When I used to take my kids around to see their grandparents, they'd rush outside to play with the dog in the dirt. My mother used to just smile and say, "Dirt is an essential nutrient for toddlers."
No, they mean 'lean-to' code. As in the software equivalent of getting a builder to build you a house and after 12 months finding you've got a lean-to that will hold a few boxes. I'm sure we've all had to work on systems like that.
But what happens to games today when they're cancelled? I read about games being put on "indefinite hiatus", or just being cancelled with the company essentially throwing their hands up in the air and saying "ain't gonna happen." What becomes of all that code? Since it just sits on the developer's machines, does it just get wiped when they start on a new project?
In my experience, everything gets backed up, just in case. The backups get stored. We reuse bits of code in our next project. The artwork just gets deleted to make space. Eventually, no one left remembers what was on those backup tapes/DVDs/discs, and they get tossed to make room for more backups.
I can think of two games where as far as I can tell, there is no trace we ever spent half a year on them, apart from us occasionally saying, "That would have been so cool if we'd finished it."
I don't know if it's an American thing, or what, but having been to two Australian public Primary Schools and two High Schools (One public and one private), I have never heard of any stories of bullying or bullies like the ones I hear from America. o.O
I could have just been lucky with my schools...but the extent of bullying at the public schools was just teasing and spreading rumours...physical harassment only really happened if there was a mutually agreed fight.
You were just lucky. Outer suburban Australian High in the early 80's, I got the crap beaten out of me, repeatedly. I tried standing up for myself, and immediately found myself suspended for a week because they said, "they expected better of me". (Suspension, BTW, meant that every moment I wasn't in class I was in the office, under supervision, having to sign in and out for each class. The other kids were encouraged to walk by and make fun of me. None of this pansy sending-the-kid-home business.) After that it was open season on me, because if I fought back, *I* was the one in trouble.
I gather it's a lot rarer here than in the US. Almost every American friend I have has horror stories to match mine, whereas a lot of Australians don't believe me because they never saw anything like that here.
A lot of the verbal bullying was psyching themselves up to get physical in my case. They didn't always go all the way, but that was what it was supposed to build up to. I'm not surprised that sort of thing has moved onto the net, I pretty much expected it as soon as I heard of teenagers having social websites.
With picture of a stupid smiling biatch on ever screen, the last going much like "Please take your card, your money and your receipt IF YOU REQUESTED IT."
It can get worse. I always want the receipt. It asks if I want one, I say yes, it churns away, then realises it's out of paper or something, and says it can't print a receipt. Why it couldn't check before asking me is beyond me. Then it asks if I want to see my balance on screen. I say yes, and until Westpac upgraded them earlier this year, the screen would flicker. I'm guessing it showed me my balance for *one* *frame*. Then I'd get my money, and the message "Please take your card, your money and your receipt IF YOU REQUESTED IT."
Considering how bad those things are at giving me what I ask, I should be grateful I at least get the money I asked for.
One thing that always baffled me re ATMs... braille keys.
Some of the ones I use also have a headphone socket. I haven't tried it out yet to hear what you get from it. But the keypads are the same on ones with and without the socket, so I'm guessing they're a standard module.
Does enyone else remember when we had that great internet completely void of government?
It was also devoid of the average person. A former co-worker used to say, before the September than never ended, "When the Internet becomes representative of the general population, I'm getting off."
Several years ago, a game came out about 9 months after one I'd worked on, with some of their map tiles being identical to the ones in our game. After a bit of discussion with the other company, it turned out they'd outsourced most of their art development, and all the copied tiles came from one of the art houses "best" artists. A bit of digging revealed that this guy was making a fine living, by copying graphics from other games and tweaking them. He'd done it to dozens of games before we caught him. He got fired from the art house he was working at then, but I'm sure he was back in business in no time.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. devs have been caught out in the same way.
You could, I suppose, invent a new game in which money did not ever leave the game and return to the Bank - perhaps you could put the money from fines and fees and so forth into some jackpot, and designate a square such that anybody landing there would collect all the wealth accumulated there - but that game would last forever, become incredibly frustrating once everybody had so much money that they didn't care about landing on Mayfair, and would basically not be Monopoly.
That one always annoyed me. It seemed that as soon as I started playing Monopoly with people outside my family, everyone else had this strange 'rule' where all the fines went on Free Parking, and whoever landed there got to collect the money. And of course, since all that money was going there, it was 'unfair' to sit there and collect rent for a few rounds if you were doing well.
