email if you do something wrong.
People talk about freedom, but they don't care about it as long as no-one is stopping them buying useless shit to fill up their house with.
All the parties game the system. It's how politics in Thailand works. The new guy is just as, if not more, corrupt than the old one. The whole thing is a joke. Thaksin's replacement was removed after being convicted of a conflict of interest (he was moonlighting as a chef on a television cooking show â" that's so pathetic that words fail me).
The difference is that Thaksin's lot were voted in with a majority, and he'd more or less kept most of his campaign promises. Hell, he'd even completed a previous term, and his party had been voted an absolute majority (both almost unheard of there). That's not to say he wasn't bent. They're all bent. But it's better to have a bent leader who represents the will of the majority than a bent leader who doesn't and who is more or less installed as the result of a coup, eh?
The antics of the current government have set democracy in Thailand back 40 years. For that, they should hang.
He should have been honest and said: "Hi, I'm your new Prime Minister who was installed by the military and the middle classes, because the poor majority of our country finally got it into their stupid heads to get together and vote for a party that more or less represented their interests. This is not allowed. Democracy is not about having a government that gets the most votes, but about serving the interests of the middle class and wealthy."
It's the same old sad story.
This guy and his supporters deserve something more than a reply to a text message.
"So you believe a nation can (or even has to) continue using a centuries old constitution with disregard for the changes that happened during that time?"
Yeah. What worries me is why you think anyone who believes that is worth reasoning with.
Libertarianism is kind of like bizarro Scientology â" the Scientologists try to keep their ideas secret and threaten lawsuits to stop it being printed on internet forums, while the Libertarians won't shut up and spam every internet forum, poll and newspaper comment site with their lunacy â" Scientologists are wealthy, successful and often attractive Hollywood celebrities, Libertarians are poverty stricken, reclusive, pale residents of parents' basements, etc.
That just proves that no matter how much men and materiel you give a bunch of cowardly, ignorant, casualty-averse idiots, they won't win jack.
I mean, anyone.... anyone... could have gone down to a local public library and acquired a better understanding of the political and ethnic situation in Iraq and Afghanistan than the people in charge of the invasions had.
Right, so if the ship had been legally docked at the Port of Los Angeles and had been attacked and sunk there by the French Secret Service, killing a crew member, the US government and US citizens would not be angry about it because the ship's owners had been annoying the French government?
Yeah right. Pull the other one.
The French had every right to arrest the protesters in French territorial waters if they chose to do so. They had no right to commit a terrorist murder in New Zealand, a country which was supposedly an ally. I'm not the only one who wouldn't mind taking a shot or two at those responsible.
You might want to read a bit more about that one. The problem in that case was that the French decided that it would be a good idea to test nuclear weapons in the South Pacific, which mortally pissed off pretty much everyone who lived there. If it was so safe, why couldn't they test the blasted things in France. It wasn't just Greenpeace. The New Zealand government had sent ships to the test site to protest in previous years. Why stand by as some European nonces shit in our back yard?
European nuclear powers had a well-known history of contempt for people in the South Pacific. Britain, for example, tested nuclear weapons in Australia without bothering to inform the Aboriginals who lived near the test site that they should get out of the way. So you can guess that the French were not popular.
New Zealand was a supposed ally of France and there are thousands of New Zealanders buried in war cemeteries in France and Belgium, which is where they died helping defend France against invasion. So to have the French security forces commit a terrorist attack and murder on New Zealand soil just because they couldn't hack a rusty old boat sailing up and down near their nuclear test site was in my opinion a bit much.
The French officials responsible for this are lower than shit. If I had the chance, I would put a bullet in their heads. So would a lot of other people I know.