We Can Remember it for You Wholesale was the basis for Total Recall, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was the basis for Bladerunner. Not to enter the debate about whether the movies should have followed the original Philip K. Dick, but you at least have to know the relationships. I was not confusing Total Recall and Bladerunner (to use the rather less elaborate titles...) I was just providing another example of Title Bitching. I could as easily have said "Excuse me, sir, but the proper title is Macross" or "I can see by your use of the title Godzilla that you are not familiar with the original film..." Just imagine it in a Simpsons "Comic Book Guy" voice - it could be about just about anything steeped in nerd-contention.
This kind of grand-scale project may seem all fine and dandy now - but then 70-odd years down the line, our horde of genetically-engineered humans, specially suited to Mars, starts declaring independence... Then later they bait our space fleet out to the outer planets with some scapegoat diversion, while their space fleet invades and conquers Earth and Venus...
The aftermath? Mars destroyed, our military in shambles, and a bunch of uncivilized space pirates offered an entire planet as compensation for their help in the conflict... No, I do not think terraforming Mars is a decision we can take lightly.
And you obviously never read "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" or you'd look at that film differently;-) "differently" from what? I mean, are you supposing that one cannot hold a positive opinion of the movie after having read the original story? Are you just venting the classic Philip K. Dick pet peeve, that all the movie adaptations butcher the story and miss the point? (If nothing else I enjoyed that the film kept the question of whether "Quaid's" adventure was real or not totally ambiguous...) Or are you just being a title snob? (*ehem* It's called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? thank-you-very-much...)
If the whole point of bringing up "Total Recall" here is just to joke about Martian Terraforming, then might not the movie be a better fit anyway?
You just have to think positively. Sounds to me like a cure for obesity. Well, not really... starving yourself slows down your metabolism. Then when you start eating again your body stores up a bunch of "reserve fuel", in preparation for the next "period of starvation".
MKV isn't a codec, it's a container format. It's an open container format that supports AFAIK effectively unlimited video and audio streams, internal subtitle tracks, etc. Not ever having heard of it is irrelevant, because it's not a large download and the beeb could provide download instructions.
Yeah, but the real question is this: what restrictions exist on the use of the AFAIK codec? It's great that it can handle "effectively unlimited" streams and all that, but that doesn't do me any good if it's all bound up in patents and overly-restrictive licensing terms...
The trip will go a lot more smoothly once development of the Lyle Drive is completed. It's probably better to wait for that rather than pen up a crew in a tiny spaceship for over a year, just to get there that much sooner.
I already explained how they can make it difficult. The trick is that scripts rely on things being sensibly encoded (and current scripts, of course, are based on the premise that nobody's trying to stop you from pulling data from the site), while people rely on vision - they read the listings. Getting that visual could mean executing page scripts, rendering the page, maybe running dynamic code (such as Flash) - and then interpreting that visual is not an easy or reliable operation on computers.
I'm not saying they can make it impossible for scripts to read site data - I'm just saying they can make it into a big hassle, if they want to.
If they do some of these things, like the images crap, they'll be putting even more load on their webservers. I fail to see how this would accomplish anything other than shooting themselves in the foot.
No matter what they do, their options are limited if they still want to make it easy for a regular (non-Myth-using) person to point IE to www.[tv-listings-site].com, enter their zipcode, and look at the TV listings. There's no way to only provide access to human browser users, and to exclude automated scripts. And all it takes is one good script writer to update the script every time they monkey with their site, and through an automated update mechanism, provide this to all the MythTV users automatically. Anything they do to make this hard will be even less effective than all the silly DRM schemes that have been tried with CDs and DVDs. You're assuming that because they haven't yet felt the need to devote significant resources to this problem, that it can't be solved. From an empirical standpoint, sure, if a human can read it then there must be a way to write a script that can do it, too. From a practical standpoint, they do have the possibility to make this difficult enough to be impractical - it just has to be worth their while.
I think the situation is analogous to Bayesian filters or web ad blockers that are based on text matches of the URLs they're fetching - people tend to think these methods are pretty much fool-proof, but that's only been the case up until the point at which the "adversary" starts writing with these things in mind. (Spam started including text designed to slip past or overburden a Bayes filter - and at some point web ads are going to stop having such obvious matchable text strings in their URLs - you won't be able to match things like "*/ads/*" and expect it to actually do you any good, once advertisers wise up...)
