Fine for you, but it's really beyond me why MMORPGs have so large of a fanbase. Frankly, they aren't so much games as jobs. Every MMO is an exercise in leveling up, getting money to get better weapons and armour -- usually for the sole purpose of leveling up in a slightly different looking area. Besides all of that, in order to stay on par with any friends you make online, you have to play for several hours a day. And then if you have a large community of trolls and griefers, you'll spend more time dealing with idiots. No friggin' thanks.
I like my offline MMOs for just those reasons. It isn't just a grind, there's a story in the game, and progressing means you get to see more of it. Secondly, I don't feel obligated to spend hours a day grinding on jRPGs. If I want to, I can stop for a month -- hell I could stop for a year -- and pick up right where I left off, without the rest of the party having moved on without me.
Well, yeah, and the Heim Hyperdrive (promising theory as of now) and the phaser actually.
My theory is that this is happenning because ST infected our minds with the memes that all of this stuff is possible, thus we look for it and sooner or later it happens.
The 21st century is more advanced than the 23rd -- my communicator can take pictures AND play games, plus I can set a cool ringtone. And I think my usb drive is actually smaller than an isolinear chip. whatever. Wake me when the ps6 is a holodeck.
Well, depends on what the developers can do. It allows different types of inputs, true enough. But so did eyetoy and the DS.
Most games making extensive use of either one looked more like tech demos to me (mostly I looked at eyetoy). The rest of the time, they used the technology very sparingly, relying on more traditional control scemes. In fact, most of the "eyetoy" functionality in games is reserved for scanning your face into the game you're playing, not some innovative gameplay feature. The only "true" game that makes use of eyetoy is Antigrav, the rest are either collections of minigames or minigames in traditional games. I expect similar from Wii -- sure Wii's Wario Ware will be fun, but I'm not expecting much more than Tech demos for the first year or two.
One thing I'd like to Wikipedia do is give a "reliability score" showing what degree of trust an article should have, based on edits and perhaps link-backs.
Both would be measured on the same scale, say a ten point scale. 10 being highly stable, and a second ten meaning that the article is linked to by other sites as a reference. I don't think most web pages would link to bad info, and a page that's edited daily or weekly is probably "good enough" for most non accademic non professional use. So if you see a mark at the top with both scores as 10, chances are that the article is fairly accurate.
To quote no one in particular, never quote a guy who releases "spoken word" albums.
And now for something completely different:
Mein bratwurst has a first name, it's F-R-I-T-Z / Mein bratwurst has a second name, it's S-C-H-N-A-C-K-E-N-P-F-E-F-F-E-R-H-A-U-S-E-N. -- Reiner Wolfcastle
We don't have mascots because most gamers are 20+, and they aren't impressed by mascots anymore. Most products don't have them for the same reason. What's the mascot for Ford, or Viagra?
But there is a difference -- with wikipedia, the errors are there because some 14-year old edited the page. This creates two problems: first, we have absolutely no idea who made the edit, what he knew about the subject, etc. At least with Newton's original work, we know who made the error and what his qualifications are. Second, by now most of the errors in Newton are known, so the next source will likely have a mention of Newton's mistakes.
As an added bonus, almost all modern acedemic sources have something called "peer-review", meaning that all the papers submitted to the journals are read and reviewed by experts in the field, not by volenteers with no expertise in the subject. Even offline sources such as encyclopedias and newspapers have editors and researchers whose sole job is to catch mistakes before they make it to print. Without that, it's a complete crap-shoot as to whether what you're reading has anything to do with reality. It also tends to weed out obvious bias, which is fairly common in blogs (dailyKos, for example pretty much shills for liberal causes), but held in check by the editors of daily newspapers.
Secondly, as I said before, Anyone with significant html knowledge can easily fake credentials on a web page. If you're good enough, you could be a professor at a nonexistant university lecuring in advanced particle physics. And unless your readers are somewhat knowledgeable in the "who's who" of the subject your claiming to be an expert on, they're going to fall for it. hook. line. sinker. A journalism major who never read sci-fi might quite easily fall for "Prof E. Cochrane, phD in Quantum Physics at University of Dublin". They know nothing of physics, and wouldn't recognize the joke. They'd probably never question anything they saw on the page, and lets face it, very few people are going to contact U of Dublin to see if the professor whose work they're citing actually exists.
The web is simply too anonymous to provide a good source of information. Fraud is easy to commit, and no one checks for bias or outright lies online. Because of that, it's far better to go to the library and read a book on the subject, or search for magazine or journal articles on the subject. For the time being the web is too "wild west" to provide information for a serious research assignment.
Better yet -- don't cite webpages and encyclopedias. You deserve to be marked down for not using good references. That means a book on the topic by an expert in the topic, or an article in a magazine, NOT some webpage that can be accessed and altered by anybody, and not a general use encyclopedia.
