True (I think), however, it wouldn't even matter for MP, because the Motion Plus is an augmentation to the accelerometer, and MP really only makes use of the light gun. Motion plus will be great for finally getting that light saber duel game (if it were to ever happen), but it won't have any effect on things like Metroid Prime.
There are two different companies involved here: Nintendo and Retro Studios. I've only heard mention of Nintendo, so it doesn't sound like Retro is involved in any part of this. From what I've heard, Retro will likely be unveiling their own large title at E3, possibly a new Metroid (come on Metroid 5). They've been saying that they were going to do this, now, for about a year, and its already been released in Japan (which is weird since Metroid is their one big franchise that's more popular in the states), so it's not like they're taking precious development time away from other things.
Honestly, Metroid Prime 1 is one of my very favorite games, and it will be wonderful to see it in 16:9 with bloom lighting.
What the hell time period have you been from? Using to layout pages is a hack that we left behind back in 1998. Most pages on the internet (including slashdot) are formatted using CSS. That's what I do, that's what all web designers do these days.
is a data element specifically designed to layout spreadsheet-style data. It's bad semantics to use it as a layout element and gives you very little control. The proper way to do this is to group all your elements into
,
and blocks, depending upon the nature of the data, then align and float them accordingly using CSS. If you're using
, you seriously need to do some reading. That's about the equivalent of creating procedures in the middle of an object oriented language... or worse. Obviously some legacy websites have it left over because of time constraints, but NOONE should be using tables to format pages anymore, NOONE.
I highly recommend reading some literature on CSS column layouts. <a href="www.w3schools.org">w3schools.org</a> has some wonderful CSS tutorials, and doing a search for "CSS 3-column layout" will give you a good idea of how to use your code. Separation of content (XHTML) from design (CSS)... that's what webdesign is all about.
I'm guessing that quite a few audio engineers can do that from a simple waveform (without colorcoded FFT). I do quite a bit of audio production, both for music and for TV. No, I haven't yet learned how to distinguish exact phonetics, but if I know what a person is saying, I can pretty easilly tell which sound goes where. It's taught me a lot about speech phrasing and aspiration. Abviously, without some kind of FFT deliniation (as you were talking about), it would be very difficult to tell the difference between "To Do" and "Go To".
Pink can be a totally fine masculine color, depending upon the style. Color really isn't relivent, it's the style of clothing. I think I have a few pale pink button-down business shirts, and you see guys wearing them quite a bit. You probably don't even remember seeing them because they looked pretty natural.
Obviously, a hot-pink tube-top is going to be immediately deemed homosexual, unsophisticated, and unprofessional. But ya know what? It looks unsophisticated and unprofessional on women too.
In my experience, men and women are a lot more similar than most in our society would like to believe. If men had to deal with other men in as intimate ways as they do with women, they'd be complaining about how impossible men are too (just ask any gay man). Communication and taste varies from person to person more than it does between genders, its just that people don't usually have to deal with it as precariously in their non-romantic relationships.
On average, men and women want similar things, and you'll see the same kind of variation within each gender. I know many men who are veign and want to look like they have a very strong gender identity (in this case masculine), and I know women who do the same (in their case, feminine). I also know a lot of people who want to keep the gender identification to a minimum... some even go out of their way to play it down or even defy it.
Me, I want to look nice. Yes, I'm male, and I'd probably be uncomfortable wearing highly female-oriented clothes. But I'd also be uncomfortable in overtly-masculine clothing too. No, I'm not neutral, my clothing is admittedly male, but I'd rather not call too much attention to that. On the flip side, I enjoy feeling attractive, and having a sense of style to my clothing. I wear a lot of patterned button-down shirts, and occationally go out of my way to seek out ones that I think are interesting and appealling.
When a women is seeking out overtly feminine clothing, it's because she wants to be strongly identified with her gender. Men do the same thing. The result may look very different, but it all stems from the same gender-related thoughts.
I personally haven't witnessed many of the stereotypes to be very accurate either. I know very emotional men, I know very utilitarian women, and not just a few outliers, but in my day-to-day life. I think men are more bothered by overly-emotional women then by overly-emotional men, because they feel like they can handle it better, and so they totally overlook the fact that many men are just as emotional as women.
