To me, rationalizing would be "fight the power" style stuff and other BS to use as a smokescreen for pirating.
I'm sorry, how is "fight the power" part of the definition of rationalization ("broadly : to create an excuse or more attractive explanation for ")? But beyond that, you've done something similar by focusing on Blizzard's status as a large company with a policy you don't like, while talking up how you support indies.
I admit that I just don't want to pay for it outright, hence I'm not rationalizing. My listed reasons are WEAK, hence I don't consider them part of any effort to rationalize my behavior.
So you failed at your rationalization with WEAK arguments, and still want to claim you weren't rationalizing. Gotcha. Come on, stop trying to refute the obvious. It's all recorded in the conversation history, and unlike some other crappy forums, you can't edit what you said previously (a frequently requested malfeature on Slashdot).
Stop lying to yourself and everybody else. Somebody called you an asshole and you tried to justify yourself by claiming you didn't want to support Blizzard's business model.
Thing is (and you're free to not believe me) I'm not a habitual pirate.
So you aren't trying to rationalize by saying this?
I don't even really pirate that much since a lot of AAA games don't really interest me.
Ah, so you only pirate the AAA games you really like. Bravo?
Given that I really doubt Blizzard is going to go backrupt because of little ol' me.
Still not rationalizing? Isn't everybody entitled to that sentiment? Why should anybody pay, when somebody else can?
You can be legit most of the time and bend the rules on occasion. It's FINE not to be black and while all the time people.
Is what you are doing FINE? I thought you weren't rationalizing?
Maybe I should have qualified that particular comment with mid to mid-high level games.
Strategy applies to those to. It seems to me you never did any serious watching of high-level games and tried to apply the same analysis to your games. There's much more than deciding at what supply to make a barracks. Casters like Husky, HD, or Psy are not "absolute top end", but they have some really interesting things to say about strategy.
I mean more of, early expansion or no, early units or teching, harassment vs. assault, etc. Are there really many more than a half dozen viable choices of this sort to make?
The map-specific choices already lead to more than 6.
As a reminder, specifically excluded from the commonly accepted definition of 'strategy' is anything 'tactical', i.e. techniques for conducting any one battle.
The line between tactics and strategy is often blurry. For example, if you decide to kill off a certain unit and then make a counter-unit to take advantage of that, that's both tactics and strategy.
To get back to what you were originally saying, you said it was dominated by "twitch", but there are many, many decisions that come down to what you decide to do with things like positioning, what units to make, tech switches, what and how to attack, etc. The situation is often dynamic, and you have to play the situation.
The problem is, Blizzard is just so damn good at 1. balancing radically different sides, 2. storyline, and 3. overall polish that people are willing to overlook the fact that SC2 still doesn't have strategy-enhancing features that reviewers widely bemoaned were missing in Starcraft 1.
It really sounds like you just want the twitch element removed, which is a different game than what StarCraft is. If you want strategy without the twitch then play a turn-based strategy game.
By the way, a lot of micromanagement was removed when they made SC2. Group management alone with vastly improved. Pathing was improved. Unit targeting has been made more intelligent. They could go even further, as you suggest, but at some point the people who like microing their units around will complain that all the micro skill is being removed.
I thought I made it quite clear - I like the story and don't feel like spending money for it due to Blizzard's behavior.
It's extremely easy to rationalize pirating the game for any number of issues you disagree about with Blizzard. The bottom line is that if everybody took your approach, the company would be out of business, even though you enjoyed the game so much you couldn't resist pirating it.
I could just go without. But again, I don't have to since it's easy enough to obtain it in other ways.
Right, so why should anybody pay, according to your philosophy?
"Does Steam Trading mean I can sell my used games?
No, only games that have been bought as a gift, and thus have never been played, can be traded. Once the Steam Gift is opened and added to your game library, you won't be able to trade it again."
Once you progress beyond the noob skill level, your success is almost entirely a product of your twitch, with less than a half dozen cookie-cutter strategies you must blindly follow as fast as you possibly can if you are to have any hope of success.
That's really bullshit. I've watched a lot of high-level games on channels like HuskyStarcraft or HDstarcraft, and if all you can do is blindly follow half a dozen cookie cutter strategies, your play is extremely limited. Yes, twitch is huge, but strategy is pretty deep.
