That's very true, and I think it was both a strength and a weakness (you put your finger right on the weakness). The corresponding strength of having the world be too far divorced from ours to bear too much resemblance is it gives the writers a much freer hand in exploring ideas that might otherwise be shackled by our expectations of how the world works.
Example: the only character turn in DX1 that never sold for me was Paul and J.C. up and deciding that merging with Helios was a bright and brilliant way to go. The justification (practical and philosophical) was sorely lacking, and it also was the most irritating ending because of its ease and abruptness. The biggest problem with it was that it was barely believable that the world we know would react in the manner they described. Fast-forward to DX:IW, and the fully fleshed out concept revealed in the "chat" with J.C. at the antarctic base (machine-regulated direct democracy coupled with a radical leveling of human potential, by solving the problems of information asymmetry and the evolutionary baggage that leads to unoptimized behaviors) that they were sort of reaching for with the J.C./Helios thing in DX1 became *explainable* and so it was explained, and well. Not that the idea itself was much more attractive, but at least it got to walk around and breathe a little.
DX1 was a phenomenal game partly because you had to care about the world of the game because you could relate to it and its characters, and the freedom that DX:IW traded it for ultimately turned out to be a net loser. That is why DX1 is a brilliant game and DX:IW is merely good. One can only hope that the DX3 writers can write up a world that is not only emotionally engaging, but also free enough from our pre-conceptions for the discussions of Really Big Ideas (tm).
And also, I am deeply indebted to DX1 for turning me on to G. K. Chesterton. If DX3 could do something similar for some other forgotten but important thinker, that would at least be a public service, regardless of all other considerations on plot, character, intellectual rigor, interface, or bad-guy regulating issues (with or without hardware).
Well, yeah, it's a big deal. I think though that the/. crowd blew most of its load on the article that was posted about the original announcement. Crazy kids these days (tm) who think that good games started with Halo and ended with World of Warcraft need to get back to their roots...
DX1 was fantastic because you got presented with a world in which it was possible to think about the philosophy of surveillance and posthumanism, and conversate with well-realized characters, and also in between the chats get to regulate the bad guys with some serious hardware.
While many here have already expressed their disdain for DX:IW, I liked its presentation of a morally bleak world with many possible futures (of varying bleakness), all seriously discussed and described, and also how in between you got to regulate the bad guys with some serious fucking hardware.
Me, if the thing is thoughtful and not an intellectual hack-job, and there is the possibility of some serious bad-guy regulation (preferably with hardware, though after Half-life 2 I've become more flexible on that point), then I think we'll have ourselves a winner.
p.s. to the Editors...perhaps it would be a good plan to space out the almost-dupes a little more; it's hard to get excited today about a game that doesn't yet exist if we were just all excited about it *yesterday* and got it out of our systems.
Seriously? Let's say we were waging a war (or two!) in some remote part of the globe (no way!), and our effectiveness in that war (resupply, moving troops, etc.) depended upon a local base. This is all hypothetical, you understand! Then, let's say a neighbor who is playing host to the US base enabling those wars suddenly and for no explicable reason (heh, heh) un-invites the US military base, its personnel, its materiel, and everything, surprisingly short-circuiting the US' carefully strategized war plans and placing war objectives (never mind soliders) at risk.
In the purely hypothetical (hah!) but eminently possible above scenario, the US will likely do one of the following:
a. Carry on with eqanimity and grace, abandon their war, and leave in peace
b. Ignore the disinvitation and respond with force if ejected *strenuously*
c. bomb the ever-loving shit out of their former hosts and pretend they were never friends in the first place
I've got even money between B and C. You seem to think that the US will "get along fine" with A. I'm saying that's just a tad silly.
No, that's not screwing the pitch, its failing to close the sale. In 2004 we ended up with two pro-war candidates; there was no good candidate to vote for. However, the congressional changeover in 2006 was mostly due to public opinon continuing to turn harshly against the war, and every awareness raising and protest event did its little part, along with all the other ways people can and do get involved with the political process. You seem to be looking for INSTANT GRATIFICATION, which, of course, rarely happens in serious politics. (BTW, this capitalization thing is sort of fun.;) I get now why people shout in chatrooms.)
The 2008 race, depending on the breaks (and a spot of luck), will have either one anti-war candidate or two in the final. Those are results. That certainly wouldn't have happened without people up in arms at the get-go.
