Pardon me for replying to two posts at once, but I'm going to get both the parent and grandparent posts at once here.
Grandparent:
Science is already and has always been deeply political. Since well before the days of the great philosophers of ancient Greece, it's been tradition if not human nature to politicize, emotionalize, spiritualize, and pulverize science along with reality itself for one's personal gain. If you have an agenda, one of the best ways to support it is with pieces of information that you can refer to as facts. It doesn't matter if they're actually true or even partly true, they just need to be believable and consistent enough to fool whoever you're pitching your point to. Remember that statistical research of every kind also falls under that very same umbrella, and - if you're willing to believe the figure - 42.7 percent of all statistics are pulled out of thin air. When was the last time you heard someone start tossing unverifiable percentages around to support a claim about something?
Everyone's at least a little stupid. Most people are very stupid. Average intelligence doesn't mean that someone is moderately smart like they're in the middle of the road for functionally intelligent people, it just means that they're a few IQ points away from a mental disability. In a world of believers, appeals to emotion and the ability to convince will always be more powerful than facts and the ability to provide proof. If you really want to do yourself and the world a favor and deliver some cold hard facts, you have to be a better reality salesman than anyone who might have an interest in preventing you from doing so, because to - if you're willing to believe the figure - at least 50 percent of the people out there it doesn't really matter how right you are. (But don't quote me on that.)
Here's a great example for you from the dawn of the electric age: The War of Currents, during which Thomas Edison demonstrated his science hating, emotionally appealing, fact-phobic barbarian side when his fortunes in direct current power transmission infrastructure were threatened by superior alternating current technology. Edison's infamous and baseless FUD campaign against alternating current dates back to the 1880's.
And the parent:
How long ago did you become cynical about geekdom? Once upon a time, being called a geek or a nerd implied that you actually knew something. Just ten years ago it at least meant that you could fool people into thinking you were more computer literate than you actually were. Now it's just a shitty fashion statement that says to the world, "Look at me, I relish electronic entertainment and can build MySpace pages unassisted," while allowing you to wear ratty and mismatched business casual clothing, your old high-school duds, and inch thick 'Emo' glasses in public. For reasons I could only explain as infernal, the vulgar tackiness of the socially impaired nerd caste has been refined into a tasteless yet widely desirable template of appearance for effeminate young adult males.
The modern so called geek, especially any flavor of self identifying dweeb, is usually just someone who thinks that they're smart who overindulges in one or more highly niched indoor hobbies. Whether or not their claims of intelligence bear out in reality depends on the idiot in question.
Look, asking for MMORPG developers to stop cloning Everquest is a really, really tall order. If you want a real game, go play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup or something, because all MMORPGs are right now (with very few good exceptions) are glorified level treadmills and loot ladders with shitty low-tactical automatic combat of some variety.
Let's see. We're supposedly transitioning to a 'white collar' service economy. First off, anyone who believes that could ever work is an idiot. What, we're all going to become managers and executives presiding over third-world industrial centers? Maybe in a White Nationalist's twisted wet dream. The American industrial sector has been gutted. You absolutely must have credentials to become employed for anything that even remotely resembles a living wage, unless you like the idea of working multiple jobs and having no life and no time for a family you may or may not be supporting.
Companies claim shortages of skilled workers. (Which is a huge lie in itself, check out what that garbage really means at the Programmers Guild.) Everyone jumps on skilled labor hoping to find good work - not just easy money, but any money at all in sufficient quantities for them to secure an at least modestly comfortable life. The market becomes glutted because the companies that ordinarily hire skilled laborers, whose profits and executive pay-scales are presently extraordinarily high in general as far as I am aware, are unwilling to hire them at anything more than department store wages, so they exploit guest workers instead to exclude American workers. A glut of 'heads' forms because we don't hire 'hands' anymore, and the race to the bottom continues.
Before anyone claims I've got my tinfoil hat on a bit too tight, I don't believe a conspiracy to run the country into the ground is at work here. Rather, companies have conspired to find the cheapest labor they can possibly hire for the sake of improving their profits, satisfying investors and executives alike, and because they can exploit foreigners for pennies on the dollar they most certainly do. The consequences of this aren't the end they sought, just the consequences of it. We already watched this happen with the off-shoring of our industrial sector. Now it's happening all over again with skilled labor. Before too long these jobs and the credentials required to get them - if you can get them - won't be worth a McDonald's wage. Talk about a 'service' economy - food service, that is.
You know what's even funnier to me? It's how quickly Mister Don't-Cast-Judgment goes and casts judgment on his fellow poster, as though it's possible to discern someone's character from a single Slashdot posting. Let's see, first he implied that I agree with among other things Nazi genocide by posting a link to the Nuremburg Laws, and then for no apparent reason called me a Republican (which I'm really not, I'm really more of a moderate centrist myself), while saying that I'm angry, uptight, and evidently carry a chip on my shoulder, which couldn't be further from the truth here in real life. Whatever though, shrill pansies on the internet are always excellent judges of character. I must be some kind of monster, right? A right-wing monster, too! You presumably liberal Slashdotters better look out, the conservative boogie man is coming to get you and stifle your freedoms!
If anyone here is uptight, raw-nerved, and itching to start an argument, it's probably ThousandStars. Of course, I've 'brought myself down to his level' by choosing to perpetuate this exchange of ridicule, so it's not as though I can make claims of moral or intellectual superiority here. That's not the issue, though. The issue is that I struck a nerve with someone who supposedly doesn't believe in casting judgment on other people by casting judgment on people I met and worked with during my time at school, which in turn provoked him to cast judgment on me from afar in the process of stating why I am incorrect in casting judgment myself, and I think that's funny. It's funny and it makes me smile.
