It's ok to celebrate the variation and uniqueness of fictional races, like elves and hobbits and orcs, but you can never think about the differences between real races.
Yeah, there is that. The fact is that it's entirely possible (even likely) that there are genetic differences between the races above and beyond their physical characteristics. But you know what? While I'm usually all in favour of more knowledge, in this case I think we're probably better off not knowing. Whenever there are differences, people try to assert superiority and inferiority on the basis of them, and we've seen far toomanyexamples of people behaving very, very badly when that excuse is available. If there are differences brain-wise between the races, they're not particularly massive as there are examples of each of the races in just about any occupation of level of education you'd care to mention, so I'd say that it's probably best to simply leave the question alone.
Perhaps. But there's also the camp that suggests that the roles we see for black (or x other minority or female) characters are cast as they are due to subconcious racism (or sexism), which frequently is brought on by viewing other media with similar unintentional racism. In this case, although the developer was entirely innocent of intentionally adding racism, their characters are just like the others found in other films and therefore have the same racism in common with them. The people who kick up a fuss are trying to break the circuit by forcing the developers to take another look at their preconceptions.
I don't know much about RE5, so I'm not familiar with whether this applies in this case, but doing something unintentionally can be, in some cases, even worse than doing it intentionally, as it means that the problem is rooted in the fabric of the culture rather than one or two bigoted individuals.
While I completely agree that she was not given the prestiege due her while she was alive, I think you underestimate her fame in the time since. There have been monuments erected in her honour, museums named after her, and books, television shows, and no fewer than 4 films about her, and I think she could reasonably accurate be described as a household name today (who hasn't at least heard the name?). Most of them concentrate on her contribution to our understanding of sanitation (in which she was truly revolutionary) and nursing, but I do not think that she could reasonably be described as lacking in recognition in the modern era.
As it stands the US military is one of the most efficient militaries in the world(an oxymoron if there ever was one).
Eh, maybe. While you may be right in that the US has far more toys which don't need to put human life at risk, the level of training that the US military supplies to its ground forces in case they need them is not particularly impressive. Your average freshly badged Australian regular infantry private has significantly more training than a freshly badged marine, and the Canuck regular infantry has more again (seriously, I swear to god they try to make every one of their soldiers a commando, and Canada's military history suggests that they're succeeding). I'd say that the US's overall efficiency depends on the situation - against a conventional army, they'd be top-rung, but they seem to keep getting bogged down in unconventional warfare in which they are completely unable to leverage their strengths. I'm really quite surprised that given how frequently they run into these kinds of problems they haven't redirected more money from their toys to their training division, but I assume they're more focused on intimidating the big conventional threats (Russia and China). If I were cynical, I might also suggest that another reason might be that the private sector makes no profit from training - but surely no politician could be so morally deficient to deprive their soldiers of training for the sake of lobbying dollars.
Unfortunately, it does generally take a genius to take the big leaps in our understanding; to forge all our data and half-truths into a coherent whole - that's why it took 200 years (as it turns out, the amount of time between one genius (Newton) and the next) to solve the last one. With the greater number of people studying science and higher accessibility in the world today, hopefully it'll take less time before the next one in the field emerges. Let's hope.
And I don't agree with you at all. I frequently refer to characters as opposed to myself - not usually in actions, as I'm much more in control of the action, but in terms of properties ("He's got good magic skills but terrible agility") or narrative ("She was Light Side and destroyed the Star Forge") I usually prefer to speak in the third person. I'd say that this is because I'm more interested in the story than in immersion - I actually find it uncomfortable to be immersed too much in the game. I'm me, not some fictional character, and I don't like losing track of that, even briefly.
Good point. Or consider problems that could come up if the kid's biological father was an anonymous sperm donor - could be bad if either the kid or the biological father got into trouble.
Hmm, here in Australia we have Whirlpool for exactly that. The forums are very active, and all of the major ISPs have employees who get involved to at least refute rumours and clarify information about their services. It's being able to get unfiltered comments from customers which is the most valuable, though. It's a very useful resource.