That's great news for them, but I somehow doubt the US would put up with its entire global military reach being dismantled if this became a international fad. Do you?
Quote from you: Can you name one sovereign nation that US has ever taken over in order to expand its borders and impose its laws over? Hint: Texas don't count.
You are splitting hairs on "conquered territories" vs. "sovereign nations". Places that were once not part of the US become part of the US by force and then are dictated to. That is the argument (which I think is a reasonable reading of your comment) to which I was responding. Many of those places had legitimate sovereigns who were contravened by US authority and laws after they were conquered.
Also, you best check the actual tortured history of how Hawaii "voted" to become part of the US. I think it started somewhere along with a "fortuitous" assassination of their former head of state. Ditto Texas; the Republic of Texas had an American "immigrant" problem that makes our whining about illegal immigrants fairly ridiculous in comparison. Oddly enough, the hordes of uninvited Americans voted for Texas to become part of America; who'da thought?
LOL @ Gordon Gekko reference:), but in what way do you think that Iraq is "starting to show" that war can "get it done"? Depnding on very specific circumstances war *may* be able to get "it" done, I will readily grant, but your examples can be matched with equivalent ones that worked better without war. Slavery was ended in most countries (e.g. Britain) without a martial shot fired. The Eastern Bloc and then the USSR itself fell without US troops marching unto the the breach. War occurs only in those cases where the exigent circumstances dictate extreme measures, or massive misunderstandings of intelligence (or mere idiocy) cause a commander to believe that the circumstances dictate as such.
The government's definition of terrorist is so plastic that, like justification for traffic stops, it can be made to fit any case. I imagine without too much imagination someone like me could be called a "terrorist" in the government's eyes because I expressed faux shock in an earlier post today that Ron Paul and B. Obama, being so sensible, haven't been shot yet, since nobody so sensible should ever get to be president in the US. (Note to Secret Service: still kidding. Seriously.)
The problem is, people organize for all sorts of reasons, and frustration (justified or otherwise) often leads to radicalization, and along with that, rash words. If the government was really serious about combatting terrorism, esp. domestic terrorism, it would seem more sensible to go after root causes than to waste a huge heap of resources policing the great wide world of the Internet for anything that sounds even remotely scary and dangerous.
umm, why doesn't Texas count? Or Northern Mexico. Or the Phillipines. Or Hawaii. Or the Native Tribes (oh, we ALL get to forget about them!). On the point of US not building empires or dictating to its conquered territories, you epic fail. And please try not to be so naive as to think the the US doesn't use its military presence along with its other influence levers to bend the policies of other nations into a more pleasing shape.
I'm curious if you believe the US would roll over if the elected leaders of Germany, Japan, Turkey, et al. places we have permanent bases decided, for whatever reason, to retract their hospitality for our troops and materiel.
Sure, hugs don't get it done. Iraq has shown, however (as Vietnam before it) guns and bombs don't get it done either. I think Paul is on the right track when he says that trade and diplomacy have a better shot; money *does* get things done.
I was standing along side *half a million people* on third avenue in protest of the Iraq War a few years back. Perhaps you slept through it or perhaps you simply missed in because the MSM had shit coverage. However, the contention that *nobody* comes out en masse for the things they care about is about as much a bullshit uninformed groupthink ridiculous point as I have ever heard on Slashdot (yeah, those were the English grammar rules regarding the use of adjectives just screaming out in terror, but I *silenced* them with my Death Star of righteous indignation;) ; the masses do care and they often can be made to show up. The revolution is not televised, but that obviously doesn't mean it isn't happening! Just about the only thing that can kill change dead in its tracks is the isolated pessimism (seen here on/. with depressing regularity) that convinces one another, and ourselves, that we *shouldn't* get up and help change things.
Almost as bad is the "going through the motions" notion that you seem to be arguing for. No, nothing will change, and no, it is only going to get worse...but STILL VOTE FOR THE GOOD CANDIDATES and STILL TALK UP THE HARD ISSUES, cause, you know, you *should*. This is what is called screwing your own pitch. If you don't believe in the product, why should the customer?
Ditto on Paul, Obama...though I maintain the naive hope that Obama is more independent of those interests than we might assume. What I like about Obama in addition is his stance about the government's privacy rights; namely, he doesn't think there are any. His stance on government online operability and transparency is refreshing and, so far, unreplicated by the others, even Paul. IIRC, he did some good stuff on both in the Illinois legislature dduring his stint there; caught my eye.