Now I'll needlessly justify myself in my reply to you because I don't feel like posting twice and I'm really on a roll.
I developed the attitude I have toward dumb people of poor character who irresponsibly reproduce (and dumb people of poor character in general) through experience with them, not observation of them. I reserve the right to judge that large handful of girls in my class in particular because I met them, exchanged words and work with them, and was otherwise in contact with them for many weeks on end. (With a class that heavy on group work and random groups, you wind up getting to know pretty much everyone.) I found them to be a bunch of stupid, arrogant, smart-mouthed layabouts who were nothing short of contemptuous toward their peers and life in general. If someone takes offense to that, frankly it isn't my problem. I pity the kids of those girls and I hope their mothers turn their lives around - especially the two that were removed from school for drug offenses and the other two that were removed for bad behavior. While their attitudes and lack of intellect were hardly uncommon in my school, they stick out because they're having kids, who through poor upbringing and all-too-likely neglect will probably inherit their mothers' poor attitudes and poorer intelligence, thus continuing an all too difficult to break cycle of stupidity that's been running my home town into the dirt.
To be honest, I don't really wish any harm on them or their kids, but to say that they're dead weight on society as they were is too kind.
Let me tell you a little story about my senior English class when I was in high school.
I was in the first-period senior English class. While my English grades and test scores were among the best in the school, I opted out of going to the advanced English classes because of the hellish workloads encountered there. This meant I got stuck with the average Indiana teenage crowd, and let's just say that most people here can't read so well. It's amazing, really. I really want to know how functionally illiterate kids wind up in their senior year of high school, but I digress, there's more to this story than that.
There were only about ten people in that class of thirty that could read well. There were also literally seven pregnant girls in there. I don't know why they all got shoveled into that class - it may have been the time of day, and they always got to leave early, too - but they were all in there. They were the dumbest girls I've ever seen. None of them could read. I'm not talking about Shakespeare or something, I'm talking about the simplest shit. They couldn't pronounce words with more than two syllables, they didn't understand or even attempt to grasp what they were reading, nothing. Totally brain-dead, with kids on the way. Seven stupid, pregnant girls were in that class, and it was nothing short of soul-crushing to see that not only were people like this allowed to breathe the same air that I do, but that they were also having more sex than I was - and to the detriment of society, breeding as a result.
With brains like that, they'll be next to unemployable in the job market here. They're going to spend the rest of their miserable, worthless lives on welfare, no doubt failing to raise their bastard kids properly. Those kids will then enter into society and likely perpetuate the stupidity of their parents while having yet more bastard welfare children themselves. Meanwhile, I'm going to be a middle aged tax-payer, looking down on these pitiful new entrants to society and their kin, and while cursing their reliance upon the welfare system, I will lament that my penis has by then received so little use.
The thing is, it may no longer be a stereotype now. If the article is to be believed, there is now statistical evidence to prove that the smarter you are, the less sex you have. The article also provides possible reasons as to why that is.
"An intellectual is someone who has found one thing that's more interesting than sex."
I can't imagine what. I haven't met a single nerd or other 'intellectually gifted' individual that wasn't at least moderately preoccupied with sex. The problem with them was that while they were highly social among their own kind, they had the awfullest time trying to get along with 'normal' people, most of whom didn't share their interests. I'd think that the lack of compatible partners combined with their inability to seek them out contributed more to their ongoing virginity than anything. Information in the article seems to support that claim.
In the context of the crowd Harrison is referring to, a 'purist' is synonymous with a 'hardcore' gamer. It's simply a less demeaning way of calling someone a nerd who thinks fifty hour long mildly-interactive movies qualify as games. Nintendo's new strategy evidently doesn't include that kind of gamer.
Let's look at the history of E3 (as I understand it, anyway) and try to figure out what it turned into.
In a nutshell, the Electronic Entertainment Expo was supposed to be a trade show. It was a place for producers, publishers, retailers, and hardware manufacturers to mingle and network, showcase products to one another, and set up business deals. (This is the point of a trade show, after all.) It was also a significant press event, where companies would go to make presentations and hopefully turn some heads, both to generate hype and impress people who might publish and sell their products. Since it was open to the public, the people who would actually be buying the games could see them first hand before they even hit store shelves, which was part of the reason E3 was such an effective hype-generating tool for producers.
Time passed. E3 got bigger, generated more hype, attracted more people, and became much less of a trade show and much more of a press and marketing event. This was cool and all for the fans and the event-goers, who came to celebrate their favorite hobby and get a first-hand peek into it's future, but for the purposes of doing business it became an expensive nightmare. This is why it was restructured. Unfortunately, this restructuring caused many usual attendees to avoid the show all together, and some others to openly question the new format. After you look at what really happened, it's easy to understand why.
Due to the new format - which, as I understand it, also practically excludes anyone who doesn't already have a strong foothold in the industry already - it became a still-expensive but very poor press event, and served as a trade show for companies that are already well connected. There really isn't a point to 'doing E3' anymore for the people who actually showed up. It no longer includes or interests the public, and the services it provides as a trade show aren't as important to the companies attending, many of whom could just as easily set up meetings themselves with publishers and retailers at a much smaller expense to both parties. It defeats the whole purpose of E3 as both a media event and a trade fair event, and if that conclusion is correct, there really isn't a good reason for the current attendees to support E3 in it's current format.
Of course, my understanding could be flawed. I've read a great deal about it and have tried to make sense of the new event in spite of conflicting accounts and widely varied opinions, but the one recurring theme I saw during this E3 was the big snore. All it looks like to me now is just another place to host an all too ordinary press conference, and a lame trade show for people who don't need trade shows.