For one thing, even with a more static webpage, you don't have any idea who wrote it. None. With Angelfire or Geocities or some other freeware webbuilding site, I could make a professional-looking webpage that proclaims that hyperdrive is physically possible. I could BS a theory based on quantum mechanics or string theory, and have a "schematic drawing" of an engine running on said principals. I could probably have a few references to Sci-fi to show it's a joke (no my name really is Cochrane). Wikipedia takes that and multiplies it times 200 -- because now it's not just some yahoo with internet access and free time, it's millions of yahoos with internet access. And if you're stupid enough to quote a webpage post-junior-high-school, frankly you deserve to flunk. Even reading one wikipedia discussion page will put you off trusting Wikipedia forever.
And quoting the enycyclopedia has never really been acceptable for serious papers. Not even Britannica. All that shows the teacher is that you're too lazy to go to the library, or even to access Lexis-Nexis to find journal articles related to your subject. Chances are that the paper in question was assigned months ago. Fine by me if you chose to screw off on the project until the week before, but quoting an encyclopedia makes it obvious that you waited til the last minute.
Long story short, the Web is probably ok for a starting point (if you have a good bullshit detector), or your topic is related to nerd popculture (redshirts from ST, Jedi fighting styles). it's not reliable enough for serious research.
If I was going to pick a system to use, I would say add a few letters and call it done. Cryllic (Used in writing Russian and other Slavic langs) seems like a good idea.
Rather than the numerous ways we write the SH sound, just make all of them s'
-Tion becomes s'on, -Cius becomes s'us. Or the same with Th -> T'. Or having a seperate symbol for long vowels (bars seem like a natural choice).
Something like:
I went to t'e skool to get an edUcas'on.
I don't see it ever happening. And frankly it might be better to scrap English in favor of some kind of Interlang anyway.
I'm not sure I'm HardCore, I like to play games (mostly rpgs and similar, sometimes platformers or Katamari), but there's a problem with many of them.
The problem is the games aren't designed for those of us that have half an hour to an hour to play. Well at least in games with some depth. I can't commit to 2+ hours between save points, or long levels. In fact I've heard similar complaints from others I've talked to online. Two Towers got fairly bad marks because of the sparse savepoints in Helm's Deep. More or less you couldn't start the level unless you had 1.5 hours to devote, because otherwise you'd have to quit before you could save.
Another problem that keeps some away is the high cost. unless you make a lot of money, $50 is *not* a casual purchase. Yet for any game system you buy, that's the standard price. Most people aren't going to buy a $50 game that they aren't sure they're going to like. I think the limit may be far lower, about $15 or so (about the cost of a movie). Much above that, and casuals are thinking "am I really going to enjoy this game *that much*?". So if you want casual gamers to play, make cheap games that are fun to play.
I agree. So many in the middle east WANT something bad to happen to America, so if the shuttle goes down, they'll naturally take it as Allah's curse on America. Especially since that region of the world is far more religious than we are. Thinking that God is on your side helps you fight longer and harder.
My point is that there's useful innovation and stupid innovation. This seems (to me anyway) to be in the stupid end. What does it really add, other than a "gee whiz" factor. The script itself (just to read the memory card) is probably fairly trivial to write, just do a quick read of the files on the card, have the ninja say "you've been playing XXX". And the thing is that they didn't do much with it. You could have used that info to adjust the difficulty of the game (ooh, so you played Spliter Cell and Rainbow 6, you're obviously a well trained spy...) or to have one of the bosses be a texture mapped version of the most recent Konami game you played. That would be more fun and interesting than a list of save games.
I prefer the innovations to add to the gameplay factor -- I guess that's just me. I'd rather see someone try a new feature in a level or a new type of puzzle. The MGS 4th wall effects seem more like the bad side of modern art -- random things thrown in to make people say WTF.
We aren't going to get there unless one of two thinks happens: First -- Chinese manned mission to Mars or Moon (Just like when the Ruskis kicked our asses in Space Race 1, it will make space an issue of national urgency). Second -- private companies sending rockets up themselves for various investments (mineral mining, space tourism, etc.) Competition is the only thing that's going to drive space exploration. The greed to make money is about the only thing that's going to have people launching rockets with enough frequency to make any dent in space exploration.
The current US system barely explores space. Most of our time is spent launching spy satillites and communication satilites -- both of which are meant to be used to send signals from one point on Earth to another. The ISS is a nice idea, that is if it ever gets used as a weigh point towards getting manned craft out of Earth orbit. Mostly it seems to be used right now so that Astronauts and Cosmonauts can meet in space, drink vodka, and play with slinkys. For all the billions spent getting the ISS built, maintaining it, and launching ships to dock with it, we should be using it for something more. We should be going toward other planets and moons. We have all the technology we need -- we just seem to lack courage and desire.
I think ps3 live will be free for about a month, and after that, free only for the very cheap and unsellable content. It's a hook, but what will happen is that you can get all the free downloads of skins and cheapass games (boggle, collapse, etc), but NOT play a game online. It sounds like they're letting developers build servers for their games, and therefore the DEVs are going to use that to make money from online players.
So to play Half-Life: Online, you'll need to connect to the Halflife server, which will cost you -- maybe $10 a month or something. Same with online "Riiiidge Racer" -- pay to use the RR server, again $10 a month. I suppose for the free SO users they'll have the occasional "Tetris-clone" tournament, which is Technically online play, but don't get your hopes up for being able to play HL or Counterstrike with your buddies without paying.