So sensible you would have thought someone would have shot those two by now. (Kidding, Secret Service! Kidding...).:) This sort of reasonable and principled policy approach cannot be allowed to mainstream in American politics!
Not for nothing but the actually painful injections tend to be the intramuscular ones...for which "finding a vein" is not part of the playbook. I agree though, a skilled intravenous needle shouldn't hurt; I donate blood regularly, and every flobotamist I've ever had worth half a damn did the original stick without more that a little minor discomfort. The damn spring loaded prick-needle for the anemia test hurts more.
Dude, re:patch=evil, I get where you are coming from--in theory--but this is way too cynical even for me. Sure this patch will make it easier to medicate kid's brains without the usual discomfort and protest, and that's surely bad (brainfucking should look painful enough to be discouraging, IMHO), but it also will help people like diabetics and cancer patients that need regular messy injections now that wouldn't if this patch were available. All technologies can be used for evil; the onus is always on us to use a new advance in ways that promote good and forbid evil, not vice versa.
I used 4.3; Bloodlines came to mind because I picked it up pretty recently. My compy is, by all reasonable metrics, a complete POS and so it didn't surprise me that I had some FPS issues. I just wasn't expecting a box that could run HL2 (the same engine, no less) at 17 fps to choke so badly on Bloodlines.
The way I would put it is that DX1 was morally ambiguous; DX2 was amoral.
I thought that too right up until the *very end*. Personally, I found JC Denton's arguments about "fixing" democracy the most intriguing of the four, but not all that convincing. I found the Illuminati's answers wholly unappetizing; benevolent dictatorship doesn't "do it for me". So the first time I played through I eventually chose the Templar luddites as a sort of default, and *surprise, surprise* the game's endings do portray that option as being an *actually* bad one (I believe the vid was a lynch mob hanging some guy...perhaps you?...overlaid with Saman's drivel about purity as voice-over, IIRC). Well, that had a moral punchline, and so I says to myself I says "Well, that wasn't the right choice".
Reload.
So then I figure, well none of the four are very appealing, so, why not just kill all of these aspiring emperors and let humanity go its own way. So, I waste them all (what I figured, ironically, as the second most moral option). Well, sonofabitch!, it turns out that if humanity goes its own way, the Omar (the fscking Borg!) win by default. Also not portrayed as a pleasant future. So I says to myself I says..."Huh".
Reload.
So I thought about the moral lesson being about choosing amongst unappealing but ultimately bright futures instead of succumbing to the natural instinct to reject all options because they don't fit one''s own preconceptions exactly. The other two endings are portrayed as morally positive, as humanity survives in some non-Dark future. Not a moral lesson I particularly agree with, for sure, but certainly a non-neutral outlook.
I think you are right, though, in that DX:IW fosters a somewhat mercenary, amoral stance until the very end (instead of DX1 hammering you with moral choices pretty consistently until the big reveal) and so it seems less fair when the consequences finally are revealed as being different and mattering on the moral plane.
*Spoiler alert* for those precious few of you still haven't played these two games.
DX1 had several of those "oh shit, I'm on the wrong side" moral moments (NSF are fighting the good fight?!, the Red Arrow are merely duped pawns?!, Tong wants me to end civilization as we know it?! Sonofabitch!!), but one thing I didn't appreciate about DX1 was that besides recognizing those moments, there are precious few choices that *matter* that follow from them (such as saving your brother in the Hotel escape). The other thing I didn't like about DX1 was that the sides, once they are clear to you, are fairly cleanly cut 'good guy'/'bad guy', and the good guys were not willing to go as far as the bad guys at achieving their ends.
For all its ways in which DX:IW fell short, its moral universe was more realistically grey, and the choices were among parties that were *all* fairly ruthless and were asking for your allegiance not on the basis of warm cuddlies, but actually making a philosophical or ideological appeal. And you were free to choose between the radical direct democracy managed by the AI, the syncretist fuzzy-wuzzy religionists who were secretly partnered with the radical capitalists, the Luddites (who of all the factions are played the least sympathetically, if only to be fair, because the entire world around your character is one giant argument in their favor), or the fucking Borg.
I also liked the moment in DX:IW where you catch up to Tong to here him regret destroying civilization as we knew it. It was a cute moral note to the point that everything didn't turn out as neatly as the characters at the end of DX1 described it would (if you took their respective sides).