What usually happened, is that enough money would accumulate there that whoever landed on it would eventually win, just by having enough money to outlast anyone else.
When parents can't take photos at school events, it may not be the terrorists, but someone has certainly won....
If my children's school hires a professional photographer to take any photos, then a condition of the professionals
contract is that all other cameras are banned. That way, you have to buy your photos off him.
I'm always wondering why the game industry is spending billions in development, and all they come up with is "go in and kill". I for one would love to play games where it is more like "go in and be smart" or "go in and be quick".
Sports and racing games prove that there is no need for a (simulated) life and death situation to motivate players.
Conflict is one of the easier ways to engage your audience. Have a look at all the more popular movies and tv
series. They all involve some method of conflict, whether it's the action thriller "We're all going to die" or
the soap opera "She's mine!".
In a game, it's harder to carry an emotional context when the player is setting the pacing, rather than the
designer. A threat hanging over the players virtual life is easier to manage. Sports games involve a different
conflict, win or lose rather than live or die. The conflict is still there.
I refuse to believe that games have to involve violence to be accepted by the masses. This looks like a bad feedback between the game industry trying to sell games while not taking any risks on one side and the consumer getting experienced in that type of games on the other side.
If a consumer is experienced in a particular type of game, he more likely buys another game of the same type. So the gaming industry develops the next title of that genre and the stupidity continues.
The gaming industry is here for the money. Yes, I like my work, but if you cut off my salary I'd be off like
a shot to feed my children another way. Violence sells. (I suspect sex would sell too, but if you think the
reaction to violent games is bad, you should see what happens when you suggest sex as a serious concept.)
Because of that, yes, we do go for the known quantity. Those of us doing the work at the bottom would like to
take more risks, but we don't set the budgets. He who pays the piper calls the tune and all that. So we are
locked into repeating the previous generation of games with minor enhancements.
On the other hand, games like The Sims or Tetris do come out occasionally. But for every one of those that
succeeds, many more fail, and scare the money people away from that type of game for good.
Another reason why game companies seldom develop a completely new game-concept is that they fear no one is actually willing to invest the training required to have fun with the game.
It's not a fear, it's a known fact.:-( You really have to draw someone into a game quickly or they'll put
it down and declare this sucks. Game reviewers can be the worst at that, too. Your brilliant and engaging game
never gets looked at because most of your players put it down within 5 minutes because you were still in
the tutorial section trying to teach them and they wanted to play now dammit!. (I confess, I gave up on Black &
White far too early because I had other things taking up my time, and it was just taking me too long to learn
to play.) If you bite a reviewer with the "You need to play for a while to appreciate this game" approach, then
you've just cost yourself a huge number of sales because of the 3/10 they just gave you.
Correct, in 10-20 or so odd years the technology maybe available that is undetectable nor traceable by any server to find if a person is an AI or human.
In 10 or 20 years, they'll use the web-cam that's been standard in computers for years by then, along
with the facial recognition software that the CCTV security world will have working by then, to verify
that the person at the keyboard is the one who submitted to the licensing agreement.
And you'll get people complaining that their account got locked because their new facial tattoos
weren't recognised by the software, and people will figure out how to stream video into the security
checker so that they can still play pirate copies or run bots, and the race will continue.
Why would you care about getting back the same garbage can? As long as they're all the same size, who cares? All they do is hold your garbage so no matter which one you get, they're all dirty.
Where I live, the council issues the bins so they will fit the robot(*) arm on the truck, and as soon as
someone damages their bin, they immediately swipe their neighbours. This leads to a game of musical bins
that lasts for weeks, until someome finally gives up and buys another one. It's usually me, I work long hours,
so my bin gets swiped by someone who gets home before I do, and by then everyone elses bin is put away.
(*) I can't see what's 'robotic' about it, but the council likes to sound high-tech.
The thing that is most scary about this attack is that it leaves no trace of the crime, unlike a broken window. This means that some unfortunate people won't be able to convince their insurance company to pay up because there is no evidence of forced entry. The insurance company will try to claim that you forgot to lock your door and refuse to pay up.
Or worse. In my part of the world, we've recently had a lot of restrictions taken off gambling laws.
So a lot of people were getting into trouble, quietly selling stuff, them claiming to have been robbed.
