I completely understand the point you're making, and I identify with you.
However, it's not really that hard to see why christianity is singled out. It's all over the place and making big news while it's at it. Particularly since many christians are also tied up in U.S politics. While that shouldn't matter outside the U.S the president brings in more "aggro" since he's internationally high-profile and constantly claiming that God is backing him. While such politically involved christians may not be representative of the larger whole, they are nevertheless prominent and ripe for targeting. This sort of thing is true for the other groups as well, just to a higher degree in the case of christianity.
It may seem obvious that not all christians think the same and agree on everything, but the problem is that people outside the group don't always understand this(sometimes even those within). This isn't just for christianity but for stereotyping in general.
I've got ventrilo recordings of an addict who cries when he's not getting his heals and screaming at the top of his lungs at the screen when he dies in PvP, then throwing a liter-bottle of coke at his wife's head when she tells him to calm down and stop screaming.
I think that the difference between pointing out potential consequences and telling people what to do will be moot if they are already addicted and have already hardened themselves against your "warning".
And the difference is just as moot for the issuer of the warning. Who am I to tell people how to live their lives? What does it matter? I can tell anyone how to live their lives whenever I please. Of course, that doesn't mean I don't have to deal with the repercussions of doing it.
There's nothing wrong with telling people how to live, it just pisses them off. The ethical dilemma, at least in my opinion, comes up when you try/forcing/ them to live a certain way. But otherwise, it's just voicing your opinion and you've got a right to have one. So folks should feel free to tell that WoW addict they're wasting their lives. The addict may not listen, but at least you can say you tried.
I'm a gamer, I play lots! I've definitely learned things in games that I've applied in the outside world. Gaming can train you in the application of the Art of War, a study of general conflict, not necessarily restricted to military clashes. And through gaming, these ideas are not just learned, but applied.) And if it weren't for gaming, I wouldn't know jack diddly about computers since I wouldn't need that knowledge to address bugs, keep windows clean, and keep my hardware updated.
But really, these are fairly small things that can be learned through many other channels that bring more to the table.
If gaming is to be used as an educational avenue it will need serious modification in order to add the lessons while still maintaining the addictive qualities that keep us playing. And thus far, I don't think I've seen any educational games that have really held to this. If you want me to learn when I'm trying to have fun, it better be damn fun. Otherwise, I'll save my learning for when I want to learn(or in the case of kids, for when I have to learn).
That's right, the game itself is played by many people, and I don't think all of them are having their lives destroyed by it. Just the ones who take it too far.
Sort of like drugs.
People just need to be aware of the risks and when they're taking it too far. I took it too far myself and it's my fault for letting it happen. But having people point out how much I'd lost touch with the rest of life was definitely a big help in getting back on track. When you're in that deep, you lose sight of how bad things have actually become. My case wasn't terrible, weight gain(50lbs), and within 6 months of hard exercise it was rectified.
Roomie put on 20lbs and dropped a/very/ active social and extracurricular life. Another friend of mine was a very serious, dour, young man. Straight-A student, went into chemical engineering, only vices were a minor amount of console gaming and several sports. Unfortunately, he got into WoW and totally lost track of his life and ended up a college dropout.
Now he's trying to get a degree in a county college. Yeesh. Luckily, his parents are rich and own their own company so he'll get bailed out. But until he plays less WoW(Apparently dropping out wasn't enough of a warning sign) he'll be a loser living off his parents' success. Most won't have rich parents as a safety net, so friends will have to head things off before it gets that bad.
Maslow's pyramid theorizes that after our baser needs are met, we'll move on to more and more ethereal wants. Something like slave-powered aristocracies would probably occur if we managed to automate the bulk of our economy.
Some will "kill" themselves with hedonism, either through wasting themselves into brainless meat, or physically killing themselves through unhealthy lifestyles or risky hobbies looking for cheap thrills. But others will use their time freed from the grind of working to obtain possessions and find themselves wanting to acquire non-physical goods.
Like personal fulfillment and achievement via the arts or scientific pursuits. It'd be damned hard for Leonardo to do the work he did if he also had a 9-5 job down by the steam mill. But since there were rich men who had poor men doing all the production to keep them rich, those rich guys could afford to pass on that wealth to support Leonardo's works, freeing him from having to provide for himself.