DX1 had fantastic gameplay, its characterizations were richer, and of course it was longer and more absorbing, and for those bits it will remain a head above its sequel. I just don't think that the charge of a lack of moral immediacy and ambiguity can be rightly lodged against DX:IW.
Oh, I used the unofficial patch, and while for my compy it moved Bloodlines from almost completely broken to merely jerky and painful, I did suffer through the gameplay to enjoy the story. I really, really liked the interactions and the storyline; particularly playing as a Malkavian and trying to puzzle out what it was that *I* just said.
But something needs to be said for killing all the bad guys without a framerate of 3 fps. I suffered through Bloodlines twice, and there is no way I'm doing it again without a smooth gameplay experience.
You win the thread. Lots of luck educating the masses.;)
Re:I think I speak for everyone ...
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Deus Ex 3 Announced
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I guess I was one of the lucky ones who had no problems running DX:IW smoothly. (Vampire Bloodlines, OTOH, can suck my...). I loved the original DX with a passion, as one of the few games that broke through the glass ceiling into art from mere entertainment. I liked the sequel very much (from the looks of the comments around I'd say I was one of the few), and while it wasn't quite art the way the first was, it had its own charms, and FWIW in my opinion it did not sacrifice the philosophical and environmental richness of the first, but merely extended it in a direction most people didn't care for.
The "Pequod's/Queequeg's" mini-story was fantastic, and previewed the main plot twist without being clumsy.
Perhaps. I agree that it seems, re: Moore's Law et al., that a huge infrastructure investment in *boxes and racks* is foolhardy. However, what if the investment is just a placeholder for more valuable enduring capital? If, ten years from now, the limiter is not bandwidth but power consumption (energy crisis?), would it not be a huge advantage to have installations already well-established, and worry about what goes in them as computers become ever more powerful? The jokes about "how about a beowulf cluster of those!" won't be so funny when a company can roll out a massively parallel installation at the drop of the proverbial hat because they already have the power, facility, and distribution infrastructure in place to welcome the next big GHz bump or new computing paradigm.
Also, I imagine that the market in data analysis and search is only just beginning. How much computing power would you need to, say, search all recorded video on the net using a single frame from the video? Could be possible, but man would that be a bitch on processing, back-end. Similar to searching for an image from a fragment of an image. These are the services I expect to see just following along from the paradigm of finding texts from a fragment of text, extrapolated to our other media paradigms.
Think bigger. Imagine a context algorithm that recognizes two-dimensional images as three-dimensional objects, and apply it to an engine that takes a photo of a location and identifies it with that location, based on the items (e.g. landmarks) in that photo. Or a searchable human gene database; (well shit, I didn't know I was Obama's 8th cousin. Does that make Cheney my 14th cousin? I wonder if I have the Republican gene...). Those will be a bitch to back end.
Point being, costs of computing diminish at an accelerated rate, but costs of infrastructure (particularly power) are less plastic. Providing the next big information service will still depend, for consumers, on fast response times, which means a whole new generation of back-end server rack forests. The barriers to entry are having the meatspace brick-and-mortar facilities (with their private roads and power plants), not the computers that go in them. That's why these moves by MS and Google are scary to me.
You joke, but it kind of creeps me out just how "world domination'-y this Google/Microsoft data center rush is. I mean, people around here bitch about barriers to market entry in things like phone or ISP service; the information-collator business will make competition costs in those businesses look like setting up competing lemonade stands by comparison.
These guys are playing Risk for ten, perhaps twenty years from now (banking of course on the world not ending in fire by 2020; then again, what do you have to lose if you're wrong?) and nobody else is even on the field. Is there even anybody who is the Risk version of Australia here who is quietly building data centers that nobody's paying attention to, waiting for the giants to beat each other to death?
If it is true that Kasparov et al. have no influence or support, then why on earth would the powers-that-be arrest him and risk sympathetic attention--strike that--any attention whatsoever be paid to him?
I think they are calculating from a different set of numbers than you, my friend.
In 2004, the Libertarian and Green candidates for President of the United States were arrested for attempting to enter the building in which the presidential debates were being held.
Yes, it is that serious, and, yes, it does happen here.
I like what you said, except your point #2 is based on a misreading. The "useful Arts" back in those days referred explicitly to craftsmanship and engineering--what we would expect patent law to cover today. It's the "writings" and "authors" wording that leads to our conception of art (in the modern sense) copyright.