Being an Indiana resident, this hardly comes as a surprise. Let's just wait until the Dunes National Park undergoes a die-off, kind of like the White River did when Guide Lamp got away with dumping an undisclosed quantity of toxic waste into it. That'll piss everyone off, I'm sure...
There's a reason Nintendo is looking toward the wider, uninitiated market to make their fortunes selling video games and consoles. These people will buy them. Hardcore gamers - mostly jobless kids who want increasingly elaborate, sophisticated, and engaging interactive cut-scenes to brutally scrutinize and waste their seemingly infinite leisure time on - might scoff at the Wii, but look who's selling consoles the fastest worldwide. Look which company is growing their consumer base the most rapidly. They've certainly done something right, and if the Wii actually gets a good library here in the next year for the market it's attracted, Nintendo will likely continue to dominate.
Hardcore gamers are an increasingly unprofitable niche in the market who've run their own favorite class of 'hardcore' games into the ground. Their demands are too overbearing, resulting in increasingly high production costs for game developers with ever diminishing returns in profit and quality, while their tastes are too discriminating, meaning they'll typically nitpick their way through shelves of games only to take home one or two a year. Meanwhile, they're usually doing this on someone else's dollar, since most people who fall into the market's 'hardcore' category are dependent teenagers. (Which is the only way they can afford to waste so much of their time gaming; they have no lives and no jobs, and therefore little to no money of their own.) This decreases the amount of money they can lavish on their gaming habits. (This is especially true for savvy PC gamers, who can be expected to spend hundreds of dollars of their allowances on upgrades alone each year while pirating every game they possibly can.) Meanwhile, making games for the average dope - young or old - can score you a lot of cash. As with any product, the wider the market you appeal to is, the more units you're going to sell. (Nevermind that the eighteen-and-below demographic is a minority now compared to the rest of the gaming world. According to recent research the median age for a gamer now is 23.)
Assuming my sweeping generalization of the 'hardcore' gamer is correct - that they're a bunch of picky, stuck up, jobless good-for-nothings who would rather die than spend a penny of their own money, all while expecting more and more from the games they have bought for them or shamelessly steal - then it makes no sense to continue focusing solely on their sweaty, lard-laden, pizza-faced niche in the first place. Who cares about whiny teenagers whose gaming hobbies rule their lives? They're broke, discriminating to a fault, and very much inclined to just rip the games off through the internet. Children and uninitiated or casual gamers are much more profitable, have wider, less super-focused laser-like tastes, and the simpler, dumber games made for them cost less to produce and less to buy. It's that kind of crap the Wii was designed for, and it'll likely see little more than that. The parents can easily afford to buy them for their children, while said parents might pick up a game or two for themselves this time around. Let's not forget the average college-aged Joe who just wants something simple and fun to play in his limited spare time, maybe with a couple friends. Shitty party games and mini-game packs? They gobble this stuff up, because they enjoy it and aren't nearly as difficult to entertain as your typical 'hardcore' fatass. Nintendo will make a killing by initiating a new and massive wave of casual gamers while hooking another generation of our kids on the digital crack of Pokemon, while the crying penniless nerds of the hardcore niche drop out of high-school to play World of Warcraft.
Go ahead and mod me down. You all know it's true. Don't give me a bunch of bull over 'hardcore' gamers having jobs either, because among the 'hardcore' nerd bunch they're the exception, not the rule. The market is shifting dramatically now away from the unemployed white male teenager, and developers are finally realizing now what should've been obviou
Could it be that maybe there are plants already here that can do what we want them to? I seem to recall certain algae strains being fifty percent plant oil by volume, with other strains producing comparable amounts of cellulose. Why go to the trouble of engineering synthetic life forms (which could pose a tremendous environmental risk) when we could just try to find ways to grow enough algae to generate large quantities of fuel instead? The last I heard, certain strains of algae could realistically yield up to 5,000 gallons per acre. That's not bad, and as far as I know, no genetic engineering or life synthesis was required.
If the FLOSS community needs corporate stewardship to stay afloat and grow, I sincerely doubt that it was really so great in the first place. Regardless, it would be a shame for the FLOSS community to fall off the face of the earth in any case. I just wonder if the Triple-E strategy is going to work here, too. Now that Microsoft is pulling out the big guns - namely the gravely flawed United States patent system - I can't help but feel we're going to see a whole slew of casualties very soon.
That's the biggest problem I'm having with this, and it's actually amusing in its irony. Microsoft doesn't have an original bone in its body, and some of Microsoft's most important, profitable, and successful products are indeed clones of other products. It's like they're saying that they're allowed to copy their competition and absolutely obliterate them in the process, but if someone copies them - or copies their copies - they can sue you into the ground. If they actually tried to take anyone to court over this, they'd probably just get a stern talking to about their own history and have the case thrown out the window.
This whole deal reeks of bullshit, with more than a hint of FUD floating around too.
The point about style that you made is probably why everyone remembers Starcraft, while Total Annihilation is practically unknown to most gamers today. While I'm sure most of us can agree that Starcraft was a technically inferior program, it was much more memorable for its style, appearance, and story. Total Annihilation, meanwhile, was a game far ahead of its time, and it got left in the dust because it had zero personality. Total Annihilation's gameplay was and continues to be top-notch, even surpassing Supreme Commander in a few respects. (Namely in unit diversity and pacing.) It had features most RTS games don't have now, and that was ten years ago. The problem is, there was no 'coolness hook' - no real style - to draw you in unless you really, really appreciated the gameplay and the feature-set. In today's world of pretty lights, convoluted storylines, and stylishly dressed feature characters, games like Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander are just too difficult for most gamers to appreciate.