To be fair, one thing that the video game community has been saying for a while is, "don't treat video games any differently from movies" in terms of censorship, sales, taxes, etc. This bill seems to target DVDs and games equally, shouldn't we applaud that? If we don't, we'd end up being pretty hypocritical.
Well, I think Microsoft has a much better shot at winning people over if they weren't so intent on constantly deffying the W3. No, W3 isn't perfect, but Microsoft should be more willing to come to the table and be a team player. The reason that the W3 tends to side with Mozzilla is that they seem to have a very good working relationship, where-as Microsoft continually acts like an angry child. They've been getting better... MUCH better, but they still have a long way to go. Now, I will agree that the W3 has gone too far as of late to give Moz the benifit of the doubt (allowing them to create the "-moz-" CSS set was just rediculous), but it wouldn't be this way if Microsoft wasn't so incredibly impossible to talk to at the table. On the flipside, IE does have the most workable solution for the webfont problem, even if it is kind of broken. If Mozzilla continues to steamroll through allowing full Open Type and True Type fonts, I guarentee, heads will roll, and in the end, we won't get anything.
Obviously, this is one of the many things that IE has to work on. But currently, webdesigners unanimously HATE microsoft because of their obstinate rejection of the W3. It leads to many pages (including slashdot, for instance) not being optimized for IE, but that translates to users thinking that IE just looks bad (which isn't technically the case). It's all a subliminal thing. Firefox just renders pages better, because their structure is easier for webdevelopers to follow, IE is kind of a moving target. Safari (Konqueror) plays nice with the W3 and doesn't loose its competativeness with Firefox because of it, so why can't IE?
Really? I always thought that he was from slightly north of the border... whatever. His natural accent (not the one he uses for Star Trek) is very close to scottish, and he's joked about himself as being a scottsman. When you're that close to the border, there's gotta not be that much difference.
The fact remains that the "French" thing is just weird and unneccessary. I don't know why they decided to make him French. Practically any other country, it would be believable that in 400 years you could have any kind of accent you want... but not France. In 400 years, they'll still be speaking French, in a French accent, because they're French, they're language is even more important to them than fresh bread and fine wine, and those are definitely not going anywhere either (just got back from there, myself).
But Patrick Stewart, and by extension, Picard, is incredibly British, through and through. His look, his demeaner, his accent... even his obsession with tea (the French don't typically give two shits about tea), very English. Patrick was a very long-time Shakespearean stage actor, you can't simply snap your fingers and make it go away.
Thankfully, they're not even trying. Picard is basically shown as a brit whose familly lives in france. Maybe 400 years does change a 3000-year-old culture that much, who knows? Eh... it's not a big deal, but it's much more obviously a result of forced casting. Don't get me wrong, Patrick Stewart is PERFECT for the part, but they should have just changed his backstory slightly. Not even the name. It's a lot more believable for an englishman to be named Jean-Luc Picard than it is to have a frenchman speaking in a british accent, drinking earl gray, and adopting british mannerisms.
Now try taking that same thing and making it into a $60 30 hour video game. You'll sell about 10 copies and halfway through people will start shoveling people into the ovens themselves looking for some fun.
That's a really good point. People probably WOULD do that just for the hell of it in that situation. I see way too many people doing incredibly horrible things, watch people screaming and beat them to death baseball bats, and then laugh about it.
But you know why? Because their usually nothing personal about any of the random NPCs in the game. Most games feed us absolute dirt for interaction with one-dimensional characters and impersonal dialog. The reason why people walked out of Schinler's list a total mess wasn't because of all the killing, it was because of the humanity and the really realistic character portrayals that forced you to feel as if you were actually there and really knew those people. Even if you only saw them for one scene (the bathtub scubber, for instance), the acting and expression just made you really feel for the people involved. Many games just don't take the time to do that.
But you're right, you can't have a 30 hour game that pummles you with the same kind of emotional forcefullness that a 3 hour movie can, it's just too exhausting. What you can have, though, is a 30 hour game with a few moments, here and there, that demonstrate extreme amounts of humanity and morality, and I GUARENTEE that they will be the highlights of the game that everyone talks about and remembers.
When you're doing a 2-3 hour feature film to an audience who has already allotted the time to sit through your movie, you can be just about as emotionally exhausting as you wish. But that's a different medium. A game has no difinitive length, and it certainately has no specific play time per sitting. That fundimentally changes the medium. At 30 hours, you must allow for a lot more emotional downtime, and pick your moments as to when to really shine. If you look at it this way, games CAN be effective in their expression. They just have a different pacing.