Much like today's society, there's a range of people and personalities. Some would take riches and veg out. Some would take riches and/find/ work because they want accomplishments. Since money is the highest accomplishment for most people, once those people have it, they'll go finding new pursuits to accomplish.
But y'know, a distopia where automatons provide everything for you, allowing you to self-destruct with hedonism...I wouldn't really mind that distopia.
I think most people using text would benefit better from 20inch two widescreen monitors than one giant 30inch display. It lets them maximize to seperate screens so they don't need to manually size them evenly, plus you can just throw windows to the left or right monitor instead of dragging around to organize the stuff in front of you better.
Text doesn't scroll too far horizontally, but it can scroll very far vertically. Having a wider screen doesn't help show much more text if you're looking at one specific document or bit of code. But being able to turn the widescreen vertical lets you look at far more of the document at once, now it's like one long page and reminiscent of the standard letter size you'd be holding in your hand.
It'd be silly to give everyone one of these. But in the end it'll come down to how heavily this desktop setup is relied upon by the employee and how valuable their time is.
At an old job I was trying to do excel work on a 15inch CRT monitor, zero desk space left after a case, monitor, and printer and keyboard. I can't even look at two files simultaneously in Excel, and it drove me nuts having to ctrl-tab back and forth constantly, or to resize each window into tiiiiiny little windows looking at little bits of data at a time. Above 1024 res the text became illegibly small.
Would've been far more productive on at least a 19inch monitor with 1280 res. Here at home I've got two wide-screens at 1680x1050 and the ability to have multiple windows open makes things much much easier.
[quote]"I believe the more communication the better..."
The better for whom? Again, I'm left wondering what makes you think you understand the situation. You talk about 'communication' as if all forms of it are good. I know you are trying to frame your points humanistically, however, without looking at what 'communication' means to the Chinese, as opposed to this or that other culture, ignores just one part of their uniqueness. [/quote]
What is YouTube doing that makes them so much more popular than Google Video? If they can identify that, they could just compete with them instead of buying them. Is it just the network effect of having a large user base building on itself? Or is YouTube clearly a better service and is more successful as a result? They all seem pretty much the same to me, but I'm only watching videos, I've never tried posting any.
Not necessarily. Lots of game violence is really just a medium conducting the gameplay. I could fabricate an alternate reality where the world breaks down into virtual tag games where I construct low-fire exploding laser tubes that shoot slow-light that bursts into bigger light that will tag a person and decrease their health by picking up the light on sensors covering their body. Some tubes fire instant lasers that reduce health. Also, we have flags that follow players if you walk up and touch them that you need to move somewhere else. Enemy players have kidnapped your girl and have assembled an army of thousands of other laser tag players to stop you in a virtual battlefield filled with buildings and weird new cultures, also filled with a bunch of people that have nothing to do with the kidnapped girl, just trying to fill virtual world space. You can also hit people with your lasertag sword that uses laser that somehow stops immediately after 3 feet and is exactly like a lightsaber in every respect except that it's not, and it's nonviolent.
It's totally doable, it's a nonviolent premise, but it's a pretty awkward situation. Just calling them rockets, guns, hostages, RPGs, and swords is understandable. Their purpose and operation is immediately clear, and we can get on with the game. We don't need a ridiculous premise explaining why our tools aren't actually hurting anyone. We know the game "violence" isn't hurting anyone, we're just in it to beat the game.
And in the end, it's still the same thing. I'm not happy that I shot my best friend in the face and blew his brains out so I could exult in his demise. I just scored a point. It's laser-tag in the guise of violence.
People can play GTA to beat hookers to death with bats, but they don't spend hours doing it, sleep, then reload it to do it some more. They're not really getting "points" for it. There's no challenge to overcome or goal to reach, so they stop and do something more stimulating. Take out the fun gameplay from the violence and people will get bored and drop the game.
CoX(City of Heroes/Villains) had delightful PvE gameplay, but fun though it was, it got repetitive. And there wasn't anything else since team-based PvE was the core focus while the rest was/is added later.
Hopefully this Marvel game is a chance for a fresh start in terms of game mechanics, player-to-player dynamics, and engine limitations. I enjoyed CoX but cancelled after exhausting it. I look forward to more from Cryptic.
