Reasonable restrictions, eh? Okay, fine. Go to New York, apply for a pistol purchasing permit (which takes six months and the police can deny for any damn reason) get fingerprinted, background checked, and all that. Then when you have permission to purchase, go get your first pistol added to the permit before you can actually take possession of it (which can take six more months and, again, be denied for the police's amusement). Then, assuming you're actually successful, come back in a year and tell us if there's any way humanly possible they can make it any more difficult for you. The NY legislature would love to oblige, they've just run out of ideas. Oh, and be sure to go back the year after to re-register because the first permit was only good for three years.
Net neutrality is all well and good until Hillary and the other nanny-state loving think-of-the-children cultists start passing insane laws to "protect" kids from social networking and videogame sites. Expect COPPA x10 requiring webmasters to need everything short of a DNA sample before letting anyone post anything. Expect data retention laws requiring webmasters log every page view forever. Don't be too surprised to see a law saying webmasters of gaming fansites/blogs/etc.. must get an ESRB rating (especially those who host mods). That is if they don't try to nuke the ESRB in favor of a Federal game rating system.
Then again, maybe they'll be too busy poking Dubya with a stick to get anything done...
I don't know any liberals who consider Democrats 'liberal'. At best they're Conservative Lite.
This is true. But there aren't many real conservatives who think the big-government goons running the GOP these days are very conservative either. Just as the Karl Rove-types have coopted "conservative," the DNC has hijacked the word "liberal" for themselves, and turned it into a newspeak shadow of its formar self. Hence why I used it in quotation marks.
And I suppose you wouldn't mind one bit if two state Attorneys General, a handful of local district attorneys, and a number of shareholders nearly filed civil and criminal suits against you? Or nearly losing your job due to all the media swarming about? Yea, that kind of attention sure is fun...
The right wing noise machines? Conservative fascists? Erm, hello, like 90% of the politicans lined up with laws and threats of prosecution against us are left wing "liberals." Last I checked, Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, Evan Bayh, Leland Yee, Rod Blagojevich, Kathleen Blanco, Roy Burrell, Jennifer Granholm, Phil Kellam, Rocky Delgadillo, Julia Boseman, Eliott Spitzer, and countless others were all Democrats. Click around on the legislation tracker map at Game Politcs, and look how many Ds pop up behind people's names, and then tell me again how this is all the fault of conservative "cretins." Or if you're too lazy to look, here's a little secret: Neither the Republicans or Democrats give a damn about your rights.
Umm, Wal-Mart (along with like 99.9% of other stores) doesn't sell AO games. TFA mentions 17 year olds getting arrested for buying M rated games. The M label says they're for ages 17+. What part would said 17 year old not be reading properly?
Otherwise, I totally agree that forcing stores to be "proactive" is just as nanny state-ish.
I see the problem in the purpose of these devices and not just in their caliber.
Thisis a weapon designed to be as accurate as possible for a range of 1000m. Now, give me a good civilian reason why you would want to shoot a target a full kilometer away? Tresspassing?
The purpose, is, sending bits of metal downrange, just like any other rifle. The Marines and police departments often use a Remington 700 for a sniper rifle too, but does that mean its only use is killing people? No. The Rem' 700 is also a very popular hunting rifle. And it can do "scary" things like pierce airplane hulls or body armor, and with a range of about a kilometer. Aside from the rather popular target shooting competitions, the.50 ammo would probably come in handy hunting large game, or defending oneself from large angry bears.
Eh? You make them sound so... magical. Not to be rude or anything (really), but, let me guess. You probably believe the whole "they never had anything this powerful in mind 200 years ago" line the gun-control advocates chant? If so, well, you may be horrified to know that they often used.60 and even.80 caliber rifles and muskets at the time of the American Revolution. Sometimes with a powder load as big (or bigger) than the Barret. And you can buy these old "killing devices" all over the world. Even in a number of countries that pretty much banned modern arms. Toss some modern optics on it, and you're good to go at long range. Why, I hear you don't even need a permit to buy or make such muzzle loaders in Germany.
Granted, muzzle loaded weapons reload slower, but with a rifle like that, one seldom needs more than one shot.;)
WTF is so "unconceivable" about a Barret.50 that it required its own link? Unless you think the Brady moonbats are going to start invading countries or something...
Last one was UT2004, and they eventually did fixed the lighting/shadow issues and implemented the render-to-texture functions (Hellbender license plates, video monitors in a few maps). The game looks identical on Windows and Linux now, and I for one get better frame rates and faster loading in Suse 10 than in XP.