Take Diablo III as an example. Blizzard went out of their way to make some amazing looking cinematics for their cut scenes. But that rips you out of your story and then pushes you back into the usual graphics again afterwards.
I loved Warcraft III for those cutscenes. It's actually the reason I bought the game, after seeing a scene in the old show Cinematech. Obviously this is an old example, as I'm not much of a gamer.
the founding principles were based in large part on Christianity, which is why things like pre-emptive warfare, torture, and other extreme or retaliatory measures were always considered "un-American" up until 2001
This is just an extremely short-sighted view of history. You can start with the founding of the United States, where the land was brutally taken from the indigenous inhabitants, to the Civil War, to the Banana Wars, atrocities committed in World War II, Vietnam, the invasion of Panama, etc. The list is extremely long. The response to 9/11 wasn't all that unusual in the grand scheme of things.
By the way, true Christianity as Jesus preaches in the New Testament is to "turn the other cheek", or in other words, to not even fight back, which probably came about as a political stance for Jews split among the desire to rebel against Rome or to accept Roman occupation. It was a Christian ideal I've never seen evidence of in our founding principles.
are open standards, and are well-documented in public archives.
So this is really a debate about what an "open standard" is. I side with the idea that open means the specification is freely available and no fees are required to implement it. Wikipedia has a good summary of your usage versus mine:
"The definitions of the term "open standard" used by academics, the European Union and some of its member governments or parliaments such as Denmark, France, and Spain preclude open standards requiring fees for use, as do the New Zealand, South African and the Venezuelan governments. On the standard organisation side, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ensures that its specifications can be implemented on a royalty-free basis.
Many definitions of the term "standard" permit patent holders to impose "reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing" royalty fees and other licensing terms on implementers and/or users of the standard. For example, the rules for standards published by the major internationally recognized standards bodies such as the IETF, ISO, IEC, and ITU-T permit their standards to contain specifications whose implementation will require payment of patent licensing fees. Among these organizations, only the IETF and ITU-T explicitly refer to their standards as "open standards," while the others refer only to producing "standards." The IETF and ITU-T use definitions of "open standard" that allow "reasonable and non-discriminatory" patent licensing fee requirements."
The use of encryption is only intended to provide a way for legitimate remote users to gain supervised access to the system without having to hack into it. The real culprit behind bad security is software reliability.
Encryption is used to send a message from A to B across an insecure network. Other uses are to prevent someone from getting access to stored data, such as on a portable flash drive. This has nothing to do with software reliability. Not acknowledging such basic facts makes you a crank.
Compare Motif with Gnome 2. After all, you did say you were "super happy" with Gnome 2. I find Motif to be butt ugly and primitive. I liked Gnome 2 because it was pleasant to look at without being distracting like some other "lickable" interfaces.
Either way had voters voted in their interests, for him, he would have won. Instead they voted for Romney, plainly against their interests. Because keeping pot illegal and tax cuts are more important than their rights.
You forgot foreign policy. He was actually booed during the primary debates for proposing the Golden Rule. I'd love to know how many of the those same people consider themselves Christians.
The really sad part is that there is almost no chance of anyone using planes in an attack again, not because TSA is competent, but because it's been done. I'd worry more about someone poisoning Tylenol again than I would about them hijacking a jetliner.
Bombs are the main threat now. The shoe bomber and the underwear bomber are the two prime examples. And while it's easy to cry "security theater!", I think the underwear bomber would at least have been caught by a scanner. That said, I'm not going to accept a virtual strip search or an "enhanced" pat down to fly, so I just don't.
Slashdot Mirror
To me, rationalizing would be "fight the power" style stuff and other BS to use as a smokescreen for pirating.
I'm sorry, how is "fight the power" part of the definition of rationalization ("broadly : to create an excuse or more attractive explanation for ")? But beyond that, you've done something similar by focusing on Blizzard's status as a large company with a policy you don't like, while talking up how you support indies.
I admit that I just don't want to pay for it outright, hence I'm not rationalizing. My listed reasons are WEAK, hence I don't consider them part of any effort to rationalize my behavior.
So you failed at your rationalization with WEAK arguments, and still want to claim you weren't rationalizing. Gotcha. Come on, stop trying to refute the obvious. It's all recorded in the conversation history, and unlike some other crappy forums, you can't edit what you said previously (a frequently requested malfeature on Slashdot).