End result, you'd better have convincing evidence of a burglary now, or you'll find your insurance
company having you charged with fraud.
Exercising is a stressful activity. It stresses you physically. If you're already overstressed how will this do anything other than make you more stressed?
Organised exercise stresses me out. Suddenly there's goals, performance standards, if it's a team
sport I've got to live up to the others expectations, and so on.
Instead, these days, I just go for a walk. I live in a nice enough city that it's fairly easy for
me to just find a creek with a jogging/cycling path beside it, or a sequence of parks with paths linking
them up, or if I have more time, to go down to the beach. No structure, no pressure, and I leave my
phone behind so no one can get to me until I come back. I don't set any goals beyond just walking until
it's time to come back. Sure I'm not as fit as I would be if I was forcing myself into properly
organized exercise, but in my lifestyle, I don't need that kind of strength, I just need to counter the
effects of that take-away junk I had to eat when I was working late yet again.
And another effect of that, I'm fairly close to the stereotypical programmer with no social ability,
I can be polite to people, but anything more than that is getting into foreign territory for me. When
I'm out walking on weekends, after half an hour or so, I find that if some stranger walking their dog or
whatever wants to stop me and chat for 10 minutes, I can do it without getting stressed about having
to interact with a stranger.
Re:Not that big a problem...
on
Region-free PS3
·
· Score: 1
I personally wonder if this is something to do with Australia. They've ruled down there that region coding on DVDs is actually illegal; I hear that all Aussie DVD players are now multiregion. Region-coding the PS3 will get Sony into legal trouble in Australia. Region-coding all non-Australian PS3s will be kind of pointless - people prepared to import foreign games will presumably also be happy to import an Aussie PS3. So they may as well drop the whole thing.
Region coding isn't illegal here, it's just legal to bypass it, and if that
happens to also bypass copy protection, well, your right to watch or play
what you want trumps the manufacturers right to copy protection schemes.
If a device has sperate region coding and copy protection, you are only
allowed to defeat the region coding. So far everything combines the two though.
The Australian market is small enough that I doubt anyone, even Sony, would
bother making a separate device just for Australia. I don't think Sony Australia's problems really register with the Sony head office.
I've never heard of emergency treatement requiring payment in advance. In my experiance it isn't until after treatement that they start talking about payment (for any planned visits everything is always paid in advance though).
A friend's father died after he turned up at the hospital while having a heart attack, and the
hospital insisted on checking out his insurance first, then said they didn't want to deal with
that insurance company, and sent him to another hospital. He died trying to drive himself to
the next hospital.
Yes, the hospital was fined for turning away a critically ill patient, but that doesn't bring
the guy back to life. Make me glad I don't deal with the US health system.
And you know what, it's disheartening when nearly every review gets at least one thing factually wrong. It's disheartening when the reviewer clearly hasn't played more than 15 minutes into the game that you just spend 16 months creating.
And it's disheartening when you know that later reviewers will copy the factual errors from earlier reviews.
Stung us badly on a racing game we did a few years ago. First review to come out missed the big 'Car Options' menu that came right before the race, and bagged the game for not including ways to customise the car. The next half a dozen printed reviews were all 'dissappointed' that we hadn't included car customisation.
I was dissappointed that I'd wasted so much time on a feature they were clicking through without noticing. Maybe I should have made it an EULA giving me the right to sue anyone who reviewed the game without playing it.
You'll actually find that a lot of countries export their worst beer to the rest of the world. Brazil is another that comes to mind, though Fosters in Australia is probably the best example.
I used to know some people who worked at CUB. They slipped me some export Fosters once, and it
was a lot better than the local version. I feel seriously sorry for any poor mug who's tried Fosters
overseas, comes to Australia, and decides, "Oh, hey, lets have some of that Australian beer we tried."
Although the export quality Fosters wasn't anything special either.
Has it occurred to anyone that people have anxiety for a valid reason?
I don't. That's the whole point of it being a disorder. If there was something actually going wrong, then I'd have a reason to be anxious. Instead, the mechanism is working backwards, I'm anxious, constantly, and I keep thinking something normal must be going wrong.
Re:Horse cloning will actually be useful
on
Re-Pet a Reality
·
· Score: 1
If someone can get horse cloning to work, there will be considerable interest. The Jockey Club won't allow it for thoroughbreds, but there are some great horses of other breeds that could usefully be duplicated.