That's not to say they're both not completely incredible games, which they are. They're just totally square in spite of being so awesome.
Yeah, I noticed the whole memory bit too. The game's rather kind to my CPU when it's not molesting my page file, but as for my memory? Let's just say my HDD doesn't shut up for a second when I play this game. They should rename the game 'City of Thrashing', because that's what you're in for.
According to what I've read and learned, while Cryptic says the game needs only as little as 256 megabytes of RAM, it really needs between one and two gigabytes to actually run smoothly. Their recommendation of 512 megabytes still falls far short of what the game really needs to run like it should, and on my system with all of 512 megabytes of RAM, it runs like shit. My page file is immediately eaten up, and the game chugs along at a moderate pace at best in the larger zones. (Which is, you know, damn near everywhere.) At worst, I'll hang for a minute or more while my HDD ticks and clicks away, only to find myself either somewhere else on the map or dead by the time the game begins responding again. (Increasing the size of my page file to the maximum allowed fixed this problem for the most part, but it's still stupidly slow.)
In short, COH-COV is a massive memory whore that really needs between two and four times the amount of RAM recommended to run it in order to run right. It's a fun game, but it's bloated as hell.
It's no wonder we're running out, when most of the reactors in service around the world are grossly inefficient anyhow, and were practically designed to generate nuclear waste products they can't use for fuel. The typical light-water nuclear reactor today only exploits about 1% or less of the energy it can get out a given amount of nuclear fuel. (Assuming it has a once-through fuel cycle, which is the most popular.) Other technologies, however (such as the Integral Fast Reactor, which Hazel O'Leary and John Kerry so kindly helped to kill in 1994) which feature closed fuel cycles could theoretically safely use up to 95% of the energy stored in their fuel, and could in practice even consume the fuel-waste of other reactors. Other alternative fuel cycles feature materials such as Thorium as their fuel of choice. (Even Americium - the stuff in your smoke detector - has been considered as a fuel source.)
This 'Uranium Crisis' isn't caused by the mere consumption of nuclear fuel, but rather the ridiculously wasteful manner by which we've chosen to consume it for over half a century now. Better technology is within our reach that could allow us to dramatically stretch our nuclear fuel supply, both at current and greatly heightened consumption levels. While this hardly means we should stop worrying (good ideas too often fall before bad people) it does offer a bit of hope for us until nuclear fusion power finally takes off some time toward the end of our lives, if it ever does.
I think we've heard about this before. Something about atoms reacting in this big wave faster than light would travel, without anything actually moving faster than light.
"I'll note one additional data point: When you do some of the initial quests, you'll be amazed at the quality of the quest rewards for relatively simple quests. I believe this was an intentional design to bring the "casual" player up to raid quality gear, effectively levelling the playing field. Casuals do not start at much of a disadvantage when they're having T2-quality gear heaped upon them (previously only available in instances such as BWL, where few casual players were able to attend)."
I think there's more to it than that. The expansion doesn't just offer sweet quest rewards for simple quests, it practically gives you free T-2.5 items the second you walk into Outland. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall most of those items being BPU. I also remember a certain vendor sword in Halaa that outclasses Sulfuras while only costing about ten gold, and a whole slew of other items that anyone can basically pick up for either a few minutes of their time or a few gold that make everything in Azeroth look like a complete joke.
The addition of this kind of content utterly cripples anyone who doesn't farm Naxxramas and hasn't bought the expansion. Blizzard could have left this gear relatively inaccessable, or at least made it so you have to spend more than about five to ten minutes questing in the first zone in Outland in order to get it. Instead, they handed everyone who got the expansion ridiculously powerful gear that people who can't get into Outland can't match unless they're in T-3 already. This also pulled all the players who got the expansion out of practically all of Azeroth's L-50+ content, due to the complete obsolescence of the loot there. That isn't leveling the playing field, that's producing an incentive to buy the expansion, on pain of being completely worthless in the game if you don't.
Meanwhile, there's even better gear than the stuff you get at the door for people who do grind, which in turn makes the 'door prize' gear look like a joke also, so there's no real leveling of the playing field if you asked me. (Unless you count making anyone who buys the expansion ridiculously powerful compared to farmers stuck in Azeroth leveling.) As another reader has already pointed out, it's the same old shit in a new zone, and you get over the new-gear high pretty quick when you realize you've still got quite a few rungs left to climb on the all-mighty loot ladder. The people who farm will always have the best gear, and casuals will always get shafted. (That's the way games like this have to work. If you complete your character in a day, why keep paying to play?) The gold-rush of awesome loot at the door just produces the illusion that great gear will finally no longer be prohibitively difficult to access, until you realize it's shit compared to Outland raid gear.
However, this whole thing is a non-issue. I'm guessing that upwards of three fourths of the game's playerbase bought the expansion within a week of it's release, and the remainder are quickly realizing that to remain useful in-game and to actually begin enjoying the game again, they have to get the expansion. (I'm sorry, raids are no substitute for real content.) The incentives are working to rein in the players who haven't bought the expansion yet, and the promise of new content, awesome gear, flying mounts, and the new races got most of the players in the first place. All I'm saying is that it seems to me that Blizzard wanted to create an absolutely gigantic incentive for players to get the expansion, and if there's any way to do it, it's to make their gear worthless without actually nerfing their characters while promising to replace said worthless gear with incredible gear if they shell out another forty dollars. It's not about leveling the playing field, it's about getting the kids to buy the product.
Slashdot Mirror
Pardon me for replying to two posts at once, but I'm going to get both the parent and grandparent posts at once here.
