Peaceful purposes? The iranian prez has said Israel should be wiped off the map.
A better translation, with context:
'When the dear Imam [Khomeini] said that [the Shah's] regime must go, and that we demand a world without dependent governments, many people who claimed to have political and other knowledge [asked], 'Is it possible [that the Shahs regime can be toppled]?'
'That day, when Imam [Khomeini] began his movement, all the powers supported [the Shah's] corrupt regime and said it was not possible. However, our nation stood firm, and by now we have, for 27 years, been living without a government dependent on America. Imam [Khomeni] said: 'The rule of the East [U.S.S.R.] and of the West [U.S.] should be ended.' But the weak people who saw only the tiny world near them did not believe it.
'Nobody believed that we would one day witness the collapse of the Eastern Imperialism [i.e. the U.S.S.R], and said it was an iron regime. But in our short lifetime we have witnessed how this regime collapsed in such a way that we must look for it in libraries, and we can find no literature about it.
'Imam [Khomeini] said that Saddam [Hussein] must go, and that he would be humiliated in a way that was unprecedented. And what do you see today? A man who, 10 years ago, spoke as proudly as if he would live for eternity is today chained by the feet, and is now being tried in his own country... '
'Imam [Khomeini] said: 'This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history.' This sentence is very wise. The issue of Palestine is not an issue on which we can compromise.'
When you see a quote attributed to someone who was unlikely to have been speaking English, remember to maintain a healthy degree of scepticism.
People tend to forget about the game quite a lot, but I'd be interested to see a modern game along the lines of Powermonger. A real time strategy game set in a medieval world that actually acts like a medieval world; food supply and transportation, and the turn of the seasons are a significant part of the strategy, splitting your army means not being able to communicate instantly, you can disrupt enemy armies by killing messengers (pigeons), you can disrupt enemy armies by killing their commander, people can't be "conjured up" by resources, all you can do is take existing people and give them weapons, (or just conscript unarmed shepherds anyway), everyone has a name, you can kill sheep for emergency food, you can nick fishing boats for your army, but then the towns won't produce as much food for you to appropriate, townsfolk are sycophantic, and then discontent when conquered, large armies travel the waves entirely by coracle, capitals mysteriously lack the production facilities of towns and cities...OK, maybe not a carbon copy. But that would be cool.
This is only a non-trivial question for suitably restrictive definitions of "game". If interactive visual novels count, there's an entire genre in this medium dedicated to doing just that, and really quite successfully in the case of the better examples, I might add. Although few Westerners are even aware that such things exist. (For the curious, Ever 17 or Kana ~Imouto are good places to start, being the best of those with commercial English translations.)
when you're at a regular cashier, he's the one doing the work. You sit there and... what? Look around, listen to his dumb jokes, and (more importantly) notice the overpriced altoid knock-offs and useless 37-cent clamps.
Well, I don't know about you, but I always pack my own shopping.
Why would you expect any different, not just from microsoft but from ANY company out to make money? Why make it easier to use your competitors' products?
That's an argument not to use software from companies out to make money, since they'll deliberately cripple your software whenever it's in their interests, I take it?
Of course, the more people know about ways in which products are deliberately crippled, the more such crippling will have a negative effect on sales, and so the more likely the company in question is to stop crippling them, thus giving people better products. Hence complaining about it is a very useful activity. It's not "pointless".
The name is also stupid. It should be called "Windows Copy Protection".
That name isn't terribly clever either, since there's no way it which it protects copies of Windows. (Protection from what hazard?) "Windows Copy Prevention" would at least describe what it tries to do, or at least claims to try to do, but since it doesn't, "Windows User Interference" would probably be a better name.
No, there's a fundamental conflict between gaming and storytelling. To tell a story, the writer needs to be able to control events in that story. But to play a game, the player needs to be able to influence control over events, by determining the actions of their character or whatever. There isn't any obvious way to resolve this conflict. The best game stories are to be found in the likes of interactive visual novels, which are barely games at all. And in all the games I can think of with great gameplay, that gameplay has little to do with story. Of course, you can create something which alternates between showing story and allowing you to play some sort of relevant game, but that isn't really a game with a story, it's something which alternates between being a game and being a story.