Protect the Openness of the Internet: Support the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet.
Encourage Diversity in Media Ownership: Encourage diversity in the ownership of broadcast media, promote the development of new media outlets for expression of diverse viewpoints, and clarify the public interest obligations of broadcasters who occupy the nation's spectrum.
Protect Our Children While Preserving the First Amendment: Give parents the tools and information they need to control what their children see on television and the Internet in ways fully consistent with the First Amendment. Support tough penalties, increase enforcement resources and forensic tools for law enforcement, and encourage collaboration between law enforcement and the private sector to identify and prosecute people who try to exploit children online.
Safeguard our Right to Privacy: Strengthen privacy protections for the digital age and harness the power of technology to hold government and business accountable for violations of personal privacy.
Mostly seems reasonable to me, although the third is a little worryingly vague on the 'increased enforcement resources' and 'collaboration between law enforcement and the private sector' (is this code for wiretapping?). I guess we'll just have to see how it goes.
Yeah, one of the interesting things about procedural content generation is that it moves the emphasis from quantity of staff working on a project to quality. While it requires fewer lines of code, unless a programmer is at a certain level (PhD-capable, I'd say), they simply can't make a genuine contribution to the project. While not needing quite the same level, the other positions in the project also need higher levels of intellectual capability compared to their peers simply to be able to work with and take advantage of this not-entirely-intuitive paradigm to create effective content. It's a really interesting movement, and flies directly against the prevailing outsourcing-friendly throw-more-staff-at-the-problem approach that's standard in most parts of the IT industry.
I dunno how you can really blame the Democrats for this one, given how Republican-dominated Alaska is - the Democrats simply don't have the power to pull something underhanded. Both parties push this kind of legal crap when they feel it's in their favor. This election was Stevens' to lose, and he did so in spectacular fashion by being convicted on corruption charges (and then, somehow, claiming that he'd never been convicted. WTF?).
No. We will not be able to get energy out of this than it costs to generate the anti-matter. With regards to energy, at best this will be a energy storage device. However, its unique nature may prove useful for various future applications - now that this sort of potential is available, people will start to think about how to use it.
OK, this is a WTF moment. Since when is the Indian National Congress a communist party? I mean, sure, they could be described as centre-left, but probably less to the left than most major northern European parties, and you don't hear them being called communist parties.
Which is all just proof that the DRM that the other game shipped with clearly isn't strong enough.
Or at least, this is how I'm predicting most industry execs would interpret this. There's always wriggle room for those who'd rather not face reality (particularly those who have their livelihood staked on it, such as StarForce).
that what science knows now is all there is to know
Coming from a scientific background...*shudder* I can't think of anything worse. Thank god the universe still has an incredible amount still to explore.
The massive strength of Bioshock's gameplay was the variety of approaches you could take to the combat. I played on hard, so direct combat with just about anything got me dead pretty quickly. My style essentially evolved into a massive amount of trap laying - barrels, mines, turrets, drone cameras, the works. I found the final boss ridiculously easy with this style - just set up some massive explosive trap areas, lead him in and bye-bye boss.
Games simply containing sex and violence doesn't really sound like what he's looking for. Instead, by the sounds of it, he's looking for depth and challenge. The top games in this field IMO are:
Civilization (II-IV): Stretch your planning and management brain muscles. The last three versions have their afficiandos who proclaim theirs is the best; in my experience they're all quite good. Alternately, for more tactical depth, try Medieval II: Total War.
Neverwinter Nights: While the original campaign lacks substance, there are some truly excellent player-created campaigns with deep, involving plot-lines. The campaigns that come with the two expansions are decent, but for the real stuff look at the top-ranked user-created modules.
The Longest Journey: Who ever said that adventure games were dead? If you liked the King's Quest series as a youth/child, you should like The Longest Journey as an adult.