The number of times I've heard someone say that they wished they'd bred from their horse before they had him gelded. I can definitely see interest in producing a stallion clone of a gelding that turned out better than anyone expected.
Funny how these folks have plenty of time to have these meetings - they must REALLY spend a lot of time with their kids.
The principal of my kids school is one of those people who's always "concerned for the welfare of the children." She has no children of her own. Instead, she "considers the whole school to be her children." She'd be into these sort of meetings in a heartbeat if they were held near here.
The kids know when they're being patronised though. When she turns the morning assembly speech into a rant about how some dangerous act "has come to her attention", the grade 5 and 6 kids start softly chanting, "Cuckoo, cuckoo."
The person who started the rumor obviously knew nothing about the classification system in Australia. Austrialia very rarely gives out RCs or even R ratings for games and movies.
Um, we don't have an R rating for games in Australia. That was one of the things the Liberals abolished (or more accurately, never allowed to be brought in) when they were sucking up to senator Harradine. Got to take care of those poor, fragile Christian morals.
I'd say 90% of films and games rated 18+ in Britian and rated R/M in the U.S are given a MA15+ and sometimes even a M15+ down in Australia.
I don't have the figures to hand to say whether that's right or not, but yes, the OFLC does seem to be more leniant than it's overseas counterparts. As far as games go, they don't seem to like not having an R category, which would let them rank things on a similar scale to movies, so they appear to be letting the MA15+ rating accept a little more than it would if they were ranking movies. It's a fairly subjective process, so it depends heavily on the attitudes of the person making the final judgement call. However, a small change in the makeup of the OFLC and we could see games like HL2 being banned, so I can see how rumours like this get started.
I think this is purly agism between the older law makers and the 18-36 type demographics. Do these law makers really believe that adults don't/shouldn't play video games? Are the laws really that out of date? Really, Adults playing video games have been well established for at least 20 years, and adult themed games have been out of just as long. As long as there's a niche, there's a way.
There are a couple of factors, partly related to the agism of the people making the laws. When the video games ratings were brought in, the conservative government of the day was trying to win the Senate vote of a Christian independant senator, who believed in imposing good, Christian morals across all of Australia. He was the same person pushing for full net censorship, incidentally. So as part of buying him off, the government struck out the R category in video game ratings, and pushed it as 'protecting the kiddies'. Oh, and after buying him off, he voted against the proposals that the government thought they'd bought his vote on. But we're stuck with the laws now.
There are people lobbying for an R or MA18 category to be introduced, I know some of them.:-) Unfortunately, game players generally don't vote conservative, so no one in power is currently interested in listening to them. Adding to that, the right wing media tend to paint it up as 'trying to peddle porn to the kiddies' which makes the left pretty hesitant about supporting the idea too.
So, it's not really about censorship as such, more about an easy target for cheap PR stunts. Basically, games and gamers don't count in Australian politics.
Slashdot Mirror
When I used to take my kids around to see their grandparents, they'd rush outside to play with the dog in the dirt. My mother used to just smile and say, "Dirt is an essential nutrient for toddlers."
No, they mean 'lean-to' code. As in the software equivalent of getting a builder to build you a house and after 12 months finding you've got a lean-to that will hold a few boxes.
I'm sure we've all had to work on systems like that.
In my experience, everything gets backed up, just in case. The backups get stored. We reuse bits of code in our next project. The artwork just gets deleted to make space. Eventually, no one left remembers what was on those backup tapes/DVDs/discs, and they get tossed to make room for more backups.
I can think of two games where as far as I can tell, there is no trace we ever spent half a year on them, apart from us occasionally saying, "That would have been so cool if we'd finished it."
You were just lucky. Outer suburban Australian High in the early 80's, I got the crap beaten out of me, repeatedly. I tried standing up for myself, and immediately found myself suspended for a week because they said, "they expected better of me". (Suspension, BTW, meant that every moment I wasn't in class I was in the office, under supervision, having to sign in and out for each class. The other kids were encouraged to walk by and make fun of me. None of this pansy sending-the-kid-home business.) After that it was open season on me, because if I fought back, *I* was the one in trouble.
I gather it's a lot rarer here than in the US. Almost every American friend I have has horror stories to match mine, whereas a lot of Australians don't believe me because they never saw anything like that here.