While DirectX may be easier to work with, OpenGL can do all the same eye-candy with the right shaders. DX10 does bring some funky new things to the table (geometry shaders, single-pass cube maps), but the PS3 is using OpenGL ES with rather decent results.
The committee also passed two other surveillance measures, including one from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California)
The same Dianne Feinstein who said this about guns?
"If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an out right ban, picking up every one of them... "Mr. and Mrs. America, turn 'em all in, "I would have done it. I could not do that. The votes weren't here."
And people think we're crazy when we say gun-control advocates also advocate a police state. Wake up people. Neither the Republicans or Democrats care about your rights. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts, absolutely, and all that.
nobody is passing laws saying they can't buy games
That's exactly what they're doing though. Albeit in a roundabout way. If any of the laws stopping minors from buying M games survive, nearly all stores would stop selling them. Sorta like they don't carry AO games, only now they would also risk jailtime. If stores stop selling them, publishers stop making them, then nobody can buy them. This chilling effect is precisely why all the laws to date have been (or are close to being) shot down by Federal judges.
That's not entirely true. The industry has lobbied the crap out of a number of Republicans. Jeb Bush is in a video game. George Allen and Rick Santorum have partnered with the ESRB to promote education instead of legislation. The conservative Progress and Freedom Foundation is against the censorship of games and have testified before Congress in support of the industry. Even Dubya, in all his theocratic zealotry, has said that government shouldn't be involved in what parents let their kids play (can't find the source there). And then of course there's the fact the fundamentalists are making their own violent games now. There's plenty more examples where these came from.
Now, this isn't to say they're all on "our side" (or that anyone should myopically vote for them on this one issue), but statistically speaking, this issue belongs to the Democrats. Nearly every piece of anti-game legislation in the last two years at the state level has been penned by Democrats; and Clinton, Lieberman, and (to a lesser degree) Bayh are leading the charge at the Federal level. For what it's worth, this is actually one area where most Republicans are still true to their claimed desire for less government. 'Tis probably too little, too late, but, err, yea.
I think people are missing the point because the Halogen site doesn't make it immediately clear this was a mod for C&C. In fact, in their goodbye post, it's as if they've gone out of their way to make it sound like they were innocently modding the Halo engine. As such, there isn't a violin tiny enough to express my lack of sympaty for them.
But, err, if you read TFA, they're also pre-selling other violent, sure-to-be-M-rated games. Like Crackdown, which is being made by the team who made the first two GTAs.
This is worse. On top of the standard Fourteenth Amendment problems, It pretty much violates the whole first article of the Constitution by delegating power of all three branches of government to a private entity. It would give Legislative power to the ESRB by allowing them to decide what content is "legal," Executive power in the form of law enforcement/investigation, and Judicial power by letting them judge/fine any violations.
Furthermore, by making the ESRB an agent of the state, it would violate the Fourth Amendment by forcing developers to submit to searches without probable cause to suspect that they "hid" content. Seeing as the goal is to prevent another Hot Coffee, the act would inevtiably require source code and such to be submitted. Which is a very private thing to most game developers.
Thus, it also violates the Fifth, as it would force developers to incriminate themselves.
Next up, it violates the Sixth, as reverse engineering or searching through a game's data files is anything but a "speedy trial." It took us around four months to find the first bits of Hot Coffee, and we had three years of experience working with the engine. Had it been a brand new engine, it could have taken us a year. Now imagine the ESRB having to learn how to pick apart 1000+ games a year...
Finally it also violates the Seventh Amendment, as the ESRB is not a jury. Might also violate the Eighth, because the whole thing is rather excessive and unusual.
Why does everyone assume Wii will be so great for FPS games? From what I've heard, it's kinda like trying to play one on a PC without being able to pick up and move the mouse. Try it some time. You're sure to run out of desk space and get fragged rather quickly. And with the Wii, instead of being limited by the size of your desk times mouse DPI, you'll have @ ±30 to stay on screen. As such, you'll still have to end up dealing with the wonky gamepad-style hold-cursor-at-the-edge-of-the-screen-forever to turn controls. Granted, it might not be too bad once you get the hang of it, but the response time still won't be the same as a mouse. Not to mention if you drift too much from, say, your arm getting tired of staying in the dead center of the screen for hours, you'll have to worry about spinning madly around in place.
Not trying to bash the Wii, mind you, as it looks like fun. I just think it won't live up to expectations when it comes to FPS'ing.