Grandparent:
Science is already and has always been deeply political. Since well before the days of the great philosophers of ancient Greece, it's been tradition if not human nature to politicize, emotionalize, spiritualize, and pulverize science along with reality itself for one's personal gain. If you have an agenda, one of the best ways to support it is with pieces of information that you can refer to as facts. It doesn't matter if they're actually true or even partly true, they just need to be believable and consistent enough to fool whoever you're pitching your point to. Remember that statistical research of every kind also falls under that very same umbrella, and - if you're willing to believe the figure - 42.7 percent of all statistics are pulled out of thin air. When was the last time you heard someone start tossing unverifiable percentages around to support a claim about something?
Everyone's at least a little stupid. Most people are very stupid. Average intelligence doesn't mean that someone is moderately smart like they're in the middle of the road for functionally intelligent people, it just means that they're a few IQ points away from a mental disability. In a world of believers, appeals to emotion and the ability to convince will always be more powerful than facts and the ability to provide proof. If you really want to do yourself and the world a favor and deliver some cold hard facts, you have to be a better reality salesman than anyone who might have an interest in preventing you from doing so, because to - if you're willing to believe the figure - at least 50 percent of the people out there it doesn't really matter how right you are. (But don't quote me on that.)
Here's a great example for you from the dawn of the electric age: The War of Currents, during which Thomas Edison demonstrated his science hating, emotionally appealing, fact-phobic barbarian side when his fortunes in direct current power transmission infrastructure were threatened by superior alternating current technology. Edison's infamous and baseless FUD campaign against alternating current dates back to the 1880's.
And the parent:
How long ago did you become cynical about geekdom? Once upon a time, being called a geek or a nerd implied that you actually knew something. Just ten years ago it at least meant that you could fool people into thinking you were more computer literate than you actually were. Now it's just a shitty fashion statement that says to the world, "Look at me, I relish electronic entertainment and can build MySpace pages unassisted," while allowing you to wear ratty and mismatched business casual clothing, your old high-school duds, and inch thick 'Emo' glasses in public. For reasons I could only explain as infernal, the vulgar tackiness of the socially impaired nerd caste has been refined into a tasteless yet widely desirable template of appearance for effeminate young adult males.
The modern so called geek, especially any flavor of self identifying dweeb, is usually just someone who thinks that they're smart who overindulges in one or more highly niched indoor hobbies. Whether or not their claims of intelligence bear out in reality depends on the idiot in question.
Look, asking for MMORPG developers to stop cloning Everquest is a really, really tall order. If you want a real game, go play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup or something, because all MMORPGs are right now (with very few good exceptions) are glorified level treadmills and loot ladders with shitty low-tactical automatic combat of some variety.
This is a problem.
Let's see. We're supposedly transitioning to a 'white collar' service economy. First off, anyone who believes that could ever work is an idiot. What, we're all going to become managers and executives presiding over third-world industrial centers? Maybe in a White Nationalist's twisted wet dream. The American industrial sector has been gutted. You absolutely must have credentials to become employed for anything that even remotely resembles a living wage, unless you like the idea of working multiple jobs and having no life and no time for a family you may or may not be supporting.
Companies claim shortages of skilled workers. (Which is a huge lie in itself, check out what that garbage really means at the Programmers Guild.) Everyone jumps on skilled labor hoping to find good work - not just easy money, but any money at all in sufficient quantities for them to secure an at least modestly comfortable life. The market becomes glutted because the companies that ordinarily hire skilled laborers, whose profits and executive pay-scales are presently extraordinarily high in general as far as I am aware, are unwilling to hire them at anything more than department store wages, so they exploit guest workers instead to exclude American workers. A glut of 'heads' forms because we don't hire 'hands' anymore, and the race to the bottom continues.
Before anyone claims I've got my tinfoil hat on a bit too tight, I don't believe a conspiracy to run the country into the ground is at work here. Rather, companies have conspired to find the cheapest labor they can possibly hire for the sake of improving their profits, satisfying investors and executives alike, and because they can exploit foreigners for pennies on the dollar they most certainly do. The consequences of this aren't the end they sought, just the consequences of it. We already watched this happen with the off-shoring of our industrial sector. Now it's happening all over again with skilled labor. Before too long these jobs and the credentials required to get them - if you can get them - won't be worth a McDonald's wage. Talk about a 'service' economy - food service, that is.
That was the point, I was being a smartass.
You know what's even funnier to me? It's how quickly Mister Don't-Cast-Judgment goes and casts judgment on his fellow poster, as though it's possible to discern someone's character from a single Slashdot posting. Let's see, first he implied that I agree with among other things Nazi genocide by posting a link to the Nuremburg Laws, and then for no apparent reason called me a Republican (which I'm really not, I'm really more of a moderate centrist myself), while saying that I'm angry, uptight, and evidently carry a chip on my shoulder, which couldn't be further from the truth here in real life. Whatever though, shrill pansies on the internet are always excellent judges of character. I must be some kind of monster, right? A right-wing monster, too! You presumably liberal Slashdotters better look out, the conservative boogie man is coming to get you and stifle your freedoms!
If anyone here is uptight, raw-nerved, and itching to start an argument, it's probably ThousandStars. Of course, I've 'brought myself down to his level' by choosing to perpetuate this exchange of ridicule, so it's not as though I can make claims of moral or intellectual superiority here. That's not the issue, though. The issue is that I struck a nerve with someone who supposedly doesn't believe in casting judgment on other people by casting judgment on people I met and worked with during my time at school, which in turn provoked him to cast judgment on me from afar in the process of stating why I am incorrect in casting judgment myself, and I think that's funny. It's funny and it makes me smile.
Now I'll needlessly justify myself in my reply to you because I don't feel like posting twice and I'm really on a roll.