A lot of the verbal bullying was psyching themselves up to get physical in my case. They didn't always go all the way, but that was what it was supposed to build up to. I'm not surprised that sort of thing has moved onto the net, I pretty much expected it as soon as I heard of teenagers having social websites.
It can get worse. I always want the receipt. It asks if I want one, I say yes, it churns away, then realises it's out of paper or something, and says it can't print a receipt. Why it couldn't check before asking me is beyond me. Then it asks if I want to see my balance on screen. I say yes, and until Westpac upgraded them earlier this year, the screen would flicker. I'm guessing it showed me my balance for *one* *frame*. Then I'd get my money, and the message "Please take your card, your money and your receipt IF YOU REQUESTED IT."
Considering how bad those things are at giving me what I ask, I should be grateful I at least get the money I asked for.
Some of the ones I use also have a headphone socket. I haven't tried it out yet to hear what you get from it. But the keypads are the same on ones with and without the socket, so I'm guessing they're a standard module.
It was also devoid of the average person. A former co-worker used to say, before the September than never ended, "When the Internet becomes representative of the general population, I'm getting off."
Several years ago, a game came out about 9 months after one I'd worked on, with some of their map tiles being identical to the ones in our game. After a bit of discussion with the other company, it turned out they'd outsourced most of their art development, and all the copied tiles came from one of the art houses "best" artists. A bit of digging revealed that this guy was making a fine living, by copying graphics from other games and tweaking them. He'd done it to dozens of games before we caught him. He got fired from the art house he was working at then, but I'm sure he was back in business in no time.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. devs have been caught out in the same way.
That one always annoyed me. It seemed that as soon as I started playing Monopoly with people outside my family, everyone else had this strange 'rule' where all the fines went on Free Parking, and whoever landed there got to collect the money. And of course, since all that money was going there, it was 'unfair' to sit there and collect rent for a few rounds if you were doing well.
What usually happened, is that enough money would accumulate there that whoever landed on it would eventually win, just by having enough money to outlast anyone else.
When parents can't take photos at school events, it may not be the terrorists, but someone has certainly won....
If my children's school hires a professional photographer to take any photos, then a condition of the professionals contract is that all other cameras are banned. That way, you have to buy your photos off him.
I'm always wondering why the game industry is spending billions in development, and all they come up with is "go in and kill". I for one would love to play games where it is more like "go in and be smart" or "go in and be quick". Sports and racing games prove that there is no need for a (simulated) life and death situation to motivate players.
Conflict is one of the easier ways to engage your audience. Have a look at all the more popular movies and tv series. They all involve some method of conflict, whether it's the action thriller "We're all going to die" or the soap opera "She's mine!".
In a game, it's harder to carry an emotional context when the player is setting the pacing, rather than the designer. A threat hanging over the players virtual life is easier to manage. Sports games involve a different conflict, win or lose rather than live or die. The conflict is still there.
I refuse to believe that games have to involve violence to be accepted by the masses. This looks like a bad feedback between the game industry trying to sell games while not taking any risks on one side and the consumer getting experienced in that type of games on the other side. If a consumer is experienced in a particular type of game, he more likely buys another game of the same type. So the gaming industry develops the next title of that genre and the stupidity continues.
The gaming industry is here for the money. Yes, I like my work, but if you cut off my salary I'd be off like a shot to feed my children another way. Violence sells. (I suspect sex would sell too, but if you think the reaction to violent games is bad, you should see what happens when you suggest sex as a serious concept.)
Because of that, yes, we do go for the known quantity. Those of us doing the work at the bottom would like to take more risks, but we don't set the budgets. He who pays the piper calls the tune and all that. So we are locked into repeating the previous generation of games with minor enhancements.
On the other hand, games like The Sims or Tetris do come out occasionally. But for every one of those that succeeds, many more fail, and scare the money people away from that type of game for good.
Another reason why game companies seldom develop a completely new game-concept is that they fear no one is actually willing to invest the training required to have fun with the game.
It's not a fear, it's a known fact. :-( You really have to draw someone into a game quickly or they'll put
it down and declare this sucks. Game reviewers can be the worst at that, too. Your brilliant and engaging game
never gets looked at because most of your players put it down within 5 minutes because you were still in
the tutorial section trying to teach them and they wanted to play now dammit!. (I confess, I gave up on Black &
White far too early because I had other things taking up my time, and it was just taking me too long to learn
to play.) If you bite a reviewer with the "You need to play for a while to appreciate this game" approach, then
you've just cost yourself a huge number of sales because of the 3/10 they just gave you.