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That's very true, and I think it was both a strength and a weakness (you put your finger right on the weakness). The corresponding strength of having the world be too far divorced from ours to bear too much resemblance is it gives the writers a much freer hand in exploring ideas that might otherwise be shackled by our expectations of how the world works.
Example: the only character turn in DX1 that never sold for me was Paul and J.C. up and deciding that merging with Helios was a bright and brilliant way to go. The justification (practical and philosophical) was sorely lacking, and it also was the most irritating ending because of its ease and abruptness. The biggest problem with it was that it was barely believable that the world we know would react in the manner they described. Fast-forward to DX:IW, and the fully fleshed out concept revealed in the "chat" with J.C. at the antarctic base (machine-regulated direct democracy coupled with a radical leveling of human potential, by solving the problems of information asymmetry and the evolutionary baggage that leads to unoptimized behaviors) that they were sort of reaching for with the J.C./Helios thing in DX1 became *explainable* and so it was explained, and well. Not that the idea itself was much more attractive, but at least it got to walk around and breathe a little.
DX1 was a phenomenal game partly because you had to care about the world of the game because you could relate to it and its characters, and the freedom that DX:IW traded it for ultimately turned out to be a net loser. That is why DX1 is a brilliant game and DX:IW is merely good. One can only hope that the DX3 writers can write up a world that is not only emotionally engaging, but also free enough from our pre-conceptions for the discussions of Really Big Ideas (tm).
Geeks have something better to do that geek out about something geeky? Whaaaaat?
And also, I am deeply indebted to DX1 for turning me on to G. K. Chesterton. If DX3 could do something similar for some other forgotten but important thinker, that would at least be a public service, regardless of all other considerations on plot, character, intellectual rigor, interface, or bad-guy regulating issues (with or without hardware).
Well, yeah, it's a big deal. I think though that the /. crowd blew most of its load on the article that was posted about the original announcement. Crazy kids these days (tm) who think that good games started with Halo and ended with World of Warcraft need to get back to their roots...
DX1 was fantastic because you got presented with a world in which it was possible to think about the philosophy of surveillance and posthumanism, and conversate with well-realized characters, and also in between the chats get to regulate the bad guys with some serious hardware.
While many here have already expressed their disdain for DX:IW, I liked its presentation of a morally bleak world with many possible futures (of varying bleakness), all seriously discussed and described, and also how in between you got to regulate the bad guys with some serious fucking hardware.
Me, if the thing is thoughtful and not an intellectual hack-job, and there is the possibility of some serious bad-guy regulation (preferably with hardware, though after Half-life 2 I've become more flexible on that point), then I think we'll have ourselves a winner.
p.s. to the Editors...perhaps it would be a good plan to space out the almost-dupes a little more; it's hard to get excited today about a game that doesn't yet exist if we were just all excited about it *yesterday* and got it out of our systems.
Seriously? Let's say we were waging a war (or two!) in some remote part of the globe (no way!), and our effectiveness in that war (resupply, moving troops, etc.) depended upon a local base. This is all hypothetical, you understand! Then, let's say a neighbor who is playing host to the US base enabling those wars suddenly and for no explicable reason (heh, heh) un-invites the US military base, its personnel, its materiel, and everything, surprisingly short-circuiting the US' carefully strategized war plans and placing war objectives (never mind soliders) at risk.
In the purely hypothetical (hah!) but eminently possible above scenario, the US will likely do one of the following:
a. Carry on with eqanimity and grace, abandon their war, and leave in peace
b. Ignore the disinvitation and respond with force if ejected *strenuously*
c. bomb the ever-loving shit out of their former hosts and pretend they were never friends in the first place
I've got even money between B and C. You seem to think that the US will "get along fine" with A. I'm saying that's just a tad silly.
No, that's not screwing the pitch, its failing to close the sale. In 2004 we ended up with two pro-war candidates; there was no good candidate to vote for. However, the congressional changeover in 2006 was mostly due to public opinon continuing to turn harshly against the war, and every awareness raising and protest event did its little part, along with all the other ways people can and do get involved with the political process. You seem to be looking for INSTANT GRATIFICATION, which, of course, rarely happens in serious politics. (BTW, this capitalization thing is sort of fun. ;) I get now why people shout in chatrooms.)
The 2008 race, depending on the breaks (and a spot of luck), will have either one anti-war candidate or two in the final. Those are results. That certainly wouldn't have happened without people up in arms at the get-go.
That's great news for them, but I somehow doubt the US would put up with its entire global military reach being dismantled if this became a international fad. Do you?