I'm not saying that now's the time they'll do this - but if you want to assume that scraper scripts are always going to be a viable option - well, there just may come a point where they won't, is all.
Oh, I'm sorry. I was assuming that needing parental permission means the parent has to be there so they could just as easily drop the cash on the counter and purchase it themselves and hand it off to their child. With movies it's a little different, but since I own a number of NC-17 videos, and since the porn industry seems to be going pretty strong I don't see how NC-17 is the kiss of death for movies. Yes it means a smaller possible audience but maybe that's how it should be. The great thing about the rating system is that if a parent feels there child is capable of understanding the content they are perfectly welcome to purchase/rent the content and allow their children to view it in their own home. Whoa, here's a brain-bender.
NC-17 is a kiss of death for theatrical movies because they aren't porn. They didn't just lay down a few grand to get a girl who knows how to fuck on camera, find a room somewhere and capture the fun on video. If a movie is being made, and they're going for an R rating, that's still mass-market. In all likelihood it's a multi-million dollar venture, and they expect a return on that - a return they can't get with NC-17, simply because theaters won't show NC-17 movies. Hence, death.
"Owning NC-17 movies" these days is a bit different than it used to be, thanks to the "DVD special edition" phenomenon - a movie can get released to theaters with an R rating and then sold in stores with both R and NC-17 (or unrated) cuts as alternate purchasing options - the "restored footage" becomes added value. This is a strategy that could potentially work for games, but it would probably be difficult to make it work.
AO is pretty much the same. There is no practical difference between an M-rating and an AO-rating in terms of the definition: 17+ vs. 18+, one whole year. M-rating is just the version of AO that gets sold in stores. It's like AO exists separately only so it can be shunned - to make M-rating look tame by comparison.
. . . you manipulate some switches, turn some keys, and press some buttons and/or pull some levers in order to perform an execution. So I can use the Mechassault controller when playing Manhunt? OK, now that's just lazy. Your frikkin' link even says "Steel Battalion Controller", and you still called it a Mechassault controller...
What's wrong with just "scraping" web pages (I assume that means writing code which automatically downloads the webpages and captures the data of interest, rather than requiring a human to do it. I do this all the time with Perl code.)?
There's multiple sites out there with TV listings: Yahoo TV, Zap2It, MeeTV (the one I use), etc. Just write perl scripts to capture the listing information from these sites, and modify MythTV to allow the user to choose any service he wishes. Of course, some of these sites may (stupidly) screw with their HTML in order to throw off these scripts, but that's easily worked around with regular updates. So we just need to have a "myth-scripts" distribution site where your Myth box automatically checks for updates to the perl scripts every day and downloads them if necessary, just like we already do with many other things.
No, it's not quite as reliable and efficient as a static interface to this data, but if these companies are stupid enough to remove static interfaces, thinking we're just going to go back to doing everything manually and looking at all the ads, this seems like a reasonable solution. There's no way of preventing automated scripts from downloading webpages. They can't prevent it - but if they decide they don't like you doing it, they can come up with all kinds of ways to make it hard.
For instance, they could replace their nice little HTML table with some flash code - that's not going to be impossible for you to read with scripts, but it'll be a lot harder. Another option would be to use images instead of text - possibly even breaking up the images into smaller images, to make it harder for automated tools to pull it and OCR it. They could load their page with bogus invisible text. They could provide the listing data in a funky character encoding.
So if these TV listing sites decide that the impact from web scrapers is becoming significant, they have options that can make it very difficult for you.
The problem I have with the age variations on a video game is that I was raised to address certain social groups differently. It _totally_ kills my gaming mood when I chew out the squad leader in BF2142 for making a bad call and then have some kid (or worse, some young girl) come on voice comms to apologize. I mean, I would never have used that language if I'd realized it was a kid/girl in the first place, and now I'm an asshole. I realize this is a 'self-inflicted' problem, but the converse (you realize that hard-charging drill-sergeant vocabulary is coming from a 6 year old) is just as disquieting. The real problem here is that you're directing this level of aggression and verbal abuse at a stranger over a trivial matter. Normally you'd just figure the person on the other end of the line doesn't matter - but for whatever reason, when you actually talk to them and find out it's a kid on the other end you think they do matter. If you just made a rule of showing people some respect, you wouldn't have that problem.