The way things are going, it's not the '4' part that's getting the bad connotations.
Correct, in 10-20 or so odd years the technology maybe available that is undetectable nor traceable by any server to find if a person is an AI or human.
In 10 or 20 years, they'll use the web-cam that's been standard in computers for years by then, along with the facial recognition software that the CCTV security world will have working by then, to verify that the person at the keyboard is the one who submitted to the licensing agreement.
And you'll get people complaining that their account got locked because their new facial tattoos weren't recognised by the software, and people will figure out how to stream video into the security checker so that they can still play pirate copies or run bots, and the race will continue.
Why would you care about getting back the same garbage can? As long as they're all the same size, who cares? All they do is hold your garbage so no matter which one you get, they're all dirty.
Where I live, the council issues the bins so they will fit the robot(*) arm on the truck, and as soon as someone damages their bin, they immediately swipe their neighbours. This leads to a game of musical bins that lasts for weeks, until someome finally gives up and buys another one. It's usually me, I work long hours, so my bin gets swiped by someone who gets home before I do, and by then everyone elses bin is put away.
(*) I can't see what's 'robotic' about it, but the council likes to sound high-tech.
The thing that is most scary about this attack is that it leaves no trace of the crime, unlike a broken window. This means that some unfortunate people won't be able to convince their insurance company to pay up because there is no evidence of forced entry. The insurance company will try to claim that you forgot to lock your door and refuse to pay up.
Or worse. In my part of the world, we've recently had a lot of restrictions taken off gambling laws. So a lot of people were getting into trouble, quietly selling stuff, them claiming to have been robbed. End result, you'd better have convincing evidence of a burglary now, or you'll find your insurance company having you charged with fraud.
Exercising is a stressful activity. It stresses you physically. If you're already overstressed how will this do anything other than make you more stressed?
Organised exercise stresses me out. Suddenly there's goals, performance standards, if it's a team sport I've got to live up to the others expectations, and so on.
Instead, these days, I just go for a walk. I live in a nice enough city that it's fairly easy for me to just find a creek with a jogging/cycling path beside it, or a sequence of parks with paths linking them up, or if I have more time, to go down to the beach. No structure, no pressure, and I leave my phone behind so no one can get to me until I come back. I don't set any goals beyond just walking until it's time to come back. Sure I'm not as fit as I would be if I was forcing myself into properly organized exercise, but in my lifestyle, I don't need that kind of strength, I just need to counter the effects of that take-away junk I had to eat when I was working late yet again.
And another effect of that, I'm fairly close to the stereotypical programmer with no social ability, I can be polite to people, but anything more than that is getting into foreign territory for me. When I'm out walking on weekends, after half an hour or so, I find that if some stranger walking their dog or whatever wants to stop me and chat for 10 minutes, I can do it without getting stressed about having to interact with a stranger.
I personally wonder if this is something to do with Australia. They've ruled down there that region coding on DVDs is actually illegal; I hear that all Aussie DVD players are now multiregion. Region-coding the PS3 will get Sony into legal trouble in Australia. Region-coding all non-Australian PS3s will be kind of pointless - people prepared to import foreign games will presumably also be happy to import an Aussie PS3. So they may as well drop the whole thing.
Region coding isn't illegal here, it's just legal to bypass it, and if that happens to also bypass copy protection, well, your right to watch or play what you want trumps the manufacturers right to copy protection schemes. If a device has sperate region coding and copy protection, you are only allowed to defeat the region coding. So far everything combines the two though.
The Australian market is small enough that I doubt anyone, even Sony, would bother making a separate device just for Australia. I don't think Sony Australia's problems really register with the Sony head office.
I've never heard of emergency treatement requiring payment in advance. In my experiance it isn't until after treatement that they start talking about payment (for any planned visits everything is always paid in advance though).
A friend's father died after he turned up at the hospital while having a heart attack, and the hospital insisted on checking out his insurance first, then said they didn't want to deal with that insurance company, and sent him to another hospital. He died trying to drive himself to the next hospital.
Yes, the hospital was fined for turning away a critically ill patient, but that doesn't bring the guy back to life. Make me glad I don't deal with the US health system.