Oh, for sure. I've heard Norfolk can be something of an obstructionist. My point was originally that the new-ish state law trumps anything local, meaning they shouldn't be able to stretch it out to three months anymore. But then I didn't even think that they could approve it, but drag their feet mailing the card. Guess I'll be having my foot for lunch then.:P
Err, hate to burst in on such a lovely rant (which I agree with, btw), but VA has a preemption law which forbids cities from making their own gun-control laws, save for where you can shoot. The maximum time for issuing a CCW license is 45 days, state-wide, and on a shall-issue basis unless disqualified by a felony or some such. These are kinda new developments (@2004), so, yea, if you just didn't know about them yet, now you do. Either way, you're right; the more open gun policy seems to be reducing crime.
Good metaphor, but I think this would be more like them demanding the key to every door in America be placed in an unlocked box right beside the door, with a label saying "please don't open this box if you're not a cop."
But by the time the thing ships, today's hot-shit graphics card will be nearly obsolete (mmm, More's Law), a lot cheaper, and still more powerful than the PS3's? In my experience, it works out quite well to buy a cheap, two-steps-below-bleeding-edge card every couple of years (or just before a big game), since new titles are usually designed to run on year-old stuff anyway. Same goes for the CPU/mobo, while RAM, ROMs, and cases can of course be resused. This will cost a good couple of hundred bucks more per console cycle, to be sure. But with a strategic, rotating upgrade path, you also end up with stuff to build decent secondary boxes.
It does say "Sabre-Toothed" on the website though. Perhaps the teeth are supposed to be made of those little plastic cocktail skewers that look like pirate sabers? >.<
If anyone's interested in the "logic" behind this bill, you should read the coverage at GamePolitics or watch the entire hearing linked therein.
In summary, Jack Thompson was the star witness for the hearing, so one could imagine the mountain of crap he spewed about games. Perhaps even more fantastic than Thompson's testimony was the list of "racist games" Representative Burrell used to terrify the House with (a list no doubt provided by Thompson). Burrell spent about five minutes naming off a bunch of racist Flash games one can find on the internets. However, instead of telling the House these "games" are only available online and wouldn't be affected by the bill, he made it sound like the game industry was making millions from selling them in stores directly to kids.
Worst of all (or best, if you can appreciate the irony), he told the House about how the suspect in the rape/murder of a ten year old in Oklahoma "trained" on a "video game" called Kingdom of Loathing. Yep, that's right, a non-sensical, browser-based RPG, where stick figures with classes like "Pastamancer" and "Accordian Thief" do battle with saber-tooted limes, somehow trained a 26 year old to rape and murder. And a law about carding minors in retail stores would have somehow stopped an adult from playing a browser game? Oooookay.
Normally, it would be a silly idea to tell anyone to vote based soley on a candidate's position on video games. But if anyone from Louisiana is reading this, please, vote these bastards out of office for their stupidity alone!
Not legally binding, but nearly all retailers refuse tho stock unrated games. Even Best Buy, who sells unrated DVDs wont'. Nor will they sell AO games even though they have NC-17 films.
Slashdot Mirror
Reasonable restrictions, eh? Okay, fine. Go to New York, apply for a pistol purchasing permit (which takes six months and the police can deny for any damn reason) get fingerprinted, background checked, and all that. Then when you have permission to purchase, go get your first pistol added to the permit before you can actually take possession of it (which can take six more months and, again, be denied for the police's amusement). Then, assuming you're actually successful, come back in a year and tell us if there's any way humanly possible they can make it any more difficult for you. The NY legislature would love to oblige, they've just run out of ideas. Oh, and be sure to go back the year after to re-register because the first permit was only good for three years.
Net neutrality is all well and good until Hillary and the other nanny-state loving think-of-the-children cultists start passing insane laws to "protect" kids from social networking and videogame sites. Expect COPPA x10 requiring webmasters to need everything short of a DNA sample before letting anyone post anything. Expect data retention laws requiring webmasters log every page view forever. Don't be too surprised to see a law saying webmasters of gaming fansites/blogs/etc.. must get an ESRB rating (especially those who host mods). That is if they don't try to nuke the ESRB in favor of a Federal game rating system.
Then again, maybe they'll be too busy poking Dubya with a stick to get anything done...
And I suppose you wouldn't mind one bit if two state Attorneys General, a handful of local district attorneys, and a number of shareholders nearly filed civil and criminal suits against you? Or nearly losing your job due to all the media swarming about? Yea, that kind of attention sure is fun...