And I loved Cryptic's attitude toward its community. They're open and frank with their community. They've made some unpopular changes, but never without careful consideration and clear explanation.
Economies of scale don't exist everywhere. I sure wish it did, but it's not always the case. And even where it does occur, it's not the lone determinant in price. Anyway, it's a game, and they've simplified it down to the very basic supply and demand cross-curves.
This man speaks truth. You can't pack in big blocks of straight gaming as easily when you work mon-fri 9 to 5. There's lots of gaps in college class schedules and study times could be shifted at will.
Now that I'm working, I play maybe 1-1.5 hours a night. Game time got cut by at least half or more after college. Due in part from the work hours, and the rest due to commute time since I'm not at college where everything and everyone is nearby.
Even reaching college changed my playtime though. My highschool was pathetically easy, no study necessary, and the occasional homework assignment could be done in about 1-2 hours. I could commit large blocks of time at will to RPGs and RTS games which tend to require large blocks of time to get real progress. After hitting college, I stopped playing these kinds of games. My highschool years saw the heaviest amount of gaming. I've got disposable income from part-time/summer work to buy games, I get a car to go buy games when I want them, and few responsibilities.
Bad players encounter more "cheaters!" The accusers are doing badly, defenders of the accused are doing well. Why does this happen?
I've played CS since day2 of beta 1, . I've seen maybe 15 cheaters in all these years. But the number of players I've seen accused of cheating DWARFS this number.
It's because the accusers who play badly don't understand what it is to play like the winning players. The result is that they can't distinguish between players are simply good, and players who are cheating. w Some clues are players who prepare the crosshairs at head-shot level even when no enemies are present, players who are reacting to sound in 360 degrees instead of looking through walls, players who use the winning tactics that are recognized by other winners. Heck, just by the scoreboard, timer, and dead/alive status, and weapon used can locate an enemy on the other side of the map with a fair amount of accuracy without ever seeing that player during that round. If you don't know how to pay attention to these clues, you'll only find players via sight and sound, and assume that there's wall-hacking being done to find enemies. Note that all these things don't involve twitch or precision aiming, just clues to intelligent play.
To the untrained eye, they're just playing, and the reason that they won goes by unnoticed. In the end, it just seems to be magic since the accusers don't know what they should be looking for. I'm not denying that there are cheaters out there.
Good players encounter less "cheaters" than bad players in CS. I've addressed this game in particular, and the specific examples here of course don't carry over to all games. But it'll still apply to many games. If you're not good enough to do the same feats in the game, it'll seem impossible.
I wouldn't say economists think this way. Just idiots.
I did undergrad in Economics in a mediocre college. That doesn't make me an economist and even I know this ignores the very basic concept of opportunity cost that is fundamental to Economics.
I would think that many economists are also well aware that GDP is just one measurement and it carries a number of flaws with it(like measuring quality and the benefit of the product). I'm assuming that most real economists would know this because in all the econ courses I took, everytime GDP got brought up, each of the teachers would repeat this disclaimer at me/again/ even though it's something we would had have already heard several times before even meeting the requirements for taking their course.
Economists really wouldn't look at stuff in this manner. Those silly conclusions were reached by corporate shills.
For me, Steam had a horrible start, and is turning out nicely. I was looking forward to the idea of Steam. I saw the exact opposite comments made earlier here.
The thing had a whole bunch of memory leaks and other stability issues, still has at least one. At least these days the memory leak only shows up once a month instead of several times a day. I LOATHED Steam when it first came out and ate my memory sitting there in the background. It didn't offer me much but kept me from using WON(IIRC?), and broke many of my half-life mods for weeks and months as they strove to attain compliancy.
DoD's release had issues with many pre-orders. Many missed the pre-order price cut and ended up getting the game several days after release, kind of the opposite effect they were shooting for.
But Steam has progressed tremendously. Even that Friends network works now(that took a long while). I love how simple it is to grab demos and trailers. I love how easy it is to impulse buy off the main page. Cheap indie games like Darwinia and Ragdoll kung fu were fun diversions I probably would not have noticed if they hadn't been hosted on Steam.