I'm not trying to rationalize here.
Stop lying to yourself and everybody else. Somebody called you an asshole and you tried to justify yourself by claiming you didn't want to support Blizzard's business model.
Thing is (and you're free to not believe me) I'm not a habitual pirate.
So you aren't trying to rationalize by saying this?
I don't even really pirate that much since a lot of AAA games don't really interest me.
Ah, so you only pirate the AAA games you really like. Bravo?
Given that I really doubt Blizzard is going to go backrupt because of little ol' me.
Still not rationalizing? Isn't everybody entitled to that sentiment? Why should anybody pay, when somebody else can?
You can be legit most of the time and bend the rules on occasion. It's FINE not to be black and while all the time people.
Is what you are doing FINE? I thought you weren't rationalizing?
Maybe I should have qualified that particular comment with mid to mid-high level games.
Strategy applies to those to. It seems to me you never did any serious watching of high-level games and tried to apply the same analysis to your games. There's much more than deciding at what supply to make a barracks. Casters like Husky, HD, or Psy are not "absolute top end", but they have some really interesting things to say about strategy.
I mean more of, early expansion or no, early units or teching, harassment vs. assault, etc. Are there really many more than a half dozen viable choices of this sort to make?
The map-specific choices already lead to more than 6.
As a reminder, specifically excluded from the commonly accepted definition of 'strategy' is anything 'tactical', i.e. techniques for conducting any one battle.
The line between tactics and strategy is often blurry. For example, if you decide to kill off a certain unit and then make a counter-unit to take advantage of that, that's both tactics and strategy.
To get back to what you were originally saying, you said it was dominated by "twitch", but there are many, many decisions that come down to what you decide to do with things like positioning, what units to make, tech switches, what and how to attack, etc. The situation is often dynamic, and you have to play the situation.
The problem is, Blizzard is just so damn good at 1. balancing radically different sides, 2. storyline, and 3. overall polish that people are willing to overlook the fact that SC2 still doesn't have strategy-enhancing features that reviewers widely bemoaned were missing in Starcraft 1.
It really sounds like you just want the twitch element removed, which is a different game than what StarCraft is. If you want strategy without the twitch then play a turn-based strategy game.
By the way, a lot of micromanagement was removed when they made SC2. Group management alone with vastly improved. Pathing was improved. Unit targeting has been made more intelligent. They could go even further, as you suggest, but at some point the people who like microing their units around will complain that all the micro skill is being removed.
+1 virtual mod point. Too many idiots living in the 90s.
I thought I made it quite clear - I like the story and don't feel like spending money for it due to Blizzard's behavior.
It's extremely easy to rationalize pirating the game for any number of issues you disagree about with Blizzard. The bottom line is that if everybody took your approach, the company would be out of business, even though you enjoyed the game so much you couldn't resist pirating it.
I could just go without. But again, I don't have to since it's easy enough to obtain it in other ways.
Right, so why should anybody pay, according to your philosophy?
Just to back up what others have said:
"Does Steam Trading mean I can sell my used games?
No, only games that have been bought as a gift, and thus have never been played, can be traded. Once the Steam Gift is opened and added to your game library, you won't be able to trade it again."
That was quoted from the link you referenced.
Once you progress beyond the noob skill level, your success is almost entirely a product of your twitch, with less than a half dozen cookie-cutter strategies you must blindly follow as fast as you possibly can if you are to have any hope of success.
That's really bullshit. I've watched a lot of high-level games on channels like HuskyStarcraft or HDstarcraft, and if all you can do is blindly follow half a dozen cookie cutter strategies, your play is extremely limited. Yes, twitch is huge, but strategy is pretty deep.
Take Diablo III as an example. Blizzard went out of their way to make some amazing looking cinematics for their cut scenes. But that rips you out of your story and then pushes you back into the usual graphics again afterwards.
I loved Warcraft III for those cutscenes. It's actually the reason I bought the game, after seeing a scene in the old show Cinematech. Obviously this is an old example, as I'm not much of a gamer.
There as no scam, I'm not sure why you think there was.
If I was an investor and my money was promptly used to pay off the founders instead of investing in the company I would feel scammed.
Eventually an old cow runs dry.