You ever been to San Francisco? Well, I suppose it would be pretty lonely if there were just one Gay Man... But I'm pretty sure it's pronounced "guy man"
I just don't see a lot of Windows users trying to convince their friends with Apples or Linux-based machines that Windows is better. ...Because they're not insecure about that point. Fanboyism is largely about insecurity, I think - people trying to prove to others that their own choice is the best. I think Windows fanboyism exists primarily as a response to Linux and Mac fanboyism - they see Linux or Mac fans heralding their own systems and want to respond in kind. Without that clear "outsider" boundary, the Windows fanboys would have to fight among themselves (Vista vs. non-Vista, I suppose, or Intel vs. AMD - just whatever decisions they could find, I guess.)
But Windows fanboys do knock Apple fans for being drawn in by image, paying more money for inferior hardware, or having a computer without a good selection of games available - and knock Linux fans for being dorks who care more about uptime bragging rights than about having a reliable, full-featured system. And they knock both groups for knocking Windows and Microsoft. Bear in mind that fanboys are not advocates or participants, they're armchair quarterbacks. Rather than creating things themselves, they are interested in allying themselves with something and bickering about how anything else is junk - because if something else actually turned out to be better, then their choice would be a bad one. (That's how the rationale goes, anyway - the actual reality of the situation is more complicated.)
From their perspective Windows can do more than other systems: it can play games and it can run just about any software they can download off the net. Just about any time someone writes a program that's useful to them it's written for Windows. The same is not always true of Linux or Mac.
True fanboys of Linux and Mac aren't the "peaceful advocates" people seem to think they are, either. That's why there's a "Linux Advocacy FAQ" - to get overzealous Linux fans to understand that fanboyism doesn't help the Linux cause. Linux fanboys will often claim that Linux software is better than it is - or that the customization (source-code level or otherwise) available makes it a better system than it is. They'll claim GIMP is every bit as good as Photoshop, that Blender is every bit as good as 3DSMax, and, alternately, that WINE is perfectly usable Windows emulation or that Windows compatibility is irrelevant. Realistically, that's not all true, it's not a fair evaluation. Rather, it's a biased evaluation intended to yield a particular result.
I think the point is that there's nothing romantic, creative, or cool about supporting the big market leader, so MS doesn't have much to offer for an enthusiast. Well, they sort of do. Basically if you think of Linux or Apple fans as one type of "counter-culture" against the established, predominantly Windows-based installed base, then some Windows fans may exist as a counter-culture in response to that. They can set themselves apart specifically in that they don't want to use a do-it-yourself kind of system like Linux, or buy into Apple's camp, which is largely about aesthetically-pleasing hardware. They can scoff at people for having been drawn in to using "inferior" or "overpriced" systems.
All that's really necessary for fanboyism is this: 1: Some coherent identity 2: A clear definition of (and availability of) who or what constitutes an "outsider" 3: A more-or-less continuous stream of events around which to spin a drama - the "fight" between their side and the others. (This is only necessary in that it gives them something to do)
Fanboys don't need an underdog - they just need a "team" to root for - kind of like with sports fans. (I honestly couldn't tell you if Red Sox fans are more obnoxious or obsessive or whatever than Yankees fans - or if that would be because the Red Sox are an "underdog" team or not - personally I think people just like picking a side and rooting for it - and they want their side to be winners.) You get fanboys with gaming consoles, for instance: all of the consoles, really - even if you considered PS2 to be decidedly not an "underdog" it still had fanboys - not because it was a better system (I wouldn't say it was) - just because a lot of people could only get one system, and they didn't want to feel bad about the system they got - so they choose to embrace their chosen system and "defend" it.
a) "nothing but play mp3s" is a stupid comparison, since the PS3 does almost everything you'd expect it to be able to do with its hardware b) your final point is exactly what I said -- not wanting to spend the money doesn't mean its not worth the money a: Game consoles have lockout features that keep you from doing whatever the hell you want with the hardware. This potentially decreases the value of the raw hardware - but more precisely, the value of the hardware becomes tied closely to the available software for it. And what I want here is a game console - not a DVD player. I don't trust Playstation hardware with DVD playback, as my PS2 does a really half-assed job of it.
b: To me, it's not worth the money. I'm not going to say Sony "has to" drop their prices because I can see, from a business standpoint, they may not "have to" drop their prices just yet. It may not even be in their best interests to drop price - not just from a strict money-in/money-out standpoint but also in how people perceive the value of their machine. Besides which, with the available supply right now, there are apparently enough people willing to pay the price. But I don't care. The thing is hell of expensive, and as far as I'm concerned, it's not worth it. I'm not alone in that assessment. But the PS3 will come down in price - it's inevitable. Not because it's expensive now but because hardware always decreases in value over time. It's just a matter of when.