In Steam's current form, only issue I have is that playing Steam media seems to taking longer than it should since it seems to just be using windows media player. Other than that, I love Steam and hope to see more stuff hosted on it. I'm no fan of the physical by-products of buying stuff since I really can't stow it all in my room, so Steam is right up my alley. I wish all my game purchases could be done on Steam now.
Oh, and a big F*** you to EA Downloader, an intrusive and arrogant program that attempted to emulate Steam and only managed to pull off copying all the stuff I hated about early Steam while adding new ones.
I didn't buy the idea of a 150 wii for a second. Ridiculous. 200? Possible!
250? It's what I expected. I hate "realistic" sports games, but since Wii sports would show off the Wiimote, I was curious, though not planning to pay money for it.
I would've preferred that Wii Sports wasn't included, and not because I want Zelda. As mentioned elsewhere, Zelda wasn't really designed with the Wii in mind and that doesn't bode well for playing the game with the Wiimote. I'm not sure how easy it'd be to incorporate a change that drastic late into a game's development. I'll probably play this one using a Gamecube controller if they allow it on the Wii version.
While the Wiimote is nice and I'm excited about what kinds of gameplay it'll offer, I still enjoy the traditional gamepad interface where appropriate and would even prefer it if it suited the game better than the Wiimote.
The extra features are nice but I own a PC, they're kinda irrelevant for me. But I plan to buy a Wii anyway, only because of the kinds of gameplay that controller opens up.
I primarily play PC games. I had lost interest in the PS1 quickly and just played on my friends' consoles after that, not really finding enough enjoyment to commit to a console(especially if I'd be able to play several of those console games on PC and enjoy them more since my PC is already upgraded to play PC games.)
Now, with the Wii and its out-of-left-field controller, I'm finally going to try a new console.
There's a bit of groupthink in church communities. They interact with each other and find themselves enveloped in the same message and start to think as one. However, different communities can form different opinions, Christianity is not homogenous.
There's a big problem in that many of these communities don't welcome challenges to their beliefs. It's more important that their current beliefs remain intact than if these beliefs are actually true. If the challenges fail, then they can feel more secure in their beliefs. If the challenges ring true, then they can drop that belief in favor of something closer to the truth.
With time and education, I hope that this mindset will fade out of Christianity as modern skepticism and reasoning replaces blind faith as a basis for personal beliefs. While I'm referring to Christianity in particular, I'm hoping that this will happen to humanity in general(both religious AND secular groups have this problem, it's just that religious groups have it worse).
Hmm, though I too believe in God I've got plenty of doubt to go along with it.
Really, if anyone had concrete proof for or against God, we wouldn't be having all these debates about a God's existence, we'd just reference that proof.
We've just got information that makes one option more believable than the other, and even these depend on the observer.
But in the end, it'll still come down to what you choose to believe in the end because both require a certain amount of "faith" to choose a side. We don't have many absolute certainties in life outside of abstract math. Aside from this, much of what we know stems from a series of assumptions we have that we just accept to be true until something disproves it.
So a decision about the existence of God comes down to whether you think there's enough information to assume "God" exists. Or if you think the lack of proof thus far is enough to accept as evidence of absence. It'll finish with which end you place your faith.
This should be fairly obvious, a great deal of what I know is information I've simply accepted without first-hand verification. Like the existence of galaxies, or that there are other planets. I've never seen the math, or looked through a telescope, but I'm willing to believe that all the astrologists aren't just feeding me a load of bull. I accept this information without proof.
Indeed, survival in what sense? The bacteria die very rapidly with a short lifespan. This does help them evolve though.
But then after evolving so much to fit the new obstacles, did they really survive? Arguing about their survivability would still be human-oriented semantics about the definition of survival since another perspective would be that the bacteria was exterminated over and over again, and we're dealing with a new species now.
We've had similar discussions about retaining "humanity" if we all turn into the Borg with cybernetic implants.
Even the comparison between us and other lifeforms is fairly human-oriented since those other lifeforms probably aren't even thinking in terms of "competition" so much as simply struggling to continue existence.
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I completely understand the point you're making, and I identify with you.
However, it's not really that hard to see why christianity is singled out. It's all over the place and making big news while it's at it. Particularly since many christians are also tied up in U.S politics. While that shouldn't matter outside the U.S the president brings in more "aggro" since he's internationally high-profile and constantly claiming that God is backing him. While such politically involved christians may not be representative of the larger whole, they are nevertheless prominent and ripe for targeting. This sort of thing is true for the other groups as well, just to a higher degree in the case of christianity.