The right wing noise machines? Conservative fascists? Erm, hello, like 90% of the politicans lined up with laws and threats of prosecution against us are left wing "liberals." Last I checked, Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, Evan Bayh, Leland Yee, Rod Blagojevich, Kathleen Blanco, Roy Burrell, Jennifer Granholm, Phil Kellam, Rocky Delgadillo, Julia Boseman, Eliott Spitzer, and countless others were all Democrats. Click around on the legislation tracker map at Game Politcs, and look how many Ds pop up behind people's names, and then tell me again how this is all the fault of conservative "cretins." Or if you're too lazy to look, here's a little secret: Neither the Republicans or Democrats give a damn about your rights.
Umm, Wal-Mart (along with like 99.9% of other stores) doesn't sell AO games. TFA mentions 17 year olds getting arrested for buying M rated games. The M label says they're for ages 17+. What part would said 17 year old not be reading properly?
Otherwise, I totally agree that forcing stores to be "proactive" is just as nanny state-ish.
Eh? You make them sound so... magical. Not to be rude or anything (really), but, let me guess. You probably believe the whole "they never had anything this powerful in mind 200 years ago" line the gun-control advocates chant? If so, well, you may be horrified to know that they often used .60 and even .80 caliber rifles and muskets at the time of the American Revolution. Sometimes with a powder load as big (or bigger) than the Barret. And you can buy these old "killing devices" all over the world. Even in a number of countries that pretty much banned modern arms. Toss some modern optics on it, and you're good to go at long range. Why, I hear you don't even need a permit to buy or make such muzzle loaders in Germany.
;)
Granted, muzzle loaded weapons reload slower, but with a rifle like that, one seldom needs more than one shot.
WTF is so "unconceivable" about a Barret .50 that it required its own link? Unless you think the Brady moonbats are going to start invading countries or something...
Last one was UT2004, and they eventually did fixed the lighting/shadow issues and implemented the render-to-texture functions (Hellbender license plates, video monitors in a few maps). The game looks identical on Windows and Linux now, and I for one get better frame rates and faster loading in Suse 10 than in XP.
While DirectX may be easier to work with, OpenGL can do all the same eye-candy with the right shaders. DX10 does bring some funky new things to the table (geometry shaders, single-pass cube maps), but the PS3 is using OpenGL ES with rather decent results.
That's not entirely true. The industry has lobbied the crap out of a number of Republicans. Jeb Bush is in a video game. George Allen and Rick Santorum have partnered with the ESRB to promote education instead of legislation. The conservative Progress and Freedom Foundation is against the censorship of games and have testified before Congress in support of the industry. Even Dubya, in all his theocratic zealotry, has said that government shouldn't be involved in what parents let their kids play (can't find the source there). And then of course there's the fact the fundamentalists are making their own violent games now. There's plenty more examples where these came from.
Now, this isn't to say they're all on "our side" (or that anyone should myopically vote for them on this one issue), but statistically speaking, this issue belongs to the Democrats. Nearly every piece of anti-game legislation in the last two years at the state level has been penned by Democrats; and Clinton, Lieberman, and (to a lesser degree) Bayh are leading the charge at the Federal level. For what it's worth, this is actually one area where most Republicans are still true to their claimed desire for less government. 'Tis probably too little, too late, but, err, yea.
I think people are missing the point because the Halogen site doesn't make it immediately clear this was a mod for C&C. In fact, in their goodbye post, it's as if they've gone out of their way to make it sound like they were innocently modding the Halo engine. As such, there isn't a violin tiny enough to express my lack of sympaty for them.
But, err, if you read TFA, they're also pre-selling other violent, sure-to-be-M-rated games. Like Crackdown, which is being made by the team who made the first two GTAs.
Erm, but, the ratings do not carry the force of law. Well, at least not until this law (and its companion bill or FEPA) gets passed.
This is worse. On top of the standard Fourteenth Amendment problems, It pretty much violates the whole first article of the Constitution by delegating power of all three branches of government to a private entity. It would give Legislative power to the ESRB by allowing them to decide what content is "legal," Executive power in the form of law enforcement/investigation, and Judicial power by letting them judge/fine any violations.
Furthermore, by making the ESRB an agent of the state, it would violate the Fourth Amendment by forcing developers to submit to searches without probable cause to suspect that they "hid" content. Seeing as the goal is to prevent another Hot Coffee, the act would inevtiably require source code and such to be submitted. Which is a very private thing to most game developers.