The existence of Able Danger, and its purported early identification of the 9/11 terrorists, was first disclosed publicly on June 19, 2005 in an article "Missed chance on way to 9/11" by Keith Phucas, a reporter for The Times Herald, a Norristown, Pennsylvania daily newspaper. Eight days later, on June 27, 2005, Representative Curt Weldon, vice chairman of the House Armed Services and House Homeland Security committees, gave a special orders speech on the House floor detailing Able Danger [1].
Mr. Speaker, I rise because information has come to my attention over the past several months that is very disturbing. I have learned that, in fact, one of our Federal agencies had, in fact, identified the major New York cell of Mohamed Atta prior to 9/11; and I have learned, Mr. Speaker, that in September of 2000, that Federal agency actually was prepared to bring the FBI in and prepared to work with the FBI to take down the cell that Mohamed Atta was involved in New York City, along with two of the other terrorists. I have also learned, Mr. Speaker, that when that recommendation was discussed within that Federal agency, the lawyers in the administration at that time said, you cannot pursue contact with the FBI against that cell. Mohamed Atta is in the U.S. on a green card, and we are fearful of the fallout from the Waco incident. So we did not allow that Federal agency to proceed.
Rep. Weldon later reiterated these concerns during a news conferences on February 14, 2006. He stated that Able Danger identified Mohamed Atta 13 separate times prior to 9/11 and that the unit also identified a potential problem in Yemen two weeks prior to the attack on the USS Cole in October, 2000. The Pentagon released a statement in response to Rep. Weldon, stating they wished to address these issues during a congressional hearing before the House Armed Services Committee scheduled for Wednesday, February 15, 2006.[2]
I think we had a smallish inkling that something was going to happen. I can't be sure how much of this was "hey if there's an attack we get more power" and how much was "Don't want a lawsuit, so CYA". Both seem equally plausible to me.
I agree -- if the battle system of the olde games was so bad that you don't think players want to play them --FIX THE BATTLES. Don't throw an autobattle system in there. Make them strategic, make them use a different magic/skill system. Give the enemy an ability to adapt. Have a new battle machanic. Be creative. Just. don't. fix. bad. battles. by. making. me. sit. and. watch.
It's really the cheap and easy way out. You don't have to figure out WHY you think the battles suck (CF Matsuno interview), you just need to have the "player" not touch the controls. I can't wait for the "genius" who decides platform games have boring jumps, or the FPS maker who thinks shooting is boring. At least if they follow the SE lead and decide to automate the "boring" bits. I play RPGs for the battles (well story too), which means that I should play the battles.
ps3 has complete backwards compatability, which means that a trade-in of the old ps2 doesn't make your entire game library unuseable. With a trade in and getting the lower end $500 ps3, I think the cost is actaully close to xbox 360. So the question will be of these two, which one has a bigger stable -- ps3. RPG fans, or at least Jrpg fans will not have xbox as a core system, because no Jrpgs will be made on xbox. Platformers will be mostly on ps3 or Wii -- I think there was only a port of Psychonauts as a platformer game on xbox.
The thing is that for xbox, all games seemed to be running into one of three genres -- shooters, sports games, or racers. Rarely something may come along that wasn't (Jade Empires, Psychonauts, Fable), but really not much selection on xbox unless you like those three game types. I didn't see a Katamari Damancy type game, or a Dynasty Warriors type, no Romance of the Three Kingdoms, No Gitaroo Man. Vartiety of game types seems to follow ps3 and Wii. Wii may run into problems on games that it takes a while to play -- it seems like after an hour or two, your arms would get tired.
What this is about is the ability to opperate a 2000 pound automobile safely. Nothing more, nothing less. According to the study, driving while cell-phoning someone impairs your ability to drive the car safely, just as much as alcohol does.
A car hitting a pedestrian has a lot of force behind it. in fact, the pedestrian has virtually no chance here. The point being that opperation of any large vehicle should be done in as safe a way as is reasonably possible. I think it's perfectly reasonable to require drivers (and drivers only) to hang up the cell phone before they drive, just as it's perfectly reasonable to require drivers to be sober before they get behind the wheel. Driving puts you behind the wheel of a vehicle that used improperly can easily kill or maim other people. That's why it's reasonable to ask that preventable impairments to safe driving be made illegal.
Another thing -- there is no "right to drive". Driving is a liscenced activity in the same vein as motorcyles and airplanes -- I need to show competence to opperate the vehicle safely before the government gives me permission to do so. If I can't satisfy the state that I can handle a big rig, I won't be given a commercial truck liscence. That means it's illegal for me to drive a Mack truck down interstate 44.
Doesn't surprise me. Other than RPGs, I think I'm pretty casual. And I usually end up playing a few hours. What makes you hardcore is when you do nothing else.
I don't see why those things are so great. It sounds like a bunch of random stuff -- ooh, so the game can read my saves? kewl. 'cause nothing says spygame like having a CG ninja tell me that I've been playing Samurai Warriors and Katamari Damancy. It seems like a case of people liking those elements 'cause they're weird, not because they're fun.
Skill Runes (Thunder Sword, Viper, Great Hawk etc.)