It may seem obvious that not all christians think the same and agree on everything, but the problem is that people outside the group don't always understand this(sometimes even those within). This isn't just for christianity but for stereotyping in general.
I've got ventrilo recordings of an addict who cries when he's not getting his heals and screaming at the top of his lungs at the screen when he dies in PvP, then throwing a liter-bottle of coke at his wife's head when she tells him to calm down and stop screaming.
I think that the difference between pointing out potential consequences and telling people what to do will be moot if they are already addicted and have already hardened themselves against your "warning".
/forcing/ them to live a certain way. But otherwise, it's just voicing your opinion and you've got a right to have one. So folks should feel free to tell that WoW addict they're wasting their lives. The addict may not listen, but at least you can say you tried.
And the difference is just as moot for the issuer of the warning. Who am I to tell people how to live their lives? What does it matter? I can tell anyone how to live their lives whenever I please. Of course, that doesn't mean I don't have to deal with the repercussions of doing it.
There's nothing wrong with telling people how to live, it just pisses them off. The ethical dilemma, at least in my opinion, comes up when you try
I'm a gamer, I play lots! I've definitely learned things in games that I've applied in the outside world. Gaming can train you in the application of the Art of War, a study of general conflict, not necessarily restricted to military clashes. And through gaming, these ideas are not just learned, but applied.) And if it weren't for gaming, I wouldn't know jack diddly about computers since I wouldn't need that knowledge to address bugs, keep windows clean, and keep my hardware updated.
But really, these are fairly small things that can be learned through many other channels that bring more to the table.
If gaming is to be used as an educational avenue it will need serious modification in order to add the lessons while still maintaining the addictive qualities that keep us playing. And thus far, I don't think I've seen any educational games that have really held to this. If you want me to learn when I'm trying to have fun, it better be damn fun. Otherwise, I'll save my learning for when I want to learn(or in the case of kids, for when I have to learn).
That's right, the game itself is played by many people, and I don't think all of them are having their lives destroyed by it. Just the ones who take it too far.
/very/ active social and extracurricular life. Another friend of mine was a very serious, dour, young man. Straight-A student, went into chemical engineering, only vices were a minor amount of console gaming and several sports. Unfortunately, he got into WoW and totally lost track of his life and ended up a college dropout.
Sort of like drugs.
People just need to be aware of the risks and when they're taking it too far. I took it too far myself and it's my fault for letting it happen. But having people point out how much I'd lost touch with the rest of life was definitely a big help in getting back on track. When you're in that deep, you lose sight of how bad things have actually become. My case wasn't terrible, weight gain(50lbs), and within 6 months of hard exercise it was rectified.
Roomie put on 20lbs and dropped a
Now he's trying to get a degree in a county college. Yeesh. Luckily, his parents are rich and own their own company so he'll get bailed out. But until he plays less WoW(Apparently dropping out wasn't enough of a warning sign) he'll be a loser living off his parents' success. Most won't have rich parents as a safety net, so friends will have to head things off before it gets that bad.
Er, steel mill. Heh, just replace it with any kind of menial work.
Maslow's pyramid theorizes that after our baser needs are met, we'll move on to more and more ethereal wants. Something like slave-powered aristocracies would probably occur if we managed to automate the bulk of our economy.
/find/ work because they want accomplishments. Since money is the highest accomplishment for most people, once those people have it, they'll go finding new pursuits to accomplish.
Some will "kill" themselves with hedonism, either through wasting themselves into brainless meat, or physically killing themselves through unhealthy lifestyles or risky hobbies looking for cheap thrills. But others will use their time freed from the grind of working to obtain possessions and find themselves wanting to acquire non-physical goods.
Like personal fulfillment and achievement via the arts or scientific pursuits. It'd be damned hard for Leonardo to do the work he did if he also had a 9-5 job down by the steam mill. But since there were rich men who had poor men doing all the production to keep them rich, those rich guys could afford to pass on that wealth to support Leonardo's works, freeing him from having to provide for himself.