I developed the attitude I have toward dumb people of poor character who irresponsibly reproduce (and dumb people of poor character in general) through experience with them, not observation of them. I reserve the right to judge that large handful of girls in my class in particular because I met them, exchanged words and work with them, and was otherwise in contact with them for many weeks on end. (With a class that heavy on group work and random groups, you wind up getting to know pretty much everyone.) I found them to be a bunch of stupid, arrogant, smart-mouthed layabouts who were nothing short of contemptuous toward their peers and life in general. If someone takes offense to that, frankly it isn't my problem. I pity the kids of those girls and I hope their mothers turn their lives around - especially the two that were removed from school for drug offenses and the other two that were removed for bad behavior. While their attitudes and lack of intellect were hardly uncommon in my school, they stick out because they're having kids, who through poor upbringing and all-too-likely neglect will probably inherit their mothers' poor attitudes and poorer intelligence, thus continuing an all too difficult to break cycle of stupidity that's been running my home town into the dirt.
To be honest, I don't really wish any harm on them or their kids, but to say that they're dead weight on society as they were is too kind.
Maybe you should try taking me a little less seriously, you presumptuous troll. For starters, I'm hardly a Republican.
Let me tell you a little story about my senior English class when I was in high school.
I was in the first-period senior English class. While my English grades and test scores were among the best in the school, I opted out of going to the advanced English classes because of the hellish workloads encountered there. This meant I got stuck with the average Indiana teenage crowd, and let's just say that most people here can't read so well. It's amazing, really. I really want to know how functionally illiterate kids wind up in their senior year of high school, but I digress, there's more to this story than that.
There were only about ten people in that class of thirty that could read well. There were also literally seven pregnant girls in there. I don't know why they all got shoveled into that class - it may have been the time of day, and they always got to leave early, too - but they were all in there. They were the dumbest girls I've ever seen. None of them could read. I'm not talking about Shakespeare or something, I'm talking about the simplest shit. They couldn't pronounce words with more than two syllables, they didn't understand or even attempt to grasp what they were reading, nothing. Totally brain-dead, with kids on the way. Seven stupid, pregnant girls were in that class, and it was nothing short of soul-crushing to see that not only were people like this allowed to breathe the same air that I do, but that they were also having more sex than I was - and to the detriment of society, breeding as a result.
With brains like that, they'll be next to unemployable in the job market here. They're going to spend the rest of their miserable, worthless lives on welfare, no doubt failing to raise their bastard kids properly. Those kids will then enter into society and likely perpetuate the stupidity of their parents while having yet more bastard welfare children themselves. Meanwhile, I'm going to be a middle aged tax-payer, looking down on these pitiful new entrants to society and their kin, and while cursing their reliance upon the welfare system, I will lament that my penis has by then received so little use.
High school was terrible.
The thing is, it may no longer be a stereotype now. If the article is to be believed, there is now statistical evidence to prove that the smarter you are, the less sex you have. The article also provides possible reasons as to why that is.
"An intellectual is someone who has found one thing that's more interesting than sex."
I can't imagine what. I haven't met a single nerd or other 'intellectually gifted' individual that wasn't at least moderately preoccupied with sex. The problem with them was that while they were highly social among their own kind, they had the awfullest time trying to get along with 'normal' people, most of whom didn't share their interests. I'd think that the lack of compatible partners combined with their inability to seek them out contributed more to their ongoing virginity than anything. Information in the article seems to support that claim.
Eat shit, nine million flies can't be wrong.
In the context of the crowd Harrison is referring to, a 'purist' is synonymous with a 'hardcore' gamer. It's simply a less demeaning way of calling someone a nerd who thinks fifty hour long mildly-interactive movies qualify as games. Nintendo's new strategy evidently doesn't include that kind of gamer.
Let's look at the history of E3 (as I understand it, anyway) and try to figure out what it turned into.
In a nutshell, the Electronic Entertainment Expo was supposed to be a trade show. It was a place for producers, publishers, retailers, and hardware manufacturers to mingle and network, showcase products to one another, and set up business deals. (This is the point of a trade show, after all.) It was also a significant press event, where companies would go to make presentations and hopefully turn some heads, both to generate hype and impress people who might publish and sell their products. Since it was open to the public, the people who would actually be buying the games could see them first hand before they even hit store shelves, which was part of the reason E3 was such an effective hype-generating tool for producers.
Time passed. E3 got bigger, generated more hype, attracted more people, and became much less of a trade show and much more of a press and marketing event. This was cool and all for the fans and the event-goers, who came to celebrate their favorite hobby and get a first-hand peek into it's future, but for the purposes of doing business it became an expensive nightmare. This is why it was restructured. Unfortunately, this restructuring caused many usual attendees to avoid the show all together, and some others to openly question the new format. After you look at what really happened, it's easy to understand why.
Due to the new format - which, as I understand it, also practically excludes anyone who doesn't already have a strong foothold in the industry already - it became a still-expensive but very poor press event, and served as a trade show for companies that are already well connected. There really isn't a point to 'doing E3' anymore for the people who actually showed up. It no longer includes or interests the public, and the services it provides as a trade show aren't as important to the companies attending, many of whom could just as easily set up meetings themselves with publishers and retailers at a much smaller expense to both parties. It defeats the whole purpose of E3 as both a media event and a trade fair event, and if that conclusion is correct, there really isn't a good reason for the current attendees to support E3 in it's current format.
Of course, my understanding could be flawed. I've read a great deal about it and have tried to make sense of the new event in spite of conflicting accounts and widely varied opinions, but the one recurring theme I saw during this E3 was the big snore. All it looks like to me now is just another place to host an all too ordinary press conference, and a lame trade show for people who don't need trade shows.