Status Orbs (Sealing, Drain, Magical, Fury)
The difference, the Runes were limited -- each player got 3 (Head, Right Hand and Left Hand), and the could only be changed in shops. That was really it. Since you get 108 different characters, I never really messed around with the Runes all that much -- it was usually easier to take a different character rather than change the Rune.
I give Suikoden far more "originality" credit than FF7. FF7 had FMVs, and as far as I can tell ONLY FMVs to make the game different than other FF games. It still used ATB, Aeris wasn't the first death (first death in FF actually occurs in FF2(japan) on the NES[Josef gets crushed to death by a Indiana Jones style boulder]), not the first party change system, nor the first Materia-type system (Suikoden was released first, but it's close). Suikoden is still fairly unique for its battle systems. It's the only game I know of with three BSs (Duels, Wars, and turn-based random battles). That's far more unique than "hey look purty movies". If that's what the FF7 fans think makes a great game, give 'em final fanstasy.
I still like FF games, but they're far from revolutionary. Most of them are essentially well written playable animes. I started with FF10, but I like the NES and SNES games better -- because they hadn't yet sacrificed GAMEPLAY for wannabe movies. I blame Square for that trend, where game developers now seem to think that I want a badly made movie with a little gaming on the side, or that I want purty pictures with very little story or substance. And most "games" really don't have a deep story, and too many try to shoehorn last year's "big thing" into a new game with tweaked graphics and a half assed plot.
anyway, FF7 is considered the best because it, like OoT and Mario 64, was the first in its series to go into 3D.
Well, maybe we don't mean "maturity" in the same way.
What I mean by "maturity" is that what we see and do in the real world is connected to the real world, we aren't self-centered, thinking everything is about us, happeneing to us, and worrying about how something will affect us. It's not fantasy or wishful thinking or anything like that. That's why a 5-year old living in Ghana is more mature than on living in the USA, they have to be in the real world to survive. They can't be thinking of Ninja Turtles and Toothfairies, etc. They don't have the luxury of free time before the Xbox, eating sugary foods while watching the latest cartoon, etc. The third worlders in general have very little time for the bread and circuses that dominate our waking life.
It's just something I've noticed. We in the west get obsessed with trivial slights, trivial inconvienience, things that at the end of the day just don't matter. And part of it is that we are comparatively speaking rather sheltered. We don't even read about the horrors that go on elsewhere on the planet. We live in a bubble where more people know more about entertainers than world affairs.
I'm not suggesting that westerners need to experience 3rd world conditions first hand, but they are in bad need of a reality check. We should at minimum read about what the third world is really like, look at photographs of the third world, maybe volenteer or donate to such causes. I think it might be good to go without on a semi regular basis -- I'm thinking more of camping or something similar. A week or two in a tent without TV and Xbox and so on, living on canned goods or whatever you can catch would give at least a small, highly sweetened taste of what it's like not to have everything at your fingertips the instant you want it. That's what we need -- at least for a short time not to have everything handed to us, instantly available, and exactly the size and color we want. Without that, we magnify minor inconvienience to the point where it becomes rediculous.
I think it's also partially the reason the rest of the world hates us. They hate us because we're a decadent society that obsesses over stuff that much of the world just doesn't get. We feel oppressed because some Wal-Mart greeter says "Happy Holidays", as I said before, compared to much of the world, that's not even on the radar. We worry about animal rights and stem cells and geneticly enhanced foods, I think the rest of the world frankly would be laughing at us IF our thinking that such things were "icky" didn't make it much more likely that some African kid will die of Cholera or Dysentary. I think this kind of stuff and frankly our need for instant gratification is proof positive that we ARE children. Especially considering that the west could probably solve many of these problems if we really wanted too. We're failing both our own country and the world because we're children, selfish, self-centered spoiled children.
I'm not going to ask people to live like the third world, just to recognize that it exists, and that compared to the rest of the planet, we really don't have many problems.
Well, I think part of the reason that adults don't grow up is that there aren't any real hardships to make them grow up.
We can give the political equivilant of "I'm gonna hold my breath 'til you give me my candy" -- because we aren't in very much real danger. We live in the first world, a world where "poor" doesn't mean digging for food in the trash, dysentery, or even a shack made of cobbled together materials. "Poor" means no plasma screens, no statilite TV, and Dial up internet.
We can waste time argueing about flag-burning and gay marriage because we really don't have that many serious domestic problems to be dealt with. Other nations would laugh at our battles. What -- we're "persectuted" because the Wal-Mart greeter doesn't say "Merry CHRISTMAS"? Okay, so exactly what is it called when a man can be beheaded for daring to not be a muslim? We think it's censorship because some jackass wants to ban the sale of M-rated games to 16 year olds? What about the http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/11/16/saudia12049 .htmSaudi teacher sentenced to 40 months and 750 lashes for "declaring listening to music, smoking, adultery, homosexuality and masturbation as permissible under Islam"?
The problem -- if you could call it that, keeping Americans and Westerners in general in a "childlike state" is that we don't have nearly as many problems as other people. We stay childlike because the hardships that force other people to grow up quickly just don't happen here.