I'm totally on-board with video games being an artistic form of expression, but it can't be compared with cinema, because the two have some fundimentally different properties, specifically in their temporality.
I actually completely agree with your assesment. Education breeds wisdom, but it also breeds a rense of responsibility.
It's like my view on gun control. I believe in the right to owning firearms, but I think that you should have to take a class and test in the same way that you take driver's ed and a test to get an auto license. The more you know about something, the more respectfull you are toward that endevour, and the more pride you have in being able to use it.
Obviously, making a meat-eating license is quite extreme for our society, but the general principal isn't bad.
In France and Britain, getting a drivers license is about the equivalent of getting an pilot's license in the US. And ya know what? They drive scary as hell! BUT... they get into very few accidents. They know their driving limits much better than we do in the US, but at the same time, they know their exact stopping distance, so they can scare the hell out of pedestrians! In the end, though I'd rather be scared than dead.
And some of it is playing an adult version of "Cowboys and Indians" or "Soldiers" knowing full well the horror of those two ideas is now safely tucked away behind pixels.
But that's just it... what makes an MMO any more "adult" than Cowboys & Indians in the first place? Sure C&I may be a perfectly valid form of self-exploration for an 8-year-old, but not for teen or 20-something. The arguement many may have is that many games continue the same types of pre-teen entertainment and exploration for people well into their 20s. Videogames are contributing to a global-wide arrested development, they're saying. Honestly, I can kind of understand their point. I really don't see how an MMO is any different from C&I... great graphics, more realism, more graphic decapitation scenes... but I don't see the maturity.
And let's face it, Cowboys & Indians isn't exactly the healthiest form of self-exploration for an 8-year-old either: it teaches descrimination and eskews history. But simply because childhood entertainment of the past has been unhealthy doesn't mean we should continue doing it.
Re:2. is exactly the opposite for me
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Reviews: Star Trek
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· Score: 3, Informative
Picard on the other hand was always right and the rules were everything. Also intresting to note, Spock/Vulcans were in many ways the superior race in TOS. This was comepletly lost in TNG. All human with only a half human and a human robot thrown in. Lesser racial mix with it being very clear that all the TNG crew was from north america or europe.
Wait... what? You forget you have a fucking KLINGON!
Main cast of TNG is: - French/Scottish guy (Picard) - White Guy (Riker) - Robot (Data) - Klingon (Worf) - Human woman from small colony (Crusher) - Black Blind Dude (Jordi) - Half-Human Chick (Troi)
That's definitely more varied than TOS, which had all white guys except for one black woman, a half-vulcan, and an asian guy. I mean, both have more white guys, but TNG has more woman and aliens. The first season features a third female character as well (who sucked, but whatever).
It's my favorite in the series, and I know a lot of FF fans that loved FF8 as well. Most people who started with FF7 don't like it too much because it really didn't follow in FF7s footsteps, but many who had played since the SNES days loved FF8. I thought it was fucking brilliant myself. The story may be a lot more simplistic, but it's better told, and the characters felt a lot more flushed out than in FF7. Best music in the series too... though FF9 and FF6 are right on its heals.
There is actually a good financial reason for taxing substances, is that selling goods that are very damaging to ones' health inevitably winds up being a financial burdon to the rest of society, namely in health insurrence increases and medical bills. This is also one of the main arguements behind seatbelt laws. Games, on the other hand, create no widespread financial implact. No more than any of the other tax-free entertainment and luxury items. If a city or state has a luxury tax on all entertainment goods... fine, that's up to them. But singling out specific types of entertainment to be taxed is completely unjust, and SHOULD be forbidden by the US constitution if it is not already.
The difference is control. Bush was never locked in a room and forced to watch SNL. Free speech dictates that we have the right to publicly say anything about anybody, that's not the point. The point is that they forced it on him as a form of humilliated. Humilliation is forbidden under the Geneva convention, plain and simple.
The most effective way of getting information out of prisoners is to be nice to them, it's well documented. Any form of humilliation or torture is simply for the cruel entertainment of the interogators, which is incredibly disturbing. If you're going to fuck around with the basic rights of human life like freedom, no matter WHO it is, you better stick to the most effective and pragmatic approaches to achieving whatever end you have.