In actual fact, a good interactive visual novel can be a very effective medium of storytelling. So there's plenty of reason to use game-like mediums for storytelling. But when you do, they stop really being games.
Surely if someone sells software to you then tries to tell you that you don't have the rights required to actually use it, they're guilty of selling a product which isn't suitable for the purpose advertised.
Re:Dude, there's a whole universe in all of us...
on
Futurama Returns
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· Score: 1
No. Like many people here (yourself included), I prefer Futurama to Dr Who. Anyone who tries to argue that one successful show is better than another successful show is an idiot,
And by the standards of Doctor Who, (30-40% audience share and exceptional audience appreciation levels, bringing sci-fi to a mainstream audience, single-handedly reviving the notion of family television, has a fanzine show on the nation's most popular channel, best drama award at the BAFTAs, three Hugo award nominations this year, in a category which has always been "Americanocentric" to the point of absurdity), Futurama is not actually a successful show.
I don't think anyone can be confident in estimating how many paedophiles there actually are, so long as they don't do anything. After all, if you were a paedophile in this climate, would you tell anyone?
"Comparable" to porn? It is porn, plain and simple.
Careful. Some of it is porn. Some of it is raunchy humour. Some of it is an interesting blend of sexuality and melodrama. Some of it is delicate and poetic storytelling in which there's a bit of sex at the end as an afterthought, because it's traditional or so the fanboys can find it in the shop. A lot of it gets ported to consoles with the sex removed, and without changing it very much. The medium has a lot of different things in it.
The Japanese stuff I'm not so sure about. It might very well qualify as obscene under current laws. Certainly anything comparable to actual porn would fit the description. However, I don't know where you could get that in north america, so it's possibly a moot point anyway.
Well, it is available, there's a small industry devoting to localising it. Unfortunately the quality of what's available is generally pretty poor, because it's not making enough money to be able to afford to license and translate (a good ero-game probably has several novels worth of text in it) the really good games (or at least the famous ones, like Key titles). Still, Kana has an emotional story powerful enough to induce complete career aspiration change in one reviewer assuming you believe him, and having played the game it's certainly plausible.
Despite many claims on here, the jump from a normal DVD on a 1080p television to a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc is more significant than VHS to DVD. A full 1080p picture has around 10 times more pixels per square inch than a normal DVD (which is 480p).
It's not a question of raw mathematics. People don't "see" pixel counts when they watch TV, and indeed most people won't even see most of those extra pixels. VHS to DVD was a jump from "OK" to "very good". DVD to anything bigger is a jump from "very good" to "very very good". Once you get to a quality which is "good enough", as DVD is, further increases in quality will only ever be of interest to a minority.
(And of course there are all the other differences between VHS and DVD, which aren't replicated here, like random access and so forth.)
My Windows partition doesn't make use of networking. It's far easier to download anything it needs when I'm in Linux than to allow it onto the internet and have to worry about what other people might try to do to it, and, being an operating system designed to serve Microsoft, and only serve me if it's convenient for them, what it might try to do itself.
Better, remove patents all together. They take away freedom without protecting any other freedom, and they don't work in practice anyway, inevitably ending up hindering innovation far more than they promote it. Freedom to compete with other people is good for the economy.
Ah, the democratic will of the people in action. At last the US government is listening to the cries of its people to punish those Swedish guys who make free stuff available and aren't breaking any local laws.
Oh, wait...
You don't seem to understand why child porn is actually bad.
It's certainly not anything to do with fantasising about something bad and harmful. After all, normally when someone does this, nobody really cares. If I told you that a bunch of us were talking about robbing banks recently, you would be perfectly ready to accept that it was just an idle fantasy and we weren't really intending to rob a bank, wouldn't you? How many people have fantasised at some time or another about murdering their boss?