Value has both an objective and subjective component. The PS3 may not be "worth" its price to you, but it can be shown that it's worth more than is being charged for it because you cannot build a box with equivalent features for less money (oe even as much).
Proprietary software is not worth any price to RMS, but you cannot argue that is it objectively without value.
No, you're confusing cost and value. Value is defined by what people are willing to pay for an item. It's also very perspective-based. From my perspective value is strictly defined by my own needs. From Sony's perspective, a market price would be governed not only by their cost, but by the supply and demand, competitors' prices, and so on. Cost is just what it costs to make it.
Like I said - if Sony is doing good business with their PS3 right now, then from their perspective their price point is correct. From my perspective it's nowhere close.
Consider: They need images and animations for each one of the 150 things in the game. AND for each of the previous 200+ that they released already that it needs to be compatable with. AND for each of the new ones that havne't been released yet, that they built in to be earned at exclusive nintendo events.
Remember. We're talking about needing multiple animations for 490 or so different little guys. That's a lot of resources there, both in ROM budget, as well as art production. I... don't care! It still looks like crap to have "Tail whip attack" be "shift left three pixels and shift right three pixels and repeat attack".
I mean, OK, so animating every attack for every monster is a bit much - sure, I can accept that. But they should do something. Make the fuckers blink. Make 'em flinch when they get hit. Give 'em a "running" animation (a whole two frames worth of animation!) Just something better than the boring old static graphics...
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Indiana Jones: Depends.... Whereas if you asked the same question of Lt. Frank Drebin, the answer would be "Oops! I crapped my pants!"
This kind of grand-scale project may seem all fine and dandy now - but then 70-odd years down the line, our horde of genetically-engineered humans, specially suited to Mars, starts declaring independence... Then later they bait our space fleet out to the outer planets with some scapegoat diversion, while their space fleet invades and conquers Earth and Venus...
The aftermath? Mars destroyed, our military in shambles, and a bunch of uncivilized space pirates offered an entire planet as compensation for their help in the conflict... No, I do not think terraforming Mars is a decision we can take lightly.
-jcr Ah, yes... The Larkin Decision.
If the whole point of bringing up "Total Recall" here is just to joke about Martian Terraforming, then might not the movie be a better fit anyway?
And this has... what, exactly, to do with my stupid, un-funny joke?
It's all about the exercise.
MKV isn't a codec, it's a container format. It's an open container format that supports AFAIK effectively unlimited video and audio streams, internal subtitle tracks, etc. Not ever having heard of it is irrelevant, because it's not a large download and the beeb could provide download instructions.
Yeah, but the real question is this: what restrictions exist on the use of the AFAIK codec? It's great that it can handle "effectively unlimited" streams and all that, but that doesn't do me any good if it's all bound up in patents and overly-restrictive licensing terms...The trip will go a lot more smoothly once development of the Lyle Drive is completed. It's probably better to wait for that rather than pen up a crew in a tiny spaceship for over a year, just to get there that much sooner.
I already explained how they can make it difficult. The trick is that scripts rely on things being sensibly encoded (and current scripts, of course, are based on the premise that nobody's trying to stop you from pulling data from the site), while people rely on vision - they read the listings. Getting that visual could mean executing page scripts, rendering the page, maybe running dynamic code (such as Flash) - and then interpreting that visual is not an easy or reliable operation on computers.
I'm not saying they can make it impossible for scripts to read site data - I'm just saying they can make it into a big hassle, if they want to.