Much like today's society, there's a range of people and personalities. Some would take riches and veg out. Some would take riches and
But y'know, a distopia where automatons provide everything for you, allowing you to self-destruct with hedonism...I wouldn't really mind that distopia.
...So turn off the run-at-startup option. A /lot/ of programs want to run at startup. I just don't let them.
I think most people using text would benefit better from 20inch two widescreen monitors than one giant 30inch display. It lets them maximize to seperate screens so they don't need to manually size them evenly, plus you can just throw windows to the left or right monitor instead of dragging around to organize the stuff in front of you better.
Text doesn't scroll too far horizontally, but it can scroll very far vertically. Having a wider screen doesn't help show much more text if you're looking at one specific document or bit of code. But being able to turn the widescreen vertical lets you look at far more of the document at once, now it's like one long page and reminiscent of the standard letter size you'd be holding in your hand.
It'd be silly to give everyone one of these. But in the end it'll come down to how heavily this desktop setup is relied upon by the employee and how valuable their time is.
Definitely.
At an old job I was trying to do excel work on a 15inch CRT monitor, zero desk space left after a case, monitor, and printer and keyboard. I can't even look at two files simultaneously in Excel, and it drove me nuts having to ctrl-tab back and forth constantly, or to resize each window into tiiiiiny little windows looking at little bits of data at a time. Above 1024 res the text became illegibly small.
Would've been far more productive on at least a 19inch monitor with 1280 res. Here at home I've got two wide-screens at 1680x1050 and the ability to have multiple windows open makes things much much easier.
Sorry, I included too much in the quote trying to give a frame of reference(I should really just let the parent/reply system do that)
More specifically, I was looking for elaboration on , "what 'communication' means to the Chinese, as opposed to this or that other culture,"
[quote]"I believe the more communication the better..."
The better for whom? Again, I'm left wondering what makes you think you understand the situation. You talk about 'communication' as if all forms of it are good. I know you are trying to frame your points humanistically, however, without looking at what 'communication' means to the Chinese, as opposed to this or that other culture, ignores just one part of their uniqueness.
[/quote]
Please elaborate?
I'd like to hear their reasoning too.
What is YouTube doing that makes them so much more popular than Google Video? If they can identify that, they could just compete with them instead of buying them. Is it just the network effect of having a large user base building on itself? Or is YouTube clearly a better service and is more successful as a result? They all seem pretty much the same to me, but I'm only watching videos, I've never tried posting any.
Not necessarily. Lots of game violence is really just a medium conducting the gameplay. I could fabricate an alternate reality where the world breaks down into virtual tag games where I construct low-fire exploding laser tubes that shoot slow-light that bursts into bigger light that will tag a person and decrease their health by picking up the light on sensors covering their body. Some tubes fire instant lasers that reduce health. Also, we have flags that follow players if you walk up and touch them that you need to move somewhere else. Enemy players have kidnapped your girl and have assembled an army of thousands of other laser tag players to stop you in a virtual battlefield filled with buildings and weird new cultures, also filled with a bunch of people that have nothing to do with the kidnapped girl, just trying to fill virtual world space. You can also hit people with your lasertag sword that uses laser that somehow stops immediately after 3 feet and is exactly like a lightsaber in every respect except that it's not, and it's nonviolent.
It's totally doable, it's a nonviolent premise, but it's a pretty awkward situation. Just calling them rockets, guns, hostages, RPGs, and swords is understandable. Their purpose and operation is immediately clear, and we can get on with the game. We don't need a ridiculous premise explaining why our tools aren't actually hurting anyone. We know the game "violence" isn't hurting anyone, we're just in it to beat the game.
And in the end, it's still the same thing. I'm not happy that I shot my best friend in the face and blew his brains out so I could exult in his demise. I just scored a point. It's laser-tag in the guise of violence.
People can play GTA to beat hookers to death with bats, but they don't spend hours doing it, sleep, then reload it to do it some more. They're not really getting "points" for it. There's no challenge to overcome or goal to reach, so they stop and do something more stimulating. Take out the fun gameplay from the violence and people will get bored and drop the game.
CoX(City of Heroes/Villains) had delightful PvE gameplay, but fun though it was, it got repetitive. And there wasn't anything else since team-based PvE was the core focus while the rest was/is added later.