Some of it is actually irrational, lashing out simply because it's a fantasy you don't share, but the actual reason why child porn is bad is that it's a record of abuse. And if you enjoy watching it, you are getting your kicks from watching a record of abuse. Actual, real abuse hurting real people.
When real children are involved, it's not fantasy any longer.
You can't compare that with looking at drawings. That is just like fantasising about murdering someone who really irritates you, or fantasising about bank robbery.
People making drawings and other people looking at them hurts nobody. And if you can call that immoral, your morality is, to be frank, pretty messed up. The whole point of morality is about not hurting people. Something that doesn't hurt people can't be immoral.
And for your information, the Fate/Stay Night anime is based on the Fate/Stay Night ero-game. Not the other way around. (Although I might possibly have misinterpreted that sentence, the grammar was pretty horrible, so its meaning wasn't exactly clear.) If the game didn't exist, the anime wouldn't exist. Indeed many of the best anime around at the moment are based on ero-games, because a lot of competition in the ero-game market is now based on quality of story, so you get some really good stories produced. Indeed according to those who speak Japanese and can play the games, the anime are usually very much inferior versions. Fate/Stay Night, for example, lacks Emiya's narration. And don't let any sexual element in Kana put you off, it's only about maybe 5% of the total content, and you can always fast-forward through it.
Well, assuming you are genuinely interested in understanding the situation, the first thing you need to do is to stop associating infringing downloading with theft, that going to be skewing your whole perspective on the issue. The thing which keeps you afloat is selling a sufficient number of games, not keeping non-payers from playing them, right? How many of those 99% of customers who started out with pirated games would have become customers at all if it wasn't for piracy? Pay a substantive amount of money for something which they know litle about except that everyone mocks it and it sounds quite strange?
In general, piracy is actually best for the small fish, because it's guys like you who don't have massive advertising budgets and have problems communicating to the average man on the street that your products even exist, let along are worth money, who need the greater product awareness that it brings. One of the reasons the ??AA are the leaders in stuff like suing people is because everyone already knows about their products, so they don't need piracy. I suspect that you do need piracy. In blaming it, I think you're guilty of wishful thinking, imagining a large market for your products when the actual reason sales are low is just that there aren't all that many people interested. I can certainly say that despite being a huge anime fan, and finding the storytelling medium of the interactive visual novel extremely effective, the only one so far translated that I think is worth the price is Kana Little Sister, because that one really does have a classy story. If you're in it for the porn, it's a very expensive way of buying not much really! Now, if you could get something like AIR, Higurashi or Fate/Stay Night I'd pay big money. But for most of the market, I'd pay a fiver (£) at most.
And since you asked, I'm 26 and just finishing my thesis for a PhD.
Slashdot Mirror
A better translation, with context:
When you see a quote attributed to someone who was unlikely to have been speaking English, remember to maintain a healthy degree of scepticism.
PCs are also for there for:
1) People who already have a computer for other reasons, and don't want to buy additional hardware,
2) People who want to play the sort of games which consoles simply don't do. (Me.) When did Civilization IV come out on the PS2 again?
I prefer the manpage to false.
"false - do nothing, unsuccessfully"
People tend to forget about the game quite a lot, but I'd be interested to see a modern game along the lines of Powermonger. A real time strategy game set in a medieval world that actually acts like a medieval world; food supply and transportation, and the turn of the seasons are a significant part of the strategy, splitting your army means not being able to communicate instantly, you can disrupt enemy armies by killing messengers (pigeons), you can disrupt enemy armies by killing their commander, people can't be "conjured up" by resources, all you can do is take existing people and give them weapons, (or just conscript unarmed shepherds anyway), everyone has a name, you can kill sheep for emergency food, you can nick fishing boats for your army, but then the towns won't produce as much food for you to appropriate, townsfolk are sycophantic, and then discontent when conquered, large armies travel the waves entirely by coracle, capitals mysteriously lack the production facilities of towns and cities...OK, maybe not a carbon copy. But that would be cool.