Interesting that they'll all PC games, but after browsing my console game collection I came up pretty close to blank. Mass Effect is great fun but isn't actually all that deep when you get down to it. The Fire Emblem series is mentally challenging but not as deeply as the broader strategy and tactics games available on PC. The various other genres that I may seem to be ignoring such as sport, fighting or racing aren't really designed to expand the mind like a good piece of literature can - which is no criticism of those genres, but merely pointing out that they exist for a different level of entertainment.
Yeah, it looks like the Greens are morphing into a genuine leftist party rather than the few-issue party they used to be. With any luck, they'll pick up more power in the Senate - and maybe even some House of Reps seats - before too long. While I personally wouldn't want them in power, having the option of a centre-left, centre, or centre-right party come election time would definitely be a good thing for political choice in this country.
Na, it's a correction - mod didn't understand how it worked, came to the wrong conclusion, forgot to check with anyone who knows what they're talking about, and shot his mouth off.
Even if EA were actually inclined to switch off people's games, their legal team would have conniptions. They're not going to risk bad publicity and a possible class action just to get people to play nice on their forums.
For the same reason that more people play Alliance than Horde - because the Horde are the 'bad guys', essentially. Republicans are reasonably accurately portrayed as seeing the world in a fairly black and white fashion - Americans and allies are good, opponents are bad, so help the good guys, smash the bad guys, call it a day and go home happy. Liberals, on the other hand, see things much more in terms of shades of grey - Americans and allies have a history of doing bad things at times, their opponents are frequently trying to do what they think is right and/or are just average people stuck in a bad situation (enemy soldiers, for example). A more realistic viewpoint, perhaps, but one that also frequently results in paralysis due to the lack of a truly good answer.
Bringing that back to the topic at hand, it's no real wonder that the Horde don't have a lot of Republicans, as how many people really want to be the bad guy? On the other hand, the liberals have much less of a problem playing as the Horde as they can see them with a more sympathetic eye (and, I think sometimes when feeling cynical, love being the underdog as it lets them bitch about being disadvantaged). Also, given that liberals likely play both Horde and Alliance, while Republicans would almost always go Alliance, it's no real wonder that there's more Alliance characters than Horde on most servers (although note that this is, of course, not the only mechanic in determining this - just a big one. And it does apply to players from other countries as well).
Welcome to Obamerica...where your government investigates you if you ask the wrong questions to their candidates and those candidates cut off media access when they ask to many hard questions.
You realise this is talking about things that happened in the past, while George W. Bush was still president, right?
Yeah, uh...is it just me, or is George W. Bush not still the president? I mean, maybe I've accidently time-travelled into the future again, but last I checked the current administration is still the Bush Administration, and therefore it's employees are the ones doing the checking.
I seriously doubt that it's anything but individual curiousity, but blaming some potential future administration for stuff happening under the current administration? Wow. Just...wow.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, there is that. The fact is that it's entirely possible (even likely) that there are genetic differences between the races above and beyond their physical characteristics. But you know what? While I'm usually all in favour of more knowledge, in this case I think we're probably better off not knowing. Whenever there are differences, people try to assert superiority and inferiority on the basis of them, and we've seen far too many examples of people behaving very, very badly when that excuse is available. If there are differences brain-wise between the races, they're not particularly massive as there are examples of each of the races in just about any occupation of level of education you'd care to mention, so I'd say that it's probably best to simply leave the question alone.
Perhaps. But there's also the camp that suggests that the roles we see for black (or x other minority or female) characters are cast as they are due to subconcious racism (or sexism), which frequently is brought on by viewing other media with similar unintentional racism. In this case, although the developer was entirely innocent of intentionally adding racism, their characters are just like the others found in other films and therefore have the same racism in common with them. The people who kick up a fuss are trying to break the circuit by forcing the developers to take another look at their preconceptions.
I don't know much about RE5, so I'm not familiar with whether this applies in this case, but doing something unintentionally can be, in some cases, even worse than doing it intentionally, as it means that the problem is rooted in the fabric of the culture rather than one or two bigoted individuals.
Just a couple of cents.