If you really want to ban stem cell research, then go ahead. But it means when you get crushed under your Hummer, you won't get the stem cell treatment that you think is so horrible. And another thing -- how many "moarlists" out there know an actual human being in the position to need this stuff? How many would be willing to go to a hospital or a nursing home and tell those people how "eeeevil" it is to use stem cells so that they can walk or see or whatever else?
Anyone? *chirping crickets*
Your case isn't with me or anyone else on/. It's with the paralysed, the alzheimers patient, the guy down the hall with Lou Gehrig's disease. Convince them of the evils of these almost cures from embryonic stem cells. Convince them that it's better to do the moral thing and stay in the wheelchair.
There are moral issues, sure. There are moral issues in animal reasearch as well. (hint: someone had to physically break the rat's back -- and I bet the rat felt it too.) But just as with any result from animal research or any other so-called immoral research, you are free to opt out. If you think ESCR is "ickypants", don't use it. Convince your friends to do the same, and draw up legal documents so that you'll never get an ESC treatment. Fair enough, and if enough people do the same, the research will die out -- because medicine is a business. What isn't fair is to tell some cripple that he has to live by your code. They have the right to decide for themselves if they'd rather stay in the chair for the moral issues involved or to get the treatments and walk around.
I'll admit that there are some moral problems with using ESCs, and I can't quite say for sure how bad ESC is morally. But until the day when I get the cajones to say that death is preferable to taking ESCs as a treatment, any "moral" bleating I may do on the subject is meaningless. Just another healthy 1st world know-nothing bleating about the ethics of something that I don't really understand.
I'll agree that if you have the normal American slackass desk-job, losing muscle mass might be a problem. But keep in mind that mining is still a very physical job, and so loss of muscle mass may not be as big of a problem.
The biggest danger to humans, imo wouls be silica dust -- either clogging and destroying needed equipment or giving miners the moon equivelent of "black lung". I'm not sure how mines on earth solved this, but it seems to me that the troublem would be harder to control in 1/6th earth gravity.
Slashdot Mirror
I like my offline MMOs for just those reasons. It isn't just a grind, there's a story in the game, and progressing means you get to see more of it. Secondly, I don't feel obligated to spend hours a day grinding on jRPGs. If I want to, I can stop for a month -- hell I could stop for a year -- and pick up right where I left off, without the rest of the party having moved on without me.
My theory is that this is happenning because ST infected our minds with the memes that all of this stuff is possible, thus we look for it and sooner or later it happens.
The 21st century is more advanced than the 23rd -- my communicator can take pictures AND play games, plus I can set a cool ringtone. And I think my usb drive is actually smaller than an isolinear chip. whatever. Wake me when the ps6 is a holodeck.
Most games making extensive use of either one looked more like tech demos to me (mostly I looked at eyetoy). The rest of the time, they used the technology very sparingly, relying on more traditional control scemes. In fact, most of the "eyetoy" functionality in games is reserved for scanning your face into the game you're playing, not some innovative gameplay feature. The only "true" game that makes use of eyetoy is Antigrav, the rest are either collections of minigames or minigames in traditional games. I expect similar from Wii -- sure Wii's Wario Ware will be fun, but I'm not expecting much more than Tech demos for the first year or two.
Both would be measured on the same scale, say a ten point scale. 10 being highly stable, and a second ten meaning that the article is linked to by other sites as a reference. I don't think most web pages would link to bad info, and a page that's edited daily or weekly is probably "good enough" for most non accademic non professional use. So if you see a mark at the top with both scores as 10, chances are that the article is fairly accurate.
And now for something completely different:
Mein bratwurst has a first name, it's F-R-I-T-Z / Mein bratwurst has a second name, it's S-C-H-N-A-C-K-E-N-P-F-E-F-F-E-R-H-A-U-S-E-N. -- Reiner Wolfcastle
We don't have mascots because most gamers are 20+, and they aren't impressed by mascots anymore. Most products don't have them for the same reason. What's the mascot for Ford, or Viagra?
As an added bonus, almost all modern acedemic sources have something called "peer-review", meaning that all the papers submitted to the journals are read and reviewed by experts in the field, not by volenteers with no expertise in the subject. Even offline sources such as encyclopedias and newspapers have editors and researchers whose sole job is to catch mistakes before they make it to print. Without that, it's a complete crap-shoot as to whether what you're reading has anything to do with reality. It also tends to weed out obvious bias, which is fairly common in blogs (dailyKos, for example pretty much shills for liberal causes), but held in check by the editors of daily newspapers.
Secondly, as I said before, Anyone with significant html knowledge can easily fake credentials on a web page. If you're good enough, you could be a professor at a nonexistant university lecuring in advanced particle physics. And unless your readers are somewhat knowledgeable in the "who's who" of the subject your claiming to be an expert on, they're going to fall for it. hook. line. sinker. A journalism major who never read sci-fi might quite easily fall for "Prof E. Cochrane, phD in Quantum Physics at University of Dublin". They know nothing of physics, and wouldn't recognize the joke. They'd probably never question anything they saw on the page, and lets face it, very few people are going to contact U of Dublin to see if the professor whose work they're citing actually exists.