This is only a non-trivial question for suitably restrictive definitions of "game". If interactive visual novels count, there's an entire genre in this medium dedicated to doing just that, and really quite successfully in the case of the better examples, I might add. Although few Westerners are even aware that such things exist. (For the curious, Ever 17 or Kana ~Imouto are good places to start, being the best of those with commercial English translations.)
Well, I don't know about you, but I always pack my own shopping.
I'm currently running AMD64 Sarge with GCC 3.3.5.
Why bother rooting for Microsoft when it seems pretty clear by now that Nintendo is going to be trouncing both of them?
(Disclaimer: PC gamer, for reasons of Civilization rather than graphics-card-ness.)
That's an argument not to use software from companies out to make money, since they'll deliberately cripple your software whenever it's in their interests, I take it?
Of course, the more people know about ways in which products are deliberately crippled, the more such crippling will have a negative effect on sales, and so the more likely the company in question is to stop crippling them, thus giving people better products. Hence complaining about it is a very useful activity. It's not "pointless".
Or alternatively, you could use good programming like Opera.
That name isn't terribly clever either, since there's no way it which it protects copies of Windows. (Protection from what hazard?) "Windows Copy Prevention" would at least describe what it tries to do, or at least claims to try to do, but since it doesn't, "Windows User Interference" would probably be a better name.
Especially in India, since Indians are Caucasians.
No, there's a fundamental conflict between gaming and storytelling. To tell a story, the writer needs to be able to control events in that story. But to play a game, the player needs to be able to influence control over events, by determining the actions of their character or whatever. There isn't any obvious way to resolve this conflict. The best game stories are to be found in the likes of interactive visual novels, which are barely games at all. And in all the games I can think of with great gameplay, that gameplay has little to do with story. Of course, you can create something which alternates between showing story and allowing you to play some sort of relevant game, but that isn't really a game with a story, it's something which alternates between being a game and being a story. In actual fact, a good interactive visual novel can be a very effective medium of storytelling. So there's plenty of reason to use game-like mediums for storytelling. But when you do, they stop really being games.
Surely if someone sells software to you then tries to tell you that you don't have the rights required to actually use it, they're guilty of selling a product which isn't suitable for the purpose advertised.
And by the standards of Doctor Who, (30-40% audience share and exceptional audience appreciation levels, bringing sci-fi to a mainstream audience, single-handedly reviving the notion of family television, has a fanzine show on the nation's most popular channel, best drama award at the BAFTAs, three Hugo award nominations this year, in a category which has always been "Americanocentric" to the point of absurdity), Futurama is not actually a successful show.
I don't think anyone can be confident in estimating how many paedophiles there actually are, so long as they don't do anything. After all, if you were a paedophile in this climate, would you tell anyone?
Careful. Some of it is porn. Some of it is raunchy humour. Some of it is an interesting blend of sexuality and melodrama. Some of it is delicate and poetic storytelling in which there's a bit of sex at the end as an afterthought, because it's traditional or so the fanboys can find it in the shop. A lot of it gets ported to consoles with the sex removed, and without changing it very much. The medium has a lot of different things in it.
Well, it is available, there's a small industry devoting to localising it. Unfortunately the quality of what's available is generally pretty poor, because it's not making enough money to be able to afford to license and translate (a good ero-game probably has several novels worth of text in it) the really good games (or at least the famous ones, like Key titles). Still, Kana has an emotional story powerful enough to induce complete career aspiration change in one reviewer assuming you believe him, and having played the game it's certainly plausible.
It's not a question of raw mathematics. People don't "see" pixel counts when they watch TV, and indeed most people won't even see most of those extra pixels. VHS to DVD was a jump from "OK" to "very good". DVD to anything bigger is a jump from "very good" to "very very good". Once you get to a quality which is "good enough", as DVD is, further increases in quality will only ever be of interest to a minority.