While I completely agree that she was not given the prestiege due her while she was alive, I think you underestimate her fame in the time since. There have been monuments erected in her honour, museums named after her, and books, television shows, and no fewer than 4 films about her, and I think she could reasonably accurate be described as a household name today (who hasn't at least heard the name?). Most of them concentrate on her contribution to our understanding of sanitation (in which she was truly revolutionary) and nursing, but I do not think that she could reasonably be described as lacking in recognition in the modern era.
Eh, maybe. While you may be right in that the US has far more toys which don't need to put human life at risk, the level of training that the US military supplies to its ground forces in case they need them is not particularly impressive. Your average freshly badged Australian regular infantry private has significantly more training than a freshly badged marine, and the Canuck regular infantry has more again (seriously, I swear to god they try to make every one of their soldiers a commando, and Canada's military history suggests that they're succeeding). I'd say that the US's overall efficiency depends on the situation - against a conventional army, they'd be top-rung, but they seem to keep getting bogged down in unconventional warfare in which they are completely unable to leverage their strengths. I'm really quite surprised that given how frequently they run into these kinds of problems they haven't redirected more money from their toys to their training division, but I assume they're more focused on intimidating the big conventional threats (Russia and China). If I were cynical, I might also suggest that another reason might be that the private sector makes no profit from training - but surely no politician could be so morally deficient to deprive their soldiers of training for the sake of lobbying dollars.
Sorry, I was referring to that specific field - our understanding of light. Not to denigrate all the good work in other fields.
Unfortunately, it does generally take a genius to take the big leaps in our understanding; to forge all our data and half-truths into a coherent whole - that's why it took 200 years (as it turns out, the amount of time between one genius (Newton) and the next) to solve the last one. With the greater number of people studying science and higher accessibility in the world today, hopefully it'll take less time before the next one in the field emerges. Let's hope.
And I don't agree with you at all. I frequently refer to characters as opposed to myself - not usually in actions, as I'm much more in control of the action, but in terms of properties ("He's got good magic skills but terrible agility") or narrative ("She was Light Side and destroyed the Star Forge") I usually prefer to speak in the third person. I'd say that this is because I'm more interested in the story than in immersion - I actually find it uncomfortable to be immersed too much in the game. I'm me, not some fictional character, and I don't like losing track of that, even briefly.
Good point. Or consider problems that could come up if the kid's biological father was an anonymous sperm donor - could be bad if either the kid or the biological father got into trouble.
Hmm, here in Australia we have Whirlpool for exactly that. The forums are very active, and all of the major ISPs have employees who get involved to at least refute rumours and clarify information about their services. It's being able to get unfiltered comments from customers which is the most valuable, though. It's a very useful resource.
Speaking of, from their transition site:
Mostly seems reasonable to me, although the third is a little worryingly vague on the 'increased enforcement resources' and 'collaboration between law enforcement and the private sector' (is this code for wiretapping?). I guess we'll just have to see how it goes.
Yeah, one of the interesting things about procedural content generation is that it moves the emphasis from quantity of staff working on a project to quality. While it requires fewer lines of code, unless a programmer is at a certain level (PhD-capable, I'd say), they simply can't make a genuine contribution to the project. While not needing quite the same level, the other positions in the project also need higher levels of intellectual capability compared to their peers simply to be able to work with and take advantage of this not-entirely-intuitive paradigm to create effective content. It's a really interesting movement, and flies directly against the prevailing outsourcing-friendly throw-more-staff-at-the-problem approach that's standard in most parts of the IT industry.
I dunno how you can really blame the Democrats for this one, given how Republican-dominated Alaska is - the Democrats simply don't have the power to pull something underhanded. Both parties push this kind of legal crap when they feel it's in their favor. This election was Stevens' to lose, and he did so in spectacular fashion by being convicted on corruption charges (and then, somehow, claiming that he'd never been convicted. WTF?).
No. We will not be able to get energy out of this than it costs to generate the anti-matter. With regards to energy, at best this will be a energy storage device. However, its unique nature may prove useful for various future applications - now that this sort of potential is available, people will start to think about how to use it.