Quote from you: Can you name one sovereign nation that US has ever taken over in order to expand its borders and impose its laws over? Hint: Texas don't count.
You are splitting hairs on "conquered territories" vs. "sovereign nations". Places that were once not part of the US become part of the US by force and then are dictated to. That is the argument (which I think is a reasonable reading of your comment) to which I was responding. Many of those places had legitimate sovereigns who were contravened by US authority and laws after they were conquered.
Also, you best check the actual tortured history of how Hawaii "voted" to become part of the US. I think it started somewhere along with a "fortuitous" assassination of their former head of state. Ditto Texas; the Republic of Texas had an American "immigrant" problem that makes our whining about illegal immigrants fairly ridiculous in comparison. Oddly enough, the hordes of uninvited Americans voted for Texas to become part of America; who'da thought?
LOL @ Gordon Gekko reference :), but in what way do you think that Iraq is "starting to show" that war can "get it done"? Depnding on very specific circumstances war *may* be able to get "it" done, I will readily grant, but your examples can be matched with equivalent ones that worked better without war. Slavery was ended in most countries (e.g. Britain) without a martial shot fired. The Eastern Bloc and then the USSR itself fell without US troops marching unto the the breach. War occurs only in those cases where the exigent circumstances dictate extreme measures, or massive misunderstandings of intelligence (or mere idiocy) cause a commander to believe that the circumstances dictate as such.
The government's definition of terrorist is so plastic that, like justification for traffic stops, it can be made to fit any case. I imagine without too much imagination someone like me could be called a "terrorist" in the government's eyes because I expressed faux shock in an earlier post today that Ron Paul and B. Obama, being so sensible, haven't been shot yet, since nobody so sensible should ever get to be president in the US. (Note to Secret Service: still kidding. Seriously.)
The problem is, people organize for all sorts of reasons, and frustration (justified or otherwise) often leads to radicalization, and along with that, rash words. If the government was really serious about combatting terrorism, esp. domestic terrorism, it would seem more sensible to go after root causes than to waste a huge heap of resources policing the great wide world of the Internet for anything that sounds even remotely scary and dangerous.
umm, why doesn't Texas count? Or Northern Mexico. Or the Phillipines. Or Hawaii. Or the Native Tribes (oh, we ALL get to forget about them!). On the point of US not building empires or dictating to its conquered territories, you epic fail. And please try not to be so naive as to think the the US doesn't use its military presence along with its other influence levers to bend the policies of other nations into a more pleasing shape.
I'm curious if you believe the US would roll over if the elected leaders of Germany, Japan, Turkey, et al. places we have permanent bases decided, for whatever reason, to retract their hospitality for our troops and materiel.
Sure, hugs don't get it done. Iraq has shown, however (as Vietnam before it) guns and bombs don't get it done either. I think Paul is on the right track when he says that trade and diplomacy have a better shot; money *does* get things done.
I was standing along side *half a million people* on third avenue in protest of the Iraq War a few years back. Perhaps you slept through it or perhaps you simply missed in because the MSM had shit coverage. However, the contention that *nobody* comes out en masse for the things they care about is about as much a bullshit uninformed groupthink ridiculous point as I have ever heard on Slashdot (yeah, those were the English grammar rules regarding the use of adjectives just screaming out in terror, but I *silenced* them with my Death Star of righteous indignation ;) ; the masses do care and they often can be made to show up. The revolution is not televised, but that obviously doesn't mean it isn't happening! Just about the only thing that can kill change dead in its tracks is the isolated pessimism (seen here on /. with depressing regularity) that convinces one another, and ourselves, that we *shouldn't* get up and help change things.
Almost as bad is the "going through the motions" notion that you seem to be arguing for. No, nothing will change, and no, it is only going to get worse...but STILL VOTE FOR THE GOOD CANDIDATES and STILL TALK UP THE HARD ISSUES, cause, you know, you *should*. This is what is called screwing your own pitch. If you don't believe in the product, why should the customer?
Don't whine, show up. It's better, I swear.
Cute sig...the word fell out of my brain while I was still sleeping and, yes, I haven't written it in a long while. Good catch, annoying pedant. :)
Ditto on Paul, Obama...though I maintain the naive hope that Obama is more independent of those interests than we might assume. What I like about Obama in addition is his stance about the government's privacy rights; namely, he doesn't think there are any. His stance on government online operability and transparency is refreshing and, so far, unreplicated by the others, even Paul. IIRC, he did some good stuff on both in the Illinois legislature dduring his stint there; caught my eye.