The web is simply too anonymous to provide a good source of information. Fraud is easy to commit, and no one checks for bias or outright lies online. Because of that, it's far better to go to the library and read a book on the subject, or search for magazine or journal articles on the subject. For the time being the web is too "wild west" to provide information for a serious research assignment.
For one thing, even with a more static webpage, you don't have any idea who wrote it. None. With Angelfire or Geocities or some other freeware webbuilding site, I could make a professional-looking webpage that proclaims that hyperdrive is physically possible. I could BS a theory based on quantum mechanics or string theory, and have a "schematic drawing" of an engine running on said principals. I could probably have a few references to Sci-fi to show it's a joke (no my name really is Cochrane). Wikipedia takes that and multiplies it times 200 -- because now it's not just some yahoo with internet access and free time, it's millions of yahoos with internet access. And if you're stupid enough to quote a webpage post-junior-high-school, frankly you deserve to flunk. Even reading one wikipedia discussion page will put you off trusting Wikipedia forever.
And quoting the enycyclopedia has never really been acceptable for serious papers. Not even Britannica. All that shows the teacher is that you're too lazy to go to the library, or even to access Lexis-Nexis to find journal articles related to your subject. Chances are that the paper in question was assigned months ago. Fine by me if you chose to screw off on the project until the week before, but quoting an encyclopedia makes it obvious that you waited til the last minute.
Long story short, the Web is probably ok for a starting point (if you have a good bullshit detector), or your topic is related to nerd popculture (redshirts from ST, Jedi fighting styles). it's not reliable enough for serious research.
Rather than the numerous ways we write the SH sound, just make all of them s'
-Tion becomes s'on, -Cius becomes s'us. Or the same with Th -> T'. Or having a seperate symbol for long vowels (bars seem like a natural choice).
Something like:
I went to t'e skool to get an edUcas'on.
I don't see it ever happening. And frankly it might be better to scrap English in favor of some kind of Interlang anyway.
The problem is the games aren't designed for those of us that have half an hour to an hour to play. Well at least in games with some depth. I can't commit to 2+ hours between save points, or long levels. In fact I've heard similar complaints from others I've talked to online. Two Towers got fairly bad marks because of the sparse savepoints in Helm's Deep. More or less you couldn't start the level unless you had 1.5 hours to devote, because otherwise you'd have to quit before you could save.
Another problem that keeps some away is the high cost. unless you make a lot of money, $50 is *not* a casual purchase. Yet for any game system you buy, that's the standard price. Most people aren't going to buy a $50 game that they aren't sure they're going to like. I think the limit may be far lower, about $15 or so (about the cost of a movie). Much above that, and casuals are thinking "am I really going to enjoy this game *that much*?". So if you want casual gamers to play, make cheap games that are fun to play.
I agree. So many in the middle east WANT something bad to happen to America, so if the shuttle goes down, they'll naturally take it as Allah's curse on America. Especially since that region of the world is far more religious than we are. Thinking that God is on your side helps you fight longer and harder.
http://www.weatherwars.info/index.php Aparently the Yakuza are gods then.
I prefer the innovations to add to the gameplay factor -- I guess that's just me. I'd rather see someone try a new feature in a level or a new type of puzzle. The MGS 4th wall effects seem more like the bad side of modern art -- random things thrown in to make people say WTF.
The current US system barely explores space. Most of our time is spent launching spy satillites and communication satilites -- both of which are meant to be used to send signals from one point on Earth to another. The ISS is a nice idea, that is if it ever gets used as a weigh point towards getting manned craft out of Earth orbit. Mostly it seems to be used right now so that Astronauts and Cosmonauts can meet in space, drink vodka, and play with slinkys. For all the billions spent getting the ISS built, maintaining it, and launching ships to dock with it, we should be using it for something more. We should be going toward other planets and moons. We have all the technology we need -- we just seem to lack courage and desire.
So to play Half-Life: Online, you'll need to connect to the Halflife server, which will cost you -- maybe $10 a month or something. Same with online "Riiiidge Racer" -- pay to use the RR server, again $10 a month. I suppose for the free SO users they'll have the occasional "Tetris-clone" tournament, which is Technically online play, but don't get your hopes up for being able to play HL or Counterstrike with your buddies without paying.
It's a GIMMICK, not a real feature.
Mr. Speaker, I rise because information has come to my attention over the past several months that is very disturbing. I have learned that, in fact, one of our Federal agencies had, in fact, identified the major New York cell of Mohamed Atta prior to 9/11; and I have learned, Mr. Speaker, that in September of 2000, that Federal agency actually was prepared to bring the FBI in and prepared to work with the FBI to take down the cell that Mohamed Atta was involved in New York City, along with two of the other terrorists. I have also learned, Mr. Speaker, that when that recommendation was discussed within that Federal agency, the lawyers in the administration at that time said, you cannot pursue contact with the FBI against that cell. Mohamed Atta is in the U.S. on a green card, and we are fearful of the fallout from the Waco incident. So we did not allow that Federal agency to proceed.