Cheh, never mind. They're talking about the state government. My mistake.
OK, this is a WTF moment. Since when is the Indian National Congress a communist party? I mean, sure, they could be described as centre-left, but probably less to the left than most major northern European parties, and you don't hear them being called communist parties.
Which is all just proof that the DRM that the other game shipped with clearly isn't strong enough.
Or at least, this is how I'm predicting most industry execs would interpret this. There's always wriggle room for those who'd rather not face reality (particularly those who have their livelihood staked on it, such as StarForce).
Coming from a scientific background...*shudder* I can't think of anything worse. Thank god the universe still has an incredible amount still to explore.
Harvest Moon series, Animal Crossing series... ...Dungeon Keeper (if you assume befriend = torture into submission ;) ).
The massive strength of Bioshock's gameplay was the variety of approaches you could take to the combat. I played on hard, so direct combat with just about anything got me dead pretty quickly. My style essentially evolved into a massive amount of trap laying - barrels, mines, turrets, drone cameras, the works. I found the final boss ridiculously easy with this style - just set up some massive explosive trap areas, lead him in and bye-bye boss.
Games simply containing sex and violence doesn't really sound like what he's looking for. Instead, by the sounds of it, he's looking for depth and challenge. The top games in this field IMO are:
Interesting that they'll all PC games, but after browsing my console game collection I came up pretty close to blank. Mass Effect is great fun but isn't actually all that deep when you get down to it. The Fire Emblem series is mentally challenging but not as deeply as the broader strategy and tactics games available on PC. The various other genres that I may seem to be ignoring such as sport, fighting or racing aren't really designed to expand the mind like a good piece of literature can - which is no criticism of those genres, but merely pointing out that they exist for a different level of entertainment.
Yeah, it looks like the Greens are morphing into a genuine leftist party rather than the few-issue party they used to be. With any luck, they'll pick up more power in the Senate - and maybe even some House of Reps seats - before too long. While I personally wouldn't want them in power, having the option of a centre-left, centre, or centre-right party come election time would definitely be a good thing for political choice in this country.
Na, it's a correction - mod didn't understand how it worked, came to the wrong conclusion, forgot to check with anyone who knows what they're talking about, and shot his mouth off.
Even if EA were actually inclined to switch off people's games, their legal team would have conniptions. They're not going to risk bad publicity and a possible class action just to get people to play nice on their forums.
For the same reason that more people play Alliance than Horde - because the Horde are the 'bad guys', essentially. Republicans are reasonably accurately portrayed as seeing the world in a fairly black and white fashion - Americans and allies are good, opponents are bad, so help the good guys, smash the bad guys, call it a day and go home happy. Liberals, on the other hand, see things much more in terms of shades of grey - Americans and allies have a history of doing bad things at times, their opponents are frequently trying to do what they think is right and/or are just average people stuck in a bad situation (enemy soldiers, for example). A more realistic viewpoint, perhaps, but one that also frequently results in paralysis due to the lack of a truly good answer.
Bringing that back to the topic at hand, it's no real wonder that the Horde don't have a lot of Republicans, as how many people really want to be the bad guy? On the other hand, the liberals have much less of a problem playing as the Horde as they can see them with a more sympathetic eye (and, I think sometimes when feeling cynical, love being the underdog as it lets them bitch about being disadvantaged). Also, given that liberals likely play both Horde and Alliance, while Republicans would almost always go Alliance, it's no real wonder that there's more Alliance characters than Horde on most servers (although note that this is, of course, not the only mechanic in determining this - just a big one. And it does apply to players from other countries as well).
For the record, the Australian proposal is unlikely to go ahead, due to opposition in the senate. Yay for divided parliament.
Yeah, uh...is it just me, or is George W. Bush not still the president? I mean, maybe I've accidently time-travelled into the future again, but last I checked the current administration is still the Bush Administration, and therefore it's employees are the ones doing the checking.
I seriously doubt that it's anything but individual curiousity, but blaming some potential future administration for stuff happening under the current administration? Wow. Just...wow.