No matter what they do, their options are limited if they still want to make it easy for a regular (non-Myth-using) person to point IE to www.[tv-listings-site].com, enter their zipcode, and look at the TV listings. There's no way to only provide access to human browser users, and to exclude automated scripts. And all it takes is one good script writer to update the script every time they monkey with their site, and through an automated update mechanism, provide this to all the MythTV users automatically. Anything they do to make this hard will be even less effective than all the silly DRM schemes that have been tried with CDs and DVDs. You're assuming that because they haven't yet felt the need to devote significant resources to this problem, that it can't be solved. From an empirical standpoint, sure, if a human can read it then there must be a way to write a script that can do it, too. From a practical standpoint, they do have the possibility to make this difficult enough to be impractical - it just has to be worth their while.
I think the situation is analogous to Bayesian filters or web ad blockers that are based on text matches of the URLs they're fetching - people tend to think these methods are pretty much fool-proof, but that's only been the case up until the point at which the "adversary" starts writing with these things in mind. (Spam started including text designed to slip past or overburden a Bayes filter - and at some point web ads are going to stop having such obvious matchable text strings in their URLs - you won't be able to match things like "*/ads/*" and expect it to actually do you any good, once advertisers wise up...)
I'm not saying that now's the time they'll do this - but if you want to assume that scraper scripts are always going to be a viable option - well, there just may come a point where they won't, is all.
NC-17 is a kiss of death for theatrical movies because they aren't porn. They didn't just lay down a few grand to get a girl who knows how to fuck on camera, find a room somewhere and capture the fun on video. If a movie is being made, and they're going for an R rating, that's still mass-market. In all likelihood it's a multi-million dollar venture, and they expect a return on that - a return they can't get with NC-17, simply because theaters won't show NC-17 movies. Hence, death.
"Owning NC-17 movies" these days is a bit different than it used to be, thanks to the "DVD special edition" phenomenon - a movie can get released to theaters with an R rating and then sold in stores with both R and NC-17 (or unrated) cuts as alternate purchasing options - the "restored footage" becomes added value. This is a strategy that could potentially work for games, but it would probably be difficult to make it work.
AO is pretty much the same. There is no practical difference between an M-rating and an AO-rating in terms of the definition: 17+ vs. 18+, one whole year. M-rating is just the version of AO that gets sold in stores. It's like AO exists separately only so it can be shunned - to make M-rating look tame by comparison.
There's multiple sites out there with TV listings: Yahoo TV, Zap2It, MeeTV (the one I use), etc. Just write perl scripts to capture the listing information from these sites, and modify MythTV to allow the user to choose any service he wishes. Of course, some of these sites may (stupidly) screw with their HTML in order to throw off these scripts, but that's easily worked around with regular updates. So we just need to have a "myth-scripts" distribution site where your Myth box automatically checks for updates to the perl scripts every day and downloads them if necessary, just like we already do with many other things.
No, it's not quite as reliable and efficient as a static interface to this data, but if these companies are stupid enough to remove static interfaces, thinking we're just going to go back to doing everything manually and looking at all the ads, this seems like a reasonable solution. There's no way of preventing automated scripts from downloading webpages. They can't prevent it - but if they decide they don't like you doing it, they can come up with all kinds of ways to make it hard.
For instance, they could replace their nice little HTML table with some flash code - that's not going to be impossible for you to read with scripts, but it'll be a lot harder.
Another option would be to use images instead of text - possibly even breaking up the images into smaller images, to make it harder for automated tools to pull it and OCR it.
They could load their page with bogus invisible text.
They could provide the listing data in a funky character encoding.
So if these TV listing sites decide that the impact from web scrapers is becoming significant, they have options that can make it very difficult for you.
You ever been to San Francisco? Well, I suppose it would be pretty lonely if there were just one Gay Man... But I'm pretty sure it's pronounced "guy man"
But Windows fanboys do knock Apple fans for being drawn in by image, paying more money for inferior hardware, or having a computer without a good selection of games available - and knock Linux fans for being dorks who care more about uptime bragging rights than about having a reliable, full-featured system. And they knock both groups for knocking Windows and Microsoft. Bear in mind that fanboys are not advocates or participants, they're armchair quarterbacks. Rather than creating things themselves, they are interested in allying themselves with something and bickering about how anything else is junk - because if something else actually turned out to be better, then their choice would be a bad one. (That's how the rationale goes, anyway - the actual reality of the situation is more complicated.)
From their perspective Windows can do more than other systems: it can play games and it can run just about any software they can download off the net. Just about any time someone writes a program that's useful to them it's written for Windows. The same is not always true of Linux or Mac.