So sensible you would have thought someone would have shot those two by now. (Kidding, Secret Service! Kidding...). :) This sort of reasonable and principled policy approach cannot be allowed to mainstream in American politics!
Not for nothing but the actually painful injections tend to be the intramuscular ones...for which "finding a vein" is not part of the playbook. I agree though, a skilled intravenous needle shouldn't hurt; I donate blood regularly, and every flobotamist I've ever had worth half a damn did the original stick without more that a little minor discomfort. The damn spring loaded prick-needle for the anemia test hurts more.
Dude, re:patch=evil, I get where you are coming from--in theory--but this is way too cynical even for me. Sure this patch will make it easier to medicate kid's brains without the usual discomfort and protest, and that's surely bad (brainfucking should look painful enough to be discouraging, IMHO), but it also will help people like diabetics and cancer patients that need regular messy injections now that wouldn't if this patch were available. All technologies can be used for evil; the onus is always on us to use a new advance in ways that promote good and forbid evil, not vice versa.
I used 4.3; Bloodlines came to mind because I picked it up pretty recently. My compy is, by all reasonable metrics, a complete POS and so it didn't surprise me that I had some FPS issues. I just wasn't expecting a box that could run HL2 (the same engine, no less) at 17 fps to choke so badly on Bloodlines.
The way I would put it is that DX1 was morally ambiguous; DX2 was amoral.
I thought that too right up until the *very end*. Personally, I found JC Denton's arguments about "fixing" democracy the most intriguing of the four, but not all that convincing. I found the Illuminati's answers wholly unappetizing; benevolent dictatorship doesn't "do it for me". So the first time I played through I eventually chose the Templar luddites as a sort of default, and *surprise, surprise* the game's endings do portray that option as being an *actually* bad one (I believe the vid was a lynch mob hanging some guy...perhaps you?...overlaid with Saman's drivel about purity as voice-over, IIRC). Well, that had a moral punchline, and so I says to myself I says "Well, that wasn't the right choice".
Reload.
So then I figure, well none of the four are very appealing, so, why not just kill all of these aspiring emperors and let humanity go its own way. So, I waste them all (what I figured, ironically, as the second most moral option). Well, sonofabitch!, it turns out that if humanity goes its own way, the Omar (the fscking Borg!) win by default. Also not portrayed as a pleasant future. So I says to myself I says..."Huh".
Reload.
So I thought about the moral lesson being about choosing amongst unappealing but ultimately bright futures instead of succumbing to the natural instinct to reject all options because they don't fit one''s own preconceptions exactly. The other two endings are portrayed as morally positive, as humanity survives in some non-Dark future. Not a moral lesson I particularly agree with, for sure, but certainly a non-neutral outlook.
I think you are right, though, in that DX:IW fosters a somewhat mercenary, amoral stance until the very end (instead of DX1 hammering you with moral choices pretty consistently until the big reveal) and so it seems less fair when the consequences finally are revealed as being different and mattering on the moral plane.
*Spoiler alert* for those precious few of you still haven't played these two games.
DX1 had several of those "oh shit, I'm on the wrong side" moral moments (NSF are fighting the good fight?!, the Red Arrow are merely duped pawns?!, Tong wants me to end civilization as we know it?! Sonofabitch!!), but one thing I didn't appreciate about DX1 was that besides recognizing those moments, there are precious few choices that *matter* that follow from them (such as saving your brother in the Hotel escape). The other thing I didn't like about DX1 was that the sides, once they are clear to you, are fairly cleanly cut 'good guy'/'bad guy', and the good guys were not willing to go as far as the bad guys at achieving their ends.
For all its ways in which DX:IW fell short, its moral universe was more realistically grey, and the choices were among parties that were *all* fairly ruthless and were asking for your allegiance not on the basis of warm cuddlies, but actually making a philosophical or ideological appeal. And you were free to choose between the radical direct democracy managed by the AI, the syncretist fuzzy-wuzzy religionists who were secretly partnered with the radical capitalists, the Luddites (who of all the factions are played the least sympathetically, if only to be fair, because the entire world around your character is one giant argument in their favor), or the fucking Borg.
I also liked the moment in DX:IW where you catch up to Tong to here him regret destroying civilization as we knew it. It was a cute moral note to the point that everything didn't turn out as neatly as the characters at the end of DX1 described it would (if you took their respective sides).