Prison should revolve around reform and the protection of society from dangerous criminals. Interogation should revolve around information gathering.
Vengence and humilation are simply barbaric forms of entertainment, and have no place in our prison halls.
Wait a minute, this is Saddam we're talking about. I HIGHLY doubt that "a few immature soldiers" were even allowed near him. You can bet that EVERY ACTION said or done to him or around him was carefully orchestrated, if it wasn't, that would be a HUGE failour of our military. This wasn't a "prank", this was militarilly condoned humilliation. There was no logical reason for doing this, it was simple done for pleasure and specticle, which is incredibly evil, in my mind. They were basically "fucking around" with one of the most dangerous and powerful men in the middle east for some shits and giggles. If you don't find that disturbing, I don't know what to say.
I hate to break it to you, but there's absolutely NOTHING partisian about this in the slightest... unless Republicans are going after their own these days. The department of justice is a "neutral" body in a conservative state, and is directly under the reigns of a very conservative governor (more conservative than Uncle Ted). There's not a single card-carrying democrat involved here. Hell, there are very few card-carrying democrats in the state of Alaska! The AK Justice Department has a history of being very right-leaning. THEY'RE the ones who indicted him, and THEY'RE the ones who screwed up the case.
I'd be more inclined to believe that they purposefully botched the thing in order to make sure Ted didn't go to jail.
True, but don't forget that "Enterprise" would appeal to business people... people with money... people with money who might give NASA some. Also, Enterprise had a history with the US Navy, so it makes a bit of historical sense as well. Serenity would be a great name, don't get me wrong, and it COMPLETELY fits in with Unity and Harmony.
I really don't give two hoots. Maybe naming it Serenity would get Joss Whedden off his fat ass and make more of the series the way Gene Rodenberry finally did. But Colbert did win, and he did prove a delicious point, and I gotta hand it to him. In some ways Colbert is sorta the modern day Andy Coffman.
I dunno, I say name the toilet after him, name the ship Serenity. It'll be better for everybody. He'll have more fun bitching about it, NASA and him can have little fun rivalry, and in the process, we might just wake up Joss Wheddon from his hybernation (from making GOOD shows/films).
Absolutely. My girlfriend and I purchased a pair of low-res webcams and have been using Skype while she's in France. Both of us have fairly fast DSL connections, probably average or better than average (in her case) than the average person. The compression is obviously very high, it's very grainy, and we get tearing and dropout quite frequently. Also, I notice a delay of at least 300ms-or-so.
It's easy to say, "okay, not today, but sometime in the near future", but the reality is is that as technology gets more advanced, so would the need for more bandwidth. 1080p with 6 channels of audio may seem, to us, like the be-all-and-end-all of gaming technology, but I guarentee that in 6 years, there will be newer, higher-bandwidth standards or new state-of-the-art technologies that will need to be considered. 3D monitors/TVs are not TOO far off, for instance, and as textures and motion becomes more advanced, encoders are going to have less success in breaking down the data flow.
In short, cloud computing is like a cat & mouse game in which the mouse will likely ALWAYS be two steps ahead of the cat. We may now be at the point of being able to cloud compute games from the SNES era, and in 10 years, we may have worked up to the XBox 360. But that sorta defeats the purpose if your always 10 years behind. It sorta reminds me of the folks who, way back in the late 80s, said that "noone would ever need more than a 10MB hard drive".
Yes, she's been doing her best to try to unofficially move all the guts of the government to Anchorage, which is sorta what most governors have been trying to do for decades. The reality is is that Alaska doesn't wan't Juneau to be the capital. It never really did. Jeneau is completely out of the way, there are no roads there, and landing there is like riding a rollercoaster. Problem is, then it's a battle between Anchorage and Fairbanks (where I live), as to where the capital is. The state voted, back in the 70s, to move the capital to Willow, which is a town north of Wasilla (about 100 miles north of Anchorage), but then when asked whether they wanted to pay for it, the people voted NO. It'll eventually just get moved to Anchorage, because every governor moves the infrastructure there little by little.
Oh, and Jeneau isn't 1,000 miles east of anchorage. Try more like 400 miles, it's just that you can't drive there, so it doesn't matter much anyway.