Rep. Weldon later reiterated these concerns during a news conferences on February 14, 2006. He stated that Able Danger identified Mohamed Atta 13 separate times prior to 9/11 and that the unit also identified a potential problem in Yemen two weeks prior to the attack on the USS Cole in October, 2000. The Pentagon released a statement in response to Rep. Weldon, stating they wished to address these issues during a congressional hearing before the House Armed Services Committee scheduled for Wednesday, February 15, 2006.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Danger
I think we had a smallish inkling that something was going to happen. I can't be sure how much of this was "hey if there's an attack we get more power" and how much was "Don't want a lawsuit, so CYA". Both seem equally plausible to me.
It's really the cheap and easy way out. You don't have to figure out WHY you think the battles suck (CF Matsuno interview), you just need to have the "player" not touch the controls. I can't wait for the "genius" who decides platform games have boring jumps, or the FPS maker who thinks shooting is boring. At least if they follow the SE lead and decide to automate the "boring" bits. I play RPGs for the battles (well story too), which means that I should play the battles.
USA
1. Xbox360
2. ps3
3. Wii
Japan
1. Wii
2. ps3
3. Xbox360
ps3 has complete backwards compatability, which means that a trade-in of the old ps2 doesn't make your entire game library unuseable. With a trade in and getting the lower end $500 ps3, I think the cost is actaully close to xbox 360. So the question will be of these two, which one has a bigger stable -- ps3. RPG fans, or at least Jrpg fans will not have xbox as a core system, because no Jrpgs will be made on xbox. Platformers will be mostly on ps3 or Wii -- I think there was only a port of Psychonauts as a platformer game on xbox.
The thing is that for xbox, all games seemed to be running into one of three genres -- shooters, sports games, or racers. Rarely something may come along that wasn't (Jade Empires, Psychonauts, Fable), but really not much selection on xbox unless you like those three game types. I didn't see a Katamari Damancy type game, or a Dynasty Warriors type, no Romance of the Three Kingdoms, No Gitaroo Man. Vartiety of game types seems to follow ps3 and Wii. Wii may run into problems on games that it takes a while to play -- it seems like after an hour or two, your arms would get tired.
A car hitting a pedestrian has a lot of force behind it. in fact, the pedestrian has virtually no chance here. The point being that opperation of any large vehicle should be done in as safe a way as is reasonably possible. I think it's perfectly reasonable to require drivers (and drivers only) to hang up the cell phone before they drive, just as it's perfectly reasonable to require drivers to be sober before they get behind the wheel. Driving puts you behind the wheel of a vehicle that used improperly can easily kill or maim other people. That's why it's reasonable to ask that preventable impairments to safe driving be made illegal.
Another thing -- there is no "right to drive". Driving is a liscenced activity in the same vein as motorcyles and airplanes -- I need to show competence to opperate the vehicle safely before the government gives me permission to do so. If I can't satisfy the state that I can handle a big rig, I won't be given a commercial truck liscence. That means it's illegal for me to drive a Mack truck down interstate 44.
2000lbs * 45mph (855,360,000 ft/second) = 1710720000000 (ft*lbs/s)
(not sure I got the force exactly right.)
Doesn't surprise me. Other than RPGs, I think I'm pretty casual. And I usually end up playing a few hours. What makes you hardcore is when you do nothing else.
I don't see why those things are so great. It sounds like a bunch of random stuff -- ooh, so the game can read my saves? kewl. 'cause nothing says spygame like having a CG ninja tell me that I've been playing Samurai Warriors and Katamari Damancy. It seems like a case of people liking those elements 'cause they're weird, not because they're fun.
The difference, the Runes were limited -- each player got 3 (Head, Right Hand and Left Hand), and the could only be changed in shops. That was really it. Since you get 108 different characters, I never really messed around with the Runes all that much -- it was usually easier to take a different character rather than change the Rune.
I give Suikoden far more "originality" credit than FF7. FF7 had FMVs, and as far as I can tell ONLY FMVs to make the game different than other FF games. It still used ATB, Aeris wasn't the first death (first death in FF actually occurs in FF2(japan) on the NES[Josef gets crushed to death by a Indiana Jones style boulder]), not the first party change system, nor the first Materia-type system (Suikoden was released first, but it's close). Suikoden is still fairly unique for its battle systems. It's the only game I know of with three BSs (Duels, Wars, and turn-based random battles). That's far more unique than "hey look purty movies". If that's what the FF7 fans think makes a great game, give 'em final fanstasy.
I still like FF games, but they're far from revolutionary. Most of them are essentially well written playable animes. I started with FF10, but I like the NES and SNES games better -- because they hadn't yet sacrificed GAMEPLAY for wannabe movies. I blame Square for that trend, where game developers now seem to think that I want a badly made movie with a little gaming on the side, or that I want purty pictures with very little story or substance. And most "games" really don't have a deep story, and too many try to shoehorn last year's "big thing" into a new game with tweaked graphics and a half assed plot.
anyway, FF7 is considered the best because it, like OoT and Mario 64, was the first in its series to go into 3D.