Just like Apple is going to without Saint Jobs to anoint their next product.
the founding principles were based in large part on Christianity, which is why things like pre-emptive warfare, torture, and other extreme or retaliatory measures were always considered "un-American" up until 2001
This is just an extremely short-sighted view of history. You can start with the founding of the United States, where the land was brutally taken from the indigenous inhabitants, to the Civil War, to the Banana Wars, atrocities committed in World War II, Vietnam, the invasion of Panama, etc. The list is extremely long. The response to 9/11 wasn't all that unusual in the grand scheme of things.
By the way, true Christianity as Jesus preaches in the New Testament is to "turn the other cheek", or in other words, to not even fight back, which probably came about as a political stance for Jews split among the desire to rebel against Rome or to accept Roman occupation. It was a Christian ideal I've never seen evidence of in our founding principles.
Seems more like a start of a movie than an actual movie.
I'd buy that for a dollar.
I don't know what you mean by the term "the wireless standards", but both the 802.11 WLAN standards
Example: Ericsson sues Samsung over wireless patents
and H.264
Example: Know Your Rights: H.264, patent licensing, and you
are open standards, and are well-documented in public archives.
So this is really a debate about what an "open standard" is. I side with the idea that open means the specification is freely available and no fees are required to implement it. Wikipedia has a good summary of your usage versus mine:
"The definitions of the term "open standard" used by academics, the European Union and some of its member governments or parliaments such as Denmark, France, and Spain preclude open standards requiring fees for use, as do the New Zealand, South African and the Venezuelan governments. On the standard organisation side, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ensures that its specifications can be implemented on a royalty-free basis.
Many definitions of the term "standard" permit patent holders to impose "reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing" royalty fees and other licensing terms on implementers and/or users of the standard. For example, the rules for standards published by the major internationally recognized standards bodies such as the IETF, ISO, IEC, and ITU-T permit their standards to contain specifications whose implementation will require payment of patent licensing fees. Among these organizations, only the IETF and ITU-T explicitly refer to their standards as "open standards," while the others refer only to producing "standards." The IETF and ITU-T use definitions of "open standard" that allow "reasonable and non-discriminatory" patent licensing fee requirements."
Basically I'm not scared. I can always live underground for a few years while the unprepared/weak succumb.
Assuming you didn't get infected before the threat was known. The nastiest virus would lay dormant for a year or so.
1.7 million views... really?
The use of encryption is only intended to provide a way for legitimate remote users to gain supervised access to the system without having to hack into it. The real culprit behind bad security is software reliability.
Encryption is used to send a message from A to B across an insecure network. Other uses are to prevent someone from getting access to stored data, such as on a portable flash drive. This has nothing to do with software reliability. Not acknowledging such basic facts makes you a crank.
Well.. Is that a bad thing?
Compare Motif with Gnome 2. After all, you did say you were "super happy" with Gnome 2. I find Motif to be butt ugly and primitive. I liked Gnome 2 because it was pleasant to look at without being distracting like some other "lickable" interfaces.
Fsckers
If you want to fucking swear, then fucking swear.
Either way had voters voted in their interests, for him, he would have won. Instead they voted for Romney, plainly against their interests. Because keeping pot illegal and tax cuts are more important than their rights.
You forgot foreign policy. He was actually booed during the primary debates for proposing the Golden Rule. I'd love to know how many of the those same people consider themselves Christians.
More to the point, VHS was objectively better becuase it was an open standard.
That's subjective opinion.
Open standards beat closed ones every time.
Naive. The patented wireless standards and video encodings in wide use are two obvious counter-examples.
Al Bundy, is that you?
You're welcome, and kudos for acknowledgment.
The really sad part is that there is almost no chance of anyone using planes in an attack again, not because TSA is competent, but because it's been done. I'd worry more about someone poisoning Tylenol again than I would about them hijacking a jetliner.
Bombs are the main threat now. The shoe bomber and the underwear bomber are the two prime examples. And while it's easy to cry "security theater!", I think the underwear bomber would at least have been caught by a scanner. That said, I'm not going to accept a virtual strip search or an "enhanced" pat down to fly, so I just don't.
He was stuck accepting a prize any reasonable man would rather not receive.
I would have had tremendous respect if Obama had refused the prize and insisted that they give it to somebody more deserving.