Most of the "real web" including all pages with "real web developers", create both flash and non-flash versions of their pages. Any web designer with any salt should know that. There are, and will continue to be, many devices and browsers that don't have flash. It may not be a webdesigner's responsiblity to support highly-outdated software (like IE5 for Mac, or Netscape 4.7), but flash is far from ubiquitous when you get into mobil devices. So flash should not be an absolute neccessity for any website. Therefor, if the iPhone isn't able to access a flash-based website, then it's the developer's fault, because it will limit dozens of other devices too: phones, game consoles, various other mobil devices, etc.
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True (I think), however, it wouldn't even matter for MP, because the Motion Plus is an augmentation to the accelerometer, and MP really only makes use of the light gun. Motion plus will be great for finally getting that light saber duel game (if it were to ever happen), but it won't have any effect on things like Metroid Prime.
There are two different companies involved here: Nintendo and Retro Studios. I've only heard mention of Nintendo, so it doesn't sound like Retro is involved in any part of this. From what I've heard, Retro will likely be unveiling their own large title at E3, possibly a new Metroid (come on Metroid 5). They've been saying that they were going to do this, now, for about a year, and its already been released in Japan (which is weird since Metroid is their one big franchise that's more popular in the states), so it's not like they're taking precious development time away from other things.
Honestly, Metroid Prime 1 is one of my very favorite games, and it will be wonderful to see it in 16:9 with bloom lighting.
and blocks, depending upon the nature of the data, then align and float them accordingly using CSS. If you're using , you seriously need to do some reading. That's about the equivalent of creating procedures in the middle of an object oriented language... or worse. Obviously some legacy websites have it left over because of time constraints, but NOONE should be using tables to format pages anymore, NOONE.
I highly recommend reading some literature on CSS column layouts. <a href="www.w3schools.org">w3schools.org</a> has some wonderful CSS tutorials, and doing a search for "CSS 3-column layout" will give you a good idea of how to use your code. Separation of content (XHTML) from design (CSS)... that's what webdesign is all about.
I'm guessing that quite a few audio engineers can do that from a simple waveform (without colorcoded FFT). I do quite a bit of audio production, both for music and for TV. No, I haven't yet learned how to distinguish exact phonetics, but if I know what a person is saying, I can pretty easilly tell which sound goes where. It's taught me a lot about speech phrasing and aspiration. Abviously, without some kind of FFT deliniation (as you were talking about), it would be very difficult to tell the difference between "To Do" and "Go To".
Sounds about like a flying Segway (Stealth Bomber)
Pink can be a totally fine masculine color, depending upon the style. Color really isn't relivent, it's the style of clothing. I think I have a few pale pink button-down business shirts, and you see guys wearing them quite a bit. You probably don't even remember seeing them because they looked pretty natural.
Obviously, a hot-pink tube-top is going to be immediately deemed homosexual, unsophisticated, and unprofessional. But ya know what? It looks unsophisticated and unprofessional on women too.
In my experience, men and women are a lot more similar than most in our society would like to believe. If men had to deal with other men in as intimate ways as they do with women, they'd be complaining about how impossible men are too (just ask any gay man). Communication and taste varies from person to person more than it does between genders, its just that people don't usually have to deal with it as precariously in their non-romantic relationships.
On average, men and women want similar things, and you'll see the same kind of variation within each gender. I know many men who are veign and want to look like they have a very strong gender identity (in this case masculine), and I know women who do the same (in their case, feminine). I also know a lot of people who want to keep the gender identification to a minimum... some even go out of their way to play it down or even defy it.
Me, I want to look nice. Yes, I'm male, and I'd probably be uncomfortable wearing highly female-oriented clothes. But I'd also be uncomfortable in overtly-masculine clothing too. No, I'm not neutral, my clothing is admittedly male, but I'd rather not call too much attention to that. On the flip side, I enjoy feeling attractive, and having a sense of style to my clothing. I wear a lot of patterned button-down shirts, and occationally go out of my way to seek out ones that I think are interesting and appealling.
When a women is seeking out overtly feminine clothing, it's because she wants to be strongly identified with her gender. Men do the same thing. The result may look very different, but it all stems from the same gender-related thoughts.
I personally haven't witnessed many of the stereotypes to be very accurate either. I know very emotional men, I know very utilitarian women, and not just a few outliers, but in my day-to-day life. I think men are more bothered by overly-emotional women then by overly-emotional men, because they feel like they can handle it better, and so they totally overlook the fact that many men are just as emotional as women.