Thus, it also violates the Fifth, as it would force developers to incriminate themselves.
Next up, it violates the Sixth, as reverse engineering or searching through a game's data files is anything but a "speedy trial." It took us around four months to find the first bits of Hot Coffee, and we had three years of experience working with the engine. Had it been a brand new engine, it could have taken us a year. Now imagine the ESRB having to learn how to pick apart 1000+ games a year...
Finally it also violates the Seventh Amendment, as the ESRB is not a jury. Might also violate the Eighth, because the whole thing is rather excessive and unusual.
Why does everyone assume Wii will be so great for FPS games? From what I've heard, it's kinda like trying to play one on a PC without being able to pick up and move the mouse. Try it some time. You're sure to run out of desk space and get fragged rather quickly. And with the Wii, instead of being limited by the size of your desk times mouse DPI, you'll have @ ±30 to stay on screen. As such, you'll still have to end up dealing with the wonky gamepad-style hold-cursor-at-the-edge-of-the-screen-forever to turn controls. Granted, it might not be too bad once you get the hang of it, but the response time still won't be the same as a mouse. Not to mention if you drift too much from, say, your arm getting tired of staying in the dead center of the screen for hours, you'll have to worry about spinning madly around in place. Not trying to bash the Wii, mind you, as it looks like fun. I just think it won't live up to expectations when it comes to FPS'ing.
Oh, for sure. I've heard Norfolk can be something of an obstructionist. My point was originally that the new-ish state law trumps anything local, meaning they shouldn't be able to stretch it out to three months anymore. But then I didn't even think that they could approve it, but drag their feet mailing the card. Guess I'll be having my foot for lunch then. :P
Err, hate to burst in on such a lovely rant (which I agree with, btw), but VA has a preemption law which forbids cities from making their own gun-control laws, save for where you can shoot. The maximum time for issuing a CCW license is 45 days, state-wide, and on a shall-issue basis unless disqualified by a felony or some such. These are kinda new developments (@2004), so, yea, if you just didn't know about them yet, now you do. Either way, you're right; the more open gun policy seems to be reducing crime.
Good metaphor, but I think this would be more like them demanding the key to every door in America be placed in an unlocked box right beside the door, with a label saying "please don't open this box if you're not a cop."
But by the time the thing ships, today's hot-shit graphics card will be nearly obsolete (mmm, More's Law), a lot cheaper, and still more powerful than the PS3's? In my experience, it works out quite well to buy a cheap, two-steps-below-bleeding-edge card every couple of years (or just before a big game), since new titles are usually designed to run on year-old stuff anyway. Same goes for the CPU/mobo, while RAM, ROMs, and cases can of course be resused. This will cost a good couple of hundred bucks more per console cycle, to be sure. But with a strategic, rotating upgrade path, you also end up with stuff to build decent secondary boxes.
It does say "Sabre-Toothed" on the website though. Perhaps the teeth are supposed to be made of those little plastic cocktail skewers that look like pirate sabers? >.<
If anyone's interested in the "logic" behind this bill, you should read the coverage at GamePolitics or watch the entire hearing linked therein.
In summary, Jack Thompson was the star witness for the hearing, so one could imagine the mountain of crap he spewed about games. Perhaps even more fantastic than Thompson's testimony was the list of "racist games" Representative Burrell used to terrify the House with (a list no doubt provided by Thompson). Burrell spent about five minutes naming off a bunch of racist Flash games one can find on the internets. However, instead of telling the House these "games" are only available online and wouldn't be affected by the bill, he made it sound like the game industry was making millions from selling them in stores directly to kids.
Worst of all (or best, if you can appreciate the irony), he told the House about how the suspect in the rape/murder of a ten year old in Oklahoma "trained" on a "video game" called Kingdom of Loathing. Yep, that's right, a non-sensical, browser-based RPG, where stick figures with classes like "Pastamancer" and "Accordian Thief" do battle with saber-tooted limes, somehow trained a 26 year old to rape and murder. And a law about carding minors in retail stores would have somehow stopped an adult from playing a browser game? Oooookay.
Normally, it would be a silly idea to tell anyone to vote based soley on a candidate's position on video games. But if anyone from Louisiana is reading this, please, vote these bastards out of office for their stupidity alone!
Not legally binding, but nearly all retailers refuse tho stock unrated games. Even Best Buy, who sells unrated DVDs wont'. Nor will they sell AO games even though they have NC-17 films.