Hopefully this Marvel game is a chance for a fresh start in terms of game mechanics, player-to-player dynamics, and engine limitations. I enjoyed CoX but cancelled after exhausting it. I look forward to more from Cryptic.
And I loved Cryptic's attitude toward its community. They're open and frank with their community. They've made some unpopular changes, but never without careful consideration and clear explanation.
Economies of scale don't exist everywhere. I sure wish it did, but it's not always the case. And even where it does occur, it's not the lone determinant in price. Anyway, it's a game, and they've simplified it down to the very basic supply and demand cross-curves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand
This man speaks truth. You can't pack in big blocks of straight gaming as easily when you work mon-fri 9 to 5. There's lots of gaps in college class schedules and study times could be shifted at will.
Now that I'm working, I play maybe 1-1.5 hours a night. Game time got cut by at least half or more after college. Due in part from the work hours, and the rest due to commute time since I'm not at college where everything and everyone is nearby.
Even reaching college changed my playtime though. My highschool was pathetically easy, no study necessary, and the occasional homework assignment could be done in about 1-2 hours. I could commit large blocks of time at will to RPGs and RTS games which tend to require large blocks of time to get real progress. After hitting college, I stopped playing these kinds of games. My highschool years saw the heaviest amount of gaming. I've got disposable income from part-time/summer work to buy games, I get a car to go buy games when I want them, and few responsibilities.
I've noticed something about this phenomenon.
Bad players encounter more "cheaters!" The accusers are doing badly, defenders of the accused are doing well. Why does this happen?
I've played CS since day2 of beta 1, . I've seen maybe 15 cheaters in all these years. But the number of players I've seen accused of cheating DWARFS this number.
It's because the accusers who play badly don't understand what it is to play like the winning players. The result is that they can't distinguish between players are simply good, and players who are cheating.
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Some clues are players who prepare the crosshairs at head-shot level even when no enemies are present, players who are reacting to sound in 360 degrees instead of looking through walls, players who use the winning tactics that are recognized by other winners. Heck, just by the scoreboard, timer, and dead/alive status, and weapon used can locate an enemy on the other side of the map with a fair amount of accuracy without ever seeing that player during that round. If you don't know how to pay attention to these clues, you'll only find players via sight and sound, and assume that there's wall-hacking being done to find enemies. Note that all these things don't involve twitch or precision aiming, just clues to intelligent play.
To the untrained eye, they're just playing, and the reason that they won goes by unnoticed. In the end, it just seems to be magic since the accusers don't know what they should be looking for. I'm not denying that there are cheaters out there.
Good players encounter less "cheaters" than bad players in CS. I've addressed this game in particular, and the specific examples here of course don't carry over to all games. But it'll still apply to many games. If you're not good enough to do the same feats in the game, it'll seem impossible.
I wouldn't say economists think this way. Just idiots.
/again/ even though it's something we would had have already heard several times before even meeting the requirements for taking their course.
I did undergrad in Economics in a mediocre college. That doesn't make me an economist and even I know this ignores the very basic concept of opportunity cost that is fundamental to Economics.
I would think that many economists are also well aware that GDP is just one measurement and it carries a number of flaws with it(like measuring quality and the benefit of the product). I'm assuming that most real economists would know this because in all the econ courses I took, everytime GDP got brought up, each of the teachers would repeat this disclaimer at me
Economists really wouldn't look at stuff in this manner. Those silly conclusions were reached by corporate shills.
For me, Steam had a horrible start, and is turning out nicely. I was looking forward to the idea of Steam. I saw the exact opposite comments made earlier here.
The thing had a whole bunch of memory leaks and other stability issues, still has at least one. At least these days the memory leak only shows up once a month instead of several times a day. I LOATHED Steam when it first came out and ate my memory sitting there in the background. It didn't offer me much but kept me from using WON(IIRC?), and broke many of my half-life mods for weeks and months as they strove to attain compliancy.
DoD's release had issues with many pre-orders. Many missed the pre-order price cut and ended up getting the game several days after release, kind of the opposite effect they were shooting for.
But Steam has progressed tremendously. Even that Friends network works now(that took a long while). I love how simple it is to grab demos and trailers. I love how easy it is to impulse buy off the main page. Cheap indie games like Darwinia and Ragdoll kung fu were fun diversions I probably would not have noticed if they hadn't been hosted on Steam.