DX1 had fantastic gameplay, its characterizations were richer, and of course it was longer and more absorbing, and for those bits it will remain a head above its sequel. I just don't think that the charge of a lack of moral immediacy and ambiguity can be rightly lodged against DX:IW.
Oh, I used the unofficial patch, and while for my compy it moved Bloodlines from almost completely broken to merely jerky and painful, I did suffer through the gameplay to enjoy the story. I really, really liked the interactions and the storyline; particularly playing as a Malkavian and trying to puzzle out what it was that *I* just said.
But something needs to be said for killing all the bad guys without a framerate of 3 fps. I suffered through Bloodlines twice, and there is no way I'm doing it again without a smooth gameplay experience.
You win the thread. Lots of luck educating the masses. ;)
I guess I was one of the lucky ones who had no problems running DX:IW smoothly. (Vampire Bloodlines, OTOH, can suck my...). I loved the original DX with a passion, as one of the few games that broke through the glass ceiling into art from mere entertainment. I liked the sequel very much (from the looks of the comments around I'd say I was one of the few), and while it wasn't quite art the way the first was, it had its own charms, and FWIW in my opinion it did not sacrifice the philosophical and environmental richness of the first, but merely extended it in a direction most people didn't care for.
The "Pequod's/Queequeg's" mini-story was fantastic, and previewed the main plot twist without being clumsy.
Perhaps. I agree that it seems, re: Moore's Law et al., that a huge infrastructure investment in *boxes and racks* is foolhardy. However, what if the investment is just a placeholder for more valuable enduring capital? If, ten years from now, the limiter is not bandwidth but power consumption (energy crisis?), would it not be a huge advantage to have installations already well-established, and worry about what goes in them as computers become ever more powerful? The jokes about "how about a beowulf cluster of those!" won't be so funny when a company can roll out a massively parallel installation at the drop of the proverbial hat because they already have the power, facility, and distribution infrastructure in place to welcome the next big GHz bump or new computing paradigm.
Also, I imagine that the market in data analysis and search is only just beginning. How much computing power would you need to, say, search all recorded video on the net using a single frame from the video? Could be possible, but man would that be a bitch on processing, back-end. Similar to searching for an image from a fragment of an image. These are the services I expect to see just following along from the paradigm of finding texts from a fragment of text, extrapolated to our other media paradigms.
Think bigger. Imagine a context algorithm that recognizes two-dimensional images as three-dimensional objects, and apply it to an engine that takes a photo of a location and identifies it with that location, based on the items (e.g. landmarks) in that photo. Or a searchable human gene database; (well shit, I didn't know I was Obama's 8th cousin. Does that make Cheney my 14th cousin? I wonder if I have the Republican gene...). Those will be a bitch to back end.
Point being, costs of computing diminish at an accelerated rate, but costs of infrastructure (particularly power) are less plastic. Providing the next big information service will still depend, for consumers, on fast response times, which means a whole new generation of back-end server rack forests. The barriers to entry are having the meatspace brick-and-mortar facilities (with their private roads and power plants), not the computers that go in them. That's why these moves by MS and Google are scary to me.
You joke, but it kind of creeps me out just how "world domination'-y this Google/Microsoft data center rush is. I mean, people around here bitch about barriers to market entry in things like phone or ISP service; the information-collator business will make competition costs in those businesses look like setting up competing lemonade stands by comparison.
These guys are playing Risk for ten, perhaps twenty years from now (banking of course on the world not ending in fire by 2020; then again, what do you have to lose if you're wrong?) and nobody else is even on the field. Is there even anybody who is the Risk version of Australia here who is quietly building data centers that nobody's paying attention to, waiting for the giants to beat each other to death?
If it is true that Kasparov et al. have no influence or support, then why on earth would the powers-that-be arrest him and risk sympathetic attention--strike that--any attention whatsoever be paid to him?
I think they are calculating from a different set of numbers than you, my friend.
In 2004, the Libertarian and Green candidates for President of the United States were arrested for attempting to enter the building in which the presidential debates were being held.
Yes, it is that serious, and, yes, it does happen here.
I like what you said, except your point #2 is based on a misreading. The "useful Arts" back in those days referred explicitly to craftsmanship and engineering--what we would expect patent law to cover today. It's the "writings" and "authors" wording that leads to our conception of art (in the modern sense) copyright.