True fanboys of Linux and Mac aren't the "peaceful advocates" people seem to think they are, either. That's why there's a "Linux Advocacy FAQ" - to get overzealous Linux fans to understand that fanboyism doesn't help the Linux cause. Linux fanboys will often claim that Linux software is better than it is - or that the customization (source-code level or otherwise) available makes it a better system than it is. They'll claim GIMP is every bit as good as Photoshop, that Blender is every bit as good as 3DSMax, and, alternately, that WINE is perfectly usable Windows emulation or that Windows compatibility is irrelevant. Realistically, that's not all true, it's not a fair evaluation. Rather, it's a biased evaluation intended to yield a particular result.
Our house had a Kaypro II with daisy wheel printer purchased a few months after I was born by my father for $2000.
...You were born... by your father... for $2000?The mind boggles.
"Gaimans'" means there's more than one Gaiman
"Gaiman's" means there's one Gaiman
With Love,
The Grammar Police.
The winner, and still photographer, Mateo LeFou!
All that's really necessary for fanboyism is this:
1: Some coherent identity
2: A clear definition of (and availability of) who or what constitutes an "outsider"
3: A more-or-less continuous stream of events around which to spin a drama - the "fight" between their side and the others. (This is only necessary in that it gives them something to do)
Fanboys don't need an underdog - they just need a "team" to root for - kind of like with sports fans. (I honestly couldn't tell you if Red Sox fans are more obnoxious or obsessive or whatever than Yankees fans - or if that would be because the Red Sox are an "underdog" team or not - personally I think people just like picking a side and rooting for it - and they want their side to be winners.) You get fanboys with gaming consoles, for instance: all of the consoles, really - even if you considered PS2 to be decidedly not an "underdog" it still had fanboys - not because it was a better system (I wouldn't say it was) - just because a lot of people could only get one system, and they didn't want to feel bad about the system they got - so they choose to embrace their chosen system and "defend" it.
b) your final point is exactly what I said -- not wanting to spend the money doesn't mean its not worth the money a: Game consoles have lockout features that keep you from doing whatever the hell you want with the hardware. This potentially decreases the value of the raw hardware - but more precisely, the value of the hardware becomes tied closely to the available software for it. And what I want here is a game console - not a DVD player. I don't trust Playstation hardware with DVD playback, as my PS2 does a really half-assed job of it.
b: To me, it's not worth the money. I'm not going to say Sony "has to" drop their prices because I can see, from a business standpoint, they may not "have to" drop their prices just yet. It may not even be in their best interests to drop price - not just from a strict money-in/money-out standpoint but also in how people perceive the value of their machine. Besides which, with the available supply right now, there are apparently enough people willing to pay the price. But I don't care. The thing is hell of expensive, and as far as I'm concerned, it's not worth it. I'm not alone in that assessment. But the PS3 will come down in price - it's inevitable. Not because it's expensive now but because hardware always decreases in value over time. It's just a matter of when.
Value has both an objective and subjective component. The PS3 may not be "worth" its price to you, but it can be shown that it's worth more than is being charged for it because you cannot build a box with equivalent features for less money (oe even as much).
No, you're confusing cost and value. Value is defined by what people are willing to pay for an item. It's also very perspective-based. From my perspective value is strictly defined by my own needs. From Sony's perspective, a market price would be governed not only by their cost, but by the supply and demand, competitors' prices, and so on. Cost is just what it costs to make it.Proprietary software is not worth any price to RMS, but you cannot argue that is it objectively without value.
Like I said - if Sony is doing good business with their PS3 right now, then from their perspective their price point is correct. From my perspective it's nowhere close.
Consider: They need images and animations for each one of the 150 things in the game. AND for each of the previous 200+ that they released already that it needs to be compatable with. AND for each of the new ones that havne't been released yet, that they built in to be earned at exclusive nintendo events.
Remember. We're talking about needing multiple animations for 490 or so different little guys. That's a lot of resources there, both in ROM budget, as well as art production. I... don't care! It still looks like crap to have "Tail whip attack" be "shift left three pixels and shift right three pixels and repeat attack".
I mean, OK, so animating every attack for every monster is a bit much - sure, I can accept that. But they should do something. Make the fuckers blink. Make 'em flinch when they get hit. Give 'em a "running" animation (a whole two frames worth of animation!) Just something better than the boring old static graphics...