(And of course there are all the other differences between VHS and DVD, which aren't replicated here, like random access and so forth.)
My Windows partition doesn't make use of networking. It's far easier to download anything it needs when I'm in Linux than to allow it onto the internet and have to worry about what other people might try to do to it, and, being an operating system designed to serve Microsoft, and only serve me if it's convenient for them, what it might try to do itself.
Better, remove patents all together. They take away freedom without protecting any other freedom, and they don't work in practice anyway, inevitably ending up hindering innovation far more than they promote it. Freedom to compete with other people is good for the economy.
Ah, the democratic will of the people in action. At last the US government is listening to the cries of its people to punish those Swedish guys who make free stuff available and aren't breaking any local laws. Oh, wait...
You don't seem to understand why child porn is actually bad.
It's certainly not anything to do with fantasising about something bad and harmful. After all, normally when someone does this, nobody really cares. If I told you that a bunch of us were talking about robbing banks recently, you would be perfectly ready to accept that it was just an idle fantasy and we weren't really intending to rob a bank, wouldn't you? How many people have fantasised at some time or another about murdering their boss?
Some of it is actually irrational, lashing out simply because it's a fantasy you don't share, but the actual reason why child porn is bad is that it's a record of abuse. And if you enjoy watching it, you are getting your kicks from watching a record of abuse. Actual, real abuse hurting real people.
When real children are involved, it's not fantasy any longer.
You can't compare that with looking at drawings. That is just like fantasising about murdering someone who really irritates you, or fantasising about bank robbery.
People making drawings and other people looking at them hurts nobody. And if you can call that immoral, your morality is, to be frank, pretty messed up. The whole point of morality is about not hurting people. Something that doesn't hurt people can't be immoral.
And for your information, the Fate/Stay Night anime is based on the Fate/Stay Night ero-game. Not the other way around. (Although I might possibly have misinterpreted that sentence, the grammar was pretty horrible, so its meaning wasn't exactly clear.) If the game didn't exist, the anime wouldn't exist. Indeed many of the best anime around at the moment are based on ero-games, because a lot of competition in the ero-game market is now based on quality of story, so you get some really good stories produced. Indeed according to those who speak Japanese and can play the games, the anime are usually very much inferior versions. Fate/Stay Night, for example, lacks Emiya's narration. And don't let any sexual element in Kana put you off, it's only about maybe 5% of the total content, and you can always fast-forward through it.
Well, assuming you are genuinely interested in understanding the situation, the first thing you need to do is to stop associating infringing downloading with theft, that going to be skewing your whole perspective on the issue. The thing which keeps you afloat is selling a sufficient number of games, not keeping non-payers from playing them, right? How many of those 99% of customers who started out with pirated games would have become customers at all if it wasn't for piracy? Pay a substantive amount of money for something which they know litle about except that everyone mocks it and it sounds quite strange?
In general, piracy is actually best for the small fish, because it's guys like you who don't have massive advertising budgets and have problems communicating to the average man on the street that your products even exist, let along are worth money, who need the greater product awareness that it brings. One of the reasons the ??AA are the leaders in stuff like suing people is because everyone already knows about their products, so they don't need piracy. I suspect that you do need piracy. In blaming it, I think you're guilty of wishful thinking, imagining a large market for your products when the actual reason sales are low is just that there aren't all that many people interested. I can certainly say that despite being a huge anime fan, and finding the storytelling medium of the interactive visual novel extremely effective, the only one so far translated that I think is worth the price is Kana Little Sister, because that one really does have a classy story. If you're in it for the porn, it's a very expensive way of buying not much really! Now, if you could get something like AIR, Higurashi or Fate/Stay Night I'd pay big money. But for most of the market, I'd pay a fiver (£) at most.
And since you asked, I'm 26 and just finishing my thesis for a PhD.
So what console can I get Civilization 4 on then?