To be fair, one thing that the video game community has been saying for a while is, "don't treat video games any differently from movies" in terms of censorship, sales, taxes, etc. This bill seems to target DVDs and games equally, shouldn't we applaud that? If we don't, we'd end up being pretty hypocritical.
*sigh*
Well, I think Microsoft has a much better shot at winning people over if they weren't so intent on constantly deffying the W3. No, W3 isn't perfect, but Microsoft should be more willing to come to the table and be a team player. The reason that the W3 tends to side with Mozzilla is that they seem to have a very good working relationship, where-as Microsoft continually acts like an angry child. They've been getting better... MUCH better, but they still have a long way to go. Now, I will agree that the W3 has gone too far as of late to give Moz the benifit of the doubt (allowing them to create the "-moz-" CSS set was just rediculous), but it wouldn't be this way if Microsoft wasn't so incredibly impossible to talk to at the table. On the flipside, IE does have the most workable solution for the webfont problem, even if it is kind of broken. If Mozzilla continues to steamroll through allowing full Open Type and True Type fonts, I guarentee, heads will roll, and in the end, we won't get anything.
Obviously, this is one of the many things that IE has to work on. But currently, webdesigners unanimously HATE microsoft because of their obstinate rejection of the W3. It leads to many pages (including slashdot, for instance) not being optimized for IE, but that translates to users thinking that IE just looks bad (which isn't technically the case). It's all a subliminal thing. Firefox just renders pages better, because their structure is easier for webdevelopers to follow, IE is kind of a moving target. Safari (Konqueror) plays nice with the W3 and doesn't loose its competativeness with Firefox because of it, so why can't IE?
- A continuously disgruntled webdesigner
Really? I always thought that he was from slightly north of the border... whatever. His natural accent (not the one he uses for Star Trek) is very close to scottish, and he's joked about himself as being a scottsman. When you're that close to the border, there's gotta not be that much difference.
The fact remains that the "French" thing is just weird and unneccessary. I don't know why they decided to make him French. Practically any other country, it would be believable that in 400 years you could have any kind of accent you want... but not France. In 400 years, they'll still be speaking French, in a French accent, because they're French, they're language is even more important to them than fresh bread and fine wine, and those are definitely not going anywhere either (just got back from there, myself).
But Patrick Stewart, and by extension, Picard, is incredibly British, through and through. His look, his demeaner, his accent... even his obsession with tea (the French don't typically give two shits about tea), very English. Patrick was a very long-time Shakespearean stage actor, you can't simply snap your fingers and make it go away.
Thankfully, they're not even trying. Picard is basically shown as a brit whose familly lives in france. Maybe 400 years does change a 3000-year-old culture that much, who knows? Eh... it's not a big deal, but it's much more obviously a result of forced casting. Don't get me wrong, Patrick Stewart is PERFECT for the part, but they should have just changed his backstory slightly. Not even the name. It's a lot more believable for an englishman to be named Jean-Luc Picard than it is to have a frenchman speaking in a british accent, drinking earl gray, and adopting british mannerisms.
That's a really good point. People probably WOULD do that just for the hell of it in that situation. I see way too many people doing incredibly horrible things, watch people screaming and beat them to death baseball bats, and then laugh about it.
But you know why? Because their usually nothing personal about any of the random NPCs in the game. Most games feed us absolute dirt for interaction with one-dimensional characters and impersonal dialog. The reason why people walked out of Schinler's list a total mess wasn't because of all the killing, it was because of the humanity and the really realistic character portrayals that forced you to feel as if you were actually there and really knew those people. Even if you only saw them for one scene (the bathtub scubber, for instance), the acting and expression just made you really feel for the people involved. Many games just don't take the time to do that.
But you're right, you can't have a 30 hour game that pummles you with the same kind of emotional forcefullness that a 3 hour movie can, it's just too exhausting. What you can have, though, is a 30 hour game with a few moments, here and there, that demonstrate extreme amounts of humanity and morality, and I GUARENTEE that they will be the highlights of the game that everyone talks about and remembers.
When you're doing a 2-3 hour feature film to an audience who has already allotted the time to sit through your movie, you can be just about as emotionally exhausting as you wish. But that's a different medium. A game has no difinitive length, and it certainately has no specific play time per sitting. That fundimentally changes the medium. At 30 hours, you must allow for a lot more emotional downtime, and pick your moments as to when to really shine. If you look at it this way, games CAN be effective in their expression. They just have a different pacing.