And you know what, it's disheartening when nearly every review gets at least one thing factually wrong. It's disheartening when the reviewer clearly hasn't played more than 15 minutes into the game that you just spend 16 months creating.
And it's disheartening when you know that later reviewers will copy the factual errors from earlier reviews.
Stung us badly on a racing game we did a few years ago. First review to come out missed the big 'Car Options' menu that came right before the race, and bagged the game for not including ways to customise the car. The next half a dozen printed reviews were all 'dissappointed' that we hadn't included car customisation.
I was dissappointed that I'd wasted so much time on a feature they were clicking through without noticing. Maybe I should have made it an EULA giving me the right to sue anyone who reviewed the game without playing it.
You'll actually find that a lot of countries export their worst beer to the rest of the world. Brazil is another that comes to mind, though Fosters in Australia is probably the best example.
I used to know some people who worked at CUB. They slipped me some export Fosters once, and it was a lot better than the local version. I feel seriously sorry for any poor mug who's tried Fosters overseas, comes to Australia, and decides, "Oh, hey, lets have some of that Australian beer we tried."
Although the export quality Fosters wasn't anything special either.
Has it occurred to anyone that people have anxiety for a valid reason?
I don't. That's the whole point of it being a disorder. If there was something actually going wrong, then I'd have a reason to be anxious. Instead, the mechanism is working backwards, I'm anxious, constantly, and I keep thinking something normal must be going wrong.
If someone can get horse cloning to work, there will be considerable interest. The Jockey Club won't allow it for thoroughbreds, but there are some great horses of other breeds that could usefully be duplicated.
The number of times I've heard someone say that they wished they'd bred from their horse before they had him gelded. I can definitely see interest in producing a stallion clone of a gelding that turned out better than anyone expected.
Funny how these folks have plenty of time to have these meetings - they must REALLY spend a lot of time with their kids.
The principal of my kids school is one of those people who's always "concerned for the welfare of the children." She has no children of her own. Instead, she "considers the whole school to be her children." She'd be into these sort of meetings in a heartbeat if they were held near here.
The kids know when they're being patronised though. When she turns the morning assembly speech into a rant about how some dangerous act "has come to her attention", the grade 5 and 6 kids start softly chanting, "Cuckoo, cuckoo."
The person who started the rumor obviously knew nothing about the classification system in Australia. Austrialia very rarely gives out RCs or even R ratings for games and movies.
Um, we don't have an R rating for games in Australia. That was one of the things the Liberals abolished (or more accurately, never allowed to be brought in) when they were sucking up to senator Harradine. Got to take care of those poor, fragile Christian morals.
I'd say 90% of films and games rated 18+ in Britian and rated R/M in the U.S are given a MA15+ and sometimes even a M15+ down in Australia.
I don't have the figures to hand to say whether that's right or not, but yes, the OFLC does seem to be more leniant than it's overseas counterparts. As far as games go, they don't seem to like not having an R category, which would let them rank things on a similar scale to movies, so they appear to be letting the MA15+ rating accept a little more than it would if they were ranking movies. It's a fairly subjective process, so it depends heavily on the attitudes of the person making the final judgement call. However, a small change in the makeup of the OFLC and we could see games like HL2 being banned, so I can see how rumours like this get started.
I think this is purly agism between the older law makers and the 18-36 type demographics. Do these law makers really believe that adults don't/shouldn't play video games? Are the laws really that out of date? Really, Adults playing video games have been well established for at least 20 years, and adult themed games have been out of just as long. As long as there's a niche, there's a way.
There are a couple of factors, partly related to the agism of the people making the laws. When the video games ratings were brought in, the conservative government of the day was trying to win the Senate vote of a Christian independant senator, who believed in imposing good, Christian morals across all of Australia. He was the same person pushing for full net censorship, incidentally. So as part of buying him off, the government struck out the R category in video game ratings, and pushed it as 'protecting the kiddies'. Oh, and after buying him off, he voted against the proposals that the government thought they'd bought his vote on. But we're stuck with the laws now.
There are people lobbying for an R or MA18 category to be introduced, I know some of them. :-) Unfortunately, game players generally don't vote conservative, so no one in power is currently interested in listening to them. Adding to that, the right wing media tend to paint it up as 'trying to peddle porn to the kiddies' which makes the left pretty hesitant about supporting the idea too.
So, it's not really about censorship as such, more about an easy target for cheap PR stunts. Basically, games and gamers don't count in Australian politics.