Being an Indiana resident, this hardly comes as a surprise. Let's just wait until the Dunes National Park undergoes a die-off, kind of like the White River did when Guide Lamp got away with dumping an undisclosed quantity of toxic waste into it. That'll piss everyone off, I'm sure...
The tag says it all.
There's a reason Nintendo is looking toward the wider, uninitiated market to make their fortunes selling video games and consoles. These people will buy them. Hardcore gamers - mostly jobless kids who want increasingly elaborate, sophisticated, and engaging interactive cut-scenes to brutally scrutinize and waste their seemingly infinite leisure time on - might scoff at the Wii, but look who's selling consoles the fastest worldwide. Look which company is growing their consumer base the most rapidly. They've certainly done something right, and if the Wii actually gets a good library here in the next year for the market it's attracted, Nintendo will likely continue to dominate.
Hardcore gamers are an increasingly unprofitable niche in the market who've run their own favorite class of 'hardcore' games into the ground. Their demands are too overbearing, resulting in increasingly high production costs for game developers with ever diminishing returns in profit and quality, while their tastes are too discriminating, meaning they'll typically nitpick their way through shelves of games only to take home one or two a year. Meanwhile, they're usually doing this on someone else's dollar, since most people who fall into the market's 'hardcore' category are dependent teenagers. (Which is the only way they can afford to waste so much of their time gaming; they have no lives and no jobs, and therefore little to no money of their own.) This decreases the amount of money they can lavish on their gaming habits. (This is especially true for savvy PC gamers, who can be expected to spend hundreds of dollars of their allowances on upgrades alone each year while pirating every game they possibly can.) Meanwhile, making games for the average dope - young or old - can score you a lot of cash. As with any product, the wider the market you appeal to is, the more units you're going to sell. (Nevermind that the eighteen-and-below demographic is a minority now compared to the rest of the gaming world. According to recent research the median age for a gamer now is 23.)
Assuming my sweeping generalization of the 'hardcore' gamer is correct - that they're a bunch of picky, stuck up, jobless good-for-nothings who would rather die than spend a penny of their own money, all while expecting more and more from the games they have bought for them or shamelessly steal - then it makes no sense to continue focusing solely on their sweaty, lard-laden, pizza-faced niche in the first place. Who cares about whiny teenagers whose gaming hobbies rule their lives? They're broke, discriminating to a fault, and very much inclined to just rip the games off through the internet. Children and uninitiated or casual gamers are much more profitable, have wider, less super-focused laser-like tastes, and the simpler, dumber games made for them cost less to produce and less to buy. It's that kind of crap the Wii was designed for, and it'll likely see little more than that. The parents can easily afford to buy them for their children, while said parents might pick up a game or two for themselves this time around. Let's not forget the average college-aged Joe who just wants something simple and fun to play in his limited spare time, maybe with a couple friends. Shitty party games and mini-game packs? They gobble this stuff up, because they enjoy it and aren't nearly as difficult to entertain as your typical 'hardcore' fatass. Nintendo will make a killing by initiating a new and massive wave of casual gamers while hooking another generation of our kids on the digital crack of Pokemon, while the crying penniless nerds of the hardcore niche drop out of high-school to play World of Warcraft.
Go ahead and mod me down. You all know it's true. Don't give me a bunch of bull over 'hardcore' gamers having jobs either, because among the 'hardcore' nerd bunch they're the exception, not the rule. The market is shifting dramatically now away from the unemployed white male teenager, and developers are finally realizing now what should've been obviou
Maybe, but I'm not so sure it was them either.
You can't blame this train wreck of an E3 on Vivendi alone.
Could it be that maybe there are plants already here that can do what we want them to? I seem to recall certain algae strains being fifty percent plant oil by volume, with other strains producing comparable amounts of cellulose. Why go to the trouble of engineering synthetic life forms (which could pose a tremendous environmental risk) when we could just try to find ways to grow enough algae to generate large quantities of fuel instead? The last I heard, certain strains of algae could realistically yield up to 5,000 gallons per acre. That's not bad, and as far as I know, no genetic engineering or life synthesis was required.
If the FLOSS community needs corporate stewardship to stay afloat and grow, I sincerely doubt that it was really so great in the first place. Regardless, it would be a shame for the FLOSS community to fall off the face of the earth in any case. I just wonder if the Triple-E strategy is going to work here, too. Now that Microsoft is pulling out the big guns - namely the gravely flawed United States patent system - I can't help but feel we're going to see a whole slew of casualties very soon.
That's the biggest problem I'm having with this, and it's actually amusing in its irony. Microsoft doesn't have an original bone in its body, and some of Microsoft's most important, profitable, and successful products are indeed clones of other products. It's like they're saying that they're allowed to copy their competition and absolutely obliterate them in the process, but if someone copies them - or copies their copies - they can sue you into the ground. If they actually tried to take anyone to court over this, they'd probably just get a stern talking to about their own history and have the case thrown out the window.
This whole deal reeks of bullshit, with more than a hint of FUD floating around too.
The point about style that you made is probably why everyone remembers Starcraft, while Total Annihilation is practically unknown to most gamers today. While I'm sure most of us can agree that Starcraft was a technically inferior program, it was much more memorable for its style, appearance, and story. Total Annihilation, meanwhile, was a game far ahead of its time, and it got left in the dust because it had zero personality. Total Annihilation's gameplay was and continues to be top-notch, even surpassing Supreme Commander in a few respects. (Namely in unit diversity and pacing.) It had features most RTS games don't have now, and that was ten years ago. The problem is, there was no 'coolness hook' - no real style - to draw you in unless you really, really appreciated the gameplay and the feature-set. In today's world of pretty lights, convoluted storylines, and stylishly dressed feature characters, games like Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander are just too difficult for most gamers to appreciate.