I'm totally on-board with video games being an artistic form of expression, but it can't be compared with cinema, because the two have some fundimentally different properties, specifically in their temporality.
God, you're making me hungry. I fucking love humus. Especially humus with herbs or garlic. Fuckin' yummy!
I actually completely agree with your assesment. Education breeds wisdom, but it also breeds a rense of responsibility.
It's like my view on gun control. I believe in the right to owning firearms, but I think that you should have to take a class and test in the same way that you take driver's ed and a test to get an auto license. The more you know about something, the more respectfull you are toward that endevour, and the more pride you have in being able to use it.
Obviously, making a meat-eating license is quite extreme for our society, but the general principal isn't bad.
In France and Britain, getting a drivers license is about the equivalent of getting an pilot's license in the US. And ya know what? They drive scary as hell! BUT... they get into very few accidents. They know their driving limits much better than we do in the US, but at the same time, they know their exact stopping distance, so they can scare the hell out of pedestrians! In the end, though I'd rather be scared than dead.
But that's just it... what makes an MMO any more "adult" than Cowboys & Indians in the first place? Sure C&I may be a perfectly valid form of self-exploration for an 8-year-old, but not for teen or 20-something. The arguement many may have is that many games continue the same types of pre-teen entertainment and exploration for people well into their 20s. Videogames are contributing to a global-wide arrested development, they're saying. Honestly, I can kind of understand their point. I really don't see how an MMO is any different from C&I... great graphics, more realism, more graphic decapitation scenes... but I don't see the maturity.
And let's face it, Cowboys & Indians isn't exactly the healthiest form of self-exploration for an 8-year-old either: it teaches descrimination and eskews history. But simply because childhood entertainment of the past has been unhealthy doesn't mean we should continue doing it.
Wait... what? You forget you have a fucking KLINGON!
Main cast of TNG is:
- French/Scottish guy (Picard)
- White Guy (Riker)
- Robot (Data)
- Klingon (Worf)
- Human woman from small colony (Crusher)
- Black Blind Dude (Jordi)
- Half-Human Chick (Troi)
That's definitely more varied than TOS, which had all white guys except for one black woman, a half-vulcan, and an asian guy. I mean, both have more white guys, but TNG has more woman and aliens. The first season features a third female character as well (who sucked, but whatever).
It's my favorite in the series, and I know a lot of FF fans that loved FF8 as well. Most people who started with FF7 don't like it too much because it really didn't follow in FF7s footsteps, but many who had played since the SNES days loved FF8. I thought it was fucking brilliant myself. The story may be a lot more simplistic, but it's better told, and the characters felt a lot more flushed out than in FF7. Best music in the series too... though FF9 and FF6 are right on its heals.
"I like to call him Herbert... even though his name is Bob... because it really pisses him off!"
There is actually a good financial reason for taxing substances, is that selling goods that are very damaging to ones' health inevitably winds up being a financial burdon to the rest of society, namely in health insurrence increases and medical bills. This is also one of the main arguements behind seatbelt laws. Games, on the other hand, create no widespread financial implact. No more than any of the other tax-free entertainment and luxury items. If a city or state has a luxury tax on all entertainment goods... fine, that's up to them. But singling out specific types of entertainment to be taxed is completely unjust, and SHOULD be forbidden by the US constitution if it is not already.
The difference is control. Bush was never locked in a room and forced to watch SNL. Free speech dictates that we have the right to publicly say anything about anybody, that's not the point. The point is that they forced it on him as a form of humilliated. Humilliation is forbidden under the Geneva convention, plain and simple.
The most effective way of getting information out of prisoners is to be nice to them, it's well documented. Any form of humilliation or torture is simply for the cruel entertainment of the interogators, which is incredibly disturbing. If you're going to fuck around with the basic rights of human life like freedom, no matter WHO it is, you better stick to the most effective and pragmatic approaches to achieving whatever end you have.
Prison should revolve around reform and the protection of society from dangerous criminals.
Interogation should revolve around information gathering.
Vengence and humilation are simply barbaric forms of entertainment, and have no place in our prison halls.