In Steam's current form, only issue I have is that playing Steam media seems to taking longer than it should since it seems to just be using windows media player. Other than that, I love Steam and hope to see more stuff hosted on it. I'm no fan of the physical by-products of buying stuff since I really can't stow it all in my room, so Steam is right up my alley. I wish all my game purchases could be done on Steam now.
Oh, and a big F*** you to EA Downloader, an intrusive and arrogant program that attempted to emulate Steam and only managed to pull off copying all the stuff I hated about early Steam while adding new ones.
I didn't buy the idea of a 150 wii for a second. Ridiculous. 200? Possible!
250? It's what I expected. I hate "realistic" sports games, but since Wii sports would show off the Wiimote, I was curious, though not planning to pay money for it.
I would've preferred that Wii Sports wasn't included, and not because I want Zelda. As mentioned elsewhere, Zelda wasn't really designed with the Wii in mind and that doesn't bode well for playing the game with the Wiimote. I'm not sure how easy it'd be to incorporate a change that drastic late into a game's development. I'll probably play this one using a Gamecube controller if they allow it on the Wii version.
While the Wiimote is nice and I'm excited about what kinds of gameplay it'll offer, I still enjoy the traditional gamepad interface where appropriate and would even prefer it if it suited the game better than the Wiimote.
The extra features are nice but I own a PC, they're kinda irrelevant for me. But I plan to buy a Wii anyway, only because of the kinds of gameplay that controller opens up.
I primarily play PC games. I had lost interest in the PS1 quickly and just played on my friends' consoles after that, not really finding enough enjoyment to commit to a console(especially if I'd be able to play several of those console games on PC and enjoy them more since my PC is already upgraded to play PC games.)
Now, with the Wii and its out-of-left-field controller, I'm finally going to try a new console.
I think he's going for sarcasm since it's a parody of other common sayings about these next-gen consoles.
There's a bit of groupthink in church communities. They interact with each other and find themselves enveloped in the same message and start to think as one. However, different communities can form different opinions, Christianity is not homogenous.
There's a big problem in that many of these communities don't welcome challenges to their beliefs. It's more important that their current beliefs remain intact than if these beliefs are actually true. If the challenges fail, then they can feel more secure in their beliefs. If the challenges ring true, then they can drop that belief in favor of something closer to the truth.
With time and education, I hope that this mindset will fade out of Christianity as modern skepticism and reasoning replaces blind faith as a basis for personal beliefs. While I'm referring to Christianity in particular, I'm hoping that this will happen to humanity in general(both religious AND secular groups have this problem, it's just that religious groups have it worse).
Hmm, though I too believe in God I've got plenty of doubt to go along with it.
Really, if anyone had concrete proof for or against God, we wouldn't be having all these debates about a God's existence, we'd just reference that proof.
We've just got information that makes one option more believable than the other, and even these depend on the observer.
But in the end, it'll still come down to what you choose to believe in the end because both require a certain amount of "faith" to choose a side. We don't have many absolute certainties in life outside of abstract math. Aside from this, much of what we know stems from a series of assumptions we have that we just accept to be true until something disproves it.
So a decision about the existence of God comes down to whether you think there's enough information to assume "God" exists. Or if you think the lack of proof thus far is enough to accept as evidence of absence. It'll finish with which end you place your faith.
This should be fairly obvious, a great deal of what I know is information I've simply accepted without first-hand verification. Like the existence of galaxies, or that there are other planets. I've never seen the math, or looked through a telescope, but I'm willing to believe that all the astrologists aren't just feeding me a load of bull. I accept this information without proof.
Indeed, survival in what sense? The bacteria die very rapidly with a short lifespan. This does help them evolve though.
But then after evolving so much to fit the new obstacles, did they really survive? Arguing about their survivability would still be human-oriented semantics about the definition of survival since another perspective would be that the bacteria was exterminated over and over again, and we're dealing with a new species now.
We've had similar discussions about retaining "humanity" if we all turn into the Borg with cybernetic implants.
Even the comparison between us and other lifeforms is fairly human-oriented since those other lifeforms probably aren't even thinking in terms of "competition" so much as simply struggling to continue existence.