That's not to say they're both not completely incredible games, which they are. They're just totally square in spite of being so awesome.
Yeah, I noticed the whole memory bit too. The game's rather kind to my CPU when it's not molesting my page file, but as for my memory? Let's just say my HDD doesn't shut up for a second when I play this game. They should rename the game 'City of Thrashing', because that's what you're in for.
According to what I've read and learned, while Cryptic says the game needs only as little as 256 megabytes of RAM, it really needs between one and two gigabytes to actually run smoothly. Their recommendation of 512 megabytes still falls far short of what the game really needs to run like it should, and on my system with all of 512 megabytes of RAM, it runs like shit. My page file is immediately eaten up, and the game chugs along at a moderate pace at best in the larger zones. (Which is, you know, damn near everywhere.) At worst, I'll hang for a minute or more while my HDD ticks and clicks away, only to find myself either somewhere else on the map or dead by the time the game begins responding again. (Increasing the size of my page file to the maximum allowed fixed this problem for the most part, but it's still stupidly slow.)
In short, COH-COV is a massive memory whore that really needs between two and four times the amount of RAM recommended to run it in order to run right. It's a fun game, but it's bloated as hell.
It's no wonder we're running out, when most of the reactors in service around the world are grossly inefficient anyhow, and were practically designed to generate nuclear waste products they can't use for fuel. The typical light-water nuclear reactor today only exploits about 1% or less of the energy it can get out a given amount of nuclear fuel. (Assuming it has a once-through fuel cycle, which is the most popular.) Other technologies, however (such as the Integral Fast Reactor, which Hazel O'Leary and John Kerry so kindly helped to kill in 1994) which feature closed fuel cycles could theoretically safely use up to 95% of the energy stored in their fuel, and could in practice even consume the fuel-waste of other reactors. Other alternative fuel cycles feature materials such as Thorium as their fuel of choice. (Even Americium - the stuff in your smoke detector - has been considered as a fuel source.)
This 'Uranium Crisis' isn't caused by the mere consumption of nuclear fuel, but rather the ridiculously wasteful manner by which we've chosen to consume it for over half a century now. Better technology is within our reach that could allow us to dramatically stretch our nuclear fuel supply, both at current and greatly heightened consumption levels. While this hardly means we should stop worrying (good ideas too often fall before bad people) it does offer a bit of hope for us until nuclear fusion power finally takes off some time toward the end of our lives, if it ever does.
Does anyone here think those things can run Spring?
I think we've heard about this before. Something about atoms reacting in this big wave faster than light would travel, without anything actually moving faster than light.
Anyone got a name for that? I'm lost on it.
"I'll note one additional data point: When you do some of the initial quests, you'll be amazed at the quality of the quest rewards for relatively simple quests. I believe this was an intentional design to bring the "casual" player up to raid quality gear, effectively levelling the playing field. Casuals do not start at much of a disadvantage when they're having T2-quality gear heaped upon them (previously only available in instances such as BWL, where few casual players were able to attend)."
I think there's more to it than that. The expansion doesn't just offer sweet quest rewards for simple quests, it practically gives you free T-2.5 items the second you walk into Outland. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall most of those items being BPU. I also remember a certain vendor sword in Halaa that outclasses Sulfuras while only costing about ten gold, and a whole slew of other items that anyone can basically pick up for either a few minutes of their time or a few gold that make everything in Azeroth look like a complete joke.
The addition of this kind of content utterly cripples anyone who doesn't farm Naxxramas and hasn't bought the expansion. Blizzard could have left this gear relatively inaccessable, or at least made it so you have to spend more than about five to ten minutes questing in the first zone in Outland in order to get it. Instead, they handed everyone who got the expansion ridiculously powerful gear that people who can't get into Outland can't match unless they're in T-3 already. This also pulled all the players who got the expansion out of practically all of Azeroth's L-50+ content, due to the complete obsolescence of the loot there. That isn't leveling the playing field, that's producing an incentive to buy the expansion, on pain of being completely worthless in the game if you don't.
Meanwhile, there's even better gear than the stuff you get at the door for people who do grind, which in turn makes the 'door prize' gear look like a joke also, so there's no real leveling of the playing field if you asked me. (Unless you count making anyone who buys the expansion ridiculously powerful compared to farmers stuck in Azeroth leveling.) As another reader has already pointed out, it's the same old shit in a new zone, and you get over the new-gear high pretty quick when you realize you've still got quite a few rungs left to climb on the all-mighty loot ladder. The people who farm will always have the best gear, and casuals will always get shafted. (That's the way games like this have to work. If you complete your character in a day, why keep paying to play?) The gold-rush of awesome loot at the door just produces the illusion that great gear will finally no longer be prohibitively difficult to access, until you realize it's shit compared to Outland raid gear.
However, this whole thing is a non-issue. I'm guessing that upwards of three fourths of the game's playerbase bought the expansion within a week of it's release, and the remainder are quickly realizing that to remain useful in-game and to actually begin enjoying the game again, they have to get the expansion. (I'm sorry, raids are no substitute for real content.) The incentives are working to rein in the players who haven't bought the expansion yet, and the promise of new content, awesome gear, flying mounts, and the new races got most of the players in the first place. All I'm saying is that it seems to me that Blizzard wanted to create an absolutely gigantic incentive for players to get the expansion, and if there's any way to do it, it's to make their gear worthless without actually nerfing their characters while promising to replace said worthless gear with incredible gear if they shell out another forty dollars. It's not about leveling the playing field, it's about getting the kids to buy the product.
I see games like that all the time. They're usually freeware, and a lot of them are pretty fun.