Wait a minute, this is Saddam we're talking about. I HIGHLY doubt that "a few immature soldiers" were even allowed near him. You can bet that EVERY ACTION said or done to him or around him was carefully orchestrated, if it wasn't, that would be a HUGE failour of our military. This wasn't a "prank", this was militarilly condoned humilliation. There was no logical reason for doing this, it was simple done for pleasure and specticle, which is incredibly evil, in my mind. They were basically "fucking around" with one of the most dangerous and powerful men in the middle east for some shits and giggles. If you don't find that disturbing, I don't know what to say.
I hate to break it to you, but there's absolutely NOTHING partisian about this in the slightest... unless Republicans are going after their own these days. The department of justice is a "neutral" body in a conservative state, and is directly under the reigns of a very conservative governor (more conservative than Uncle Ted). There's not a single card-carrying democrat involved here. Hell, there are very few card-carrying democrats in the state of Alaska! The AK Justice Department has a history of being very right-leaning. THEY'RE the ones who indicted him, and THEY'RE the ones who screwed up the case.
I'd be more inclined to believe that they purposefully botched the thing in order to make sure Ted didn't go to jail.
True, but don't forget that "Enterprise" would appeal to business people... people with money... people with money who might give NASA some. Also, Enterprise had a history with the US Navy, so it makes a bit of historical sense as well. Serenity would be a great name, don't get me wrong, and it COMPLETELY fits in with Unity and Harmony.
I really don't give two hoots. Maybe naming it Serenity would get Joss Whedden off his fat ass and make more of the series the way Gene Rodenberry finally did. But Colbert did win, and he did prove a delicious point, and I gotta hand it to him. In some ways Colbert is sorta the modern day Andy Coffman.
I dunno, I say name the toilet after him, name the ship Serenity. It'll be better for everybody. He'll have more fun bitching about it, NASA and him can have little fun rivalry, and in the process, we might just wake up Joss Wheddon from his hybernation (from making GOOD shows/films).
Absolutely. My girlfriend and I purchased a pair of low-res webcams and have been using Skype while she's in France. Both of us have fairly fast DSL connections, probably average or better than average (in her case) than the average person. The compression is obviously very high, it's very grainy, and we get tearing and dropout quite frequently. Also, I notice a delay of at least 300ms-or-so.
It's easy to say, "okay, not today, but sometime in the near future", but the reality is is that as technology gets more advanced, so would the need for more bandwidth. 1080p with 6 channels of audio may seem, to us, like the be-all-and-end-all of gaming technology, but I guarentee that in 6 years, there will be newer, higher-bandwidth standards or new state-of-the-art technologies that will need to be considered. 3D monitors/TVs are not TOO far off, for instance, and as textures and motion becomes more advanced, encoders are going to have less success in breaking down the data flow.
In short, cloud computing is like a cat & mouse game in which the mouse will likely ALWAYS be two steps ahead of the cat. We may now be at the point of being able to cloud compute games from the SNES era, and in 10 years, we may have worked up to the XBox 360. But that sorta defeats the purpose if your always 10 years behind. It sorta reminds me of the folks who, way back in the late 80s, said that "noone would ever need more than a 10MB hard drive".
Yes, she's been doing her best to try to unofficially move all the guts of the government to Anchorage, which is sorta what most governors have been trying to do for decades. The reality is is that Alaska doesn't wan't Juneau to be the capital. It never really did. Jeneau is completely out of the way, there are no roads there, and landing there is like riding a rollercoaster. Problem is, then it's a battle between Anchorage and Fairbanks (where I live), as to where the capital is. The state voted, back in the 70s, to move the capital to Willow, which is a town north of Wasilla (about 100 miles north of Anchorage), but then when asked whether they wanted to pay for it, the people voted NO. It'll eventually just get moved to Anchorage, because every governor moves the infrastructure there little by little.
Oh, and Jeneau isn't 1,000 miles east of anchorage. Try more like 400 miles, it's just that you can't drive there, so it doesn't matter much anyway.
Most of the "real web" including all pages with "real web developers", create both flash and non-flash versions of their pages. Any web designer with any salt should know that. There are, and will continue to be, many devices and browsers that don't have flash. It may not be a webdesigner's responsiblity to support highly-outdated software (like IE5 for Mac, or Netscape 4.7), but flash is far from ubiquitous when you get into mobil devices. So flash should not be an absolute neccessity for any website. Therefor, if the iPhone isn't able to access a flash-based website, then it's the developer's fault, because it will limit dozens of other devices too: phones, game consoles, various other mobil devices, etc.