What I mean by "maturity" is that what we see and do in the real world is connected to the real world, we aren't self-centered, thinking everything is about us, happeneing to us, and worrying about how something will affect us. It's not fantasy or wishful thinking or anything like that. That's why a 5-year old living in Ghana is more mature than on living in the USA, they have to be in the real world to survive. They can't be thinking of Ninja Turtles and Toothfairies, etc. They don't have the luxury of free time before the Xbox, eating sugary foods while watching the latest cartoon, etc. The third worlders in general have very little time for the bread and circuses that dominate our waking life.
It's just something I've noticed. We in the west get obsessed with trivial slights, trivial inconvienience, things that at the end of the day just don't matter. And part of it is that we are comparatively speaking rather sheltered. We don't even read about the horrors that go on elsewhere on the planet. We live in a bubble where more people know more about entertainers than world affairs.
I'm not suggesting that westerners need to experience 3rd world conditions first hand, but they are in bad need of a reality check. We should at minimum read about what the third world is really like, look at photographs of the third world, maybe volenteer or donate to such causes. I think it might be good to go without on a semi regular basis -- I'm thinking more of camping or something similar. A week or two in a tent without TV and Xbox and so on, living on canned goods or whatever you can catch would give at least a small, highly sweetened taste of what it's like not to have everything at your fingertips the instant you want it. That's what we need -- at least for a short time not to have everything handed to us, instantly available, and exactly the size and color we want. Without that, we magnify minor inconvienience to the point where it becomes rediculous.
I think it's also partially the reason the rest of the world hates us. They hate us because we're a decadent society that obsesses over stuff that much of the world just doesn't get. We feel oppressed because some Wal-Mart greeter says "Happy Holidays", as I said before, compared to much of the world, that's not even on the radar. We worry about animal rights and stem cells and geneticly enhanced foods, I think the rest of the world frankly would be laughing at us IF our thinking that such things were "icky" didn't make it much more likely that some African kid will die of Cholera or Dysentary. I think this kind of stuff and frankly our need for instant gratification is proof positive that we ARE children. Especially considering that the west could probably solve many of these problems if we really wanted too. We're failing both our own country and the world because we're children, selfish, self-centered spoiled children.
I'm not going to ask people to live like the third world, just to recognize that it exists, and that compared to the rest of the planet, we really don't have many problems.
We can give the political equivilant of "I'm gonna hold my breath 'til you give me my candy" -- because we aren't in very much real danger. We live in the first world, a world where "poor" doesn't mean digging for food in the trash, dysentery, or even a shack made of cobbled together materials. "Poor" means no plasma screens, no statilite TV, and Dial up internet.
We can waste time argueing about flag-burning and gay marriage because we really don't have that many serious domestic problems to be dealt with. Other nations would laugh at our battles. What -- we're "persectuted" because the Wal-Mart greeter doesn't say "Merry CHRISTMAS"? Okay, so exactly what is it called when a man can be beheaded for daring to not be a muslim? We think it's censorship because some jackass wants to ban the sale of M-rated games to 16 year olds? What about the http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/11/16/saudia12049 .htmSaudi teacher sentenced to 40 months and 750 lashes for "declaring listening to music, smoking, adultery, homosexuality and masturbation as permissible under Islam"?
The problem -- if you could call it that, keeping Americans and Westerners in general in a "childlike state" is that we don't have nearly as many problems as other people. We stay childlike because the hardships that force other people to grow up quickly just don't happen here.
PUT UP OR SHUT UP
If you really want to ban stem cell research, then go ahead. But it means when you get crushed under your Hummer, you won't get the stem cell treatment that you think is so horrible. And another thing -- how many "moarlists" out there know an actual human being in the position to need this stuff? How many would be willing to go to a hospital or a nursing home and tell those people how "eeeevil" it is to use stem cells so that they can walk or see or whatever else?
Anyone? *chirping crickets*
Your case isn't with me or anyone else on /. It's with the paralysed, the alzheimers patient, the guy down the hall with Lou Gehrig's disease. Convince them of the evils of these almost cures from embryonic stem cells. Convince them that it's better to do the moral thing and stay in the wheelchair.
There are moral issues, sure. There are moral issues in animal reasearch as well. (hint: someone had to physically break the rat's back -- and I bet the rat felt it too.) But just as with any result from animal research or any other so-called immoral research, you are free to opt out. If you think ESCR is "ickypants", don't use it. Convince your friends to do the same, and draw up legal documents so that you'll never get an ESC treatment. Fair enough, and if enough people do the same, the research will die out -- because medicine is a business. What isn't fair is to tell some cripple that he has to live by your code. They have the right to decide for themselves if they'd rather stay in the chair for the moral issues involved or to get the treatments and walk around.
I'll admit that there are some moral problems with using ESCs, and I can't quite say for sure how bad ESC is morally. But until the day when I get the cajones to say that death is preferable to taking ESCs as a treatment, any "moral" bleating I may do on the subject is meaningless. Just another healthy 1st world know-nothing bleating about the ethics of something that I don't really understand.
I'll agree that if you have the normal American slackass desk-job, losing muscle mass might be a problem. But keep in mind that mining is still a very physical job, and so loss of muscle mass may not be as big of a problem.
The biggest danger to humans, imo wouls be silica dust -- either clogging and destroying needed equipment or giving miners the moon equivelent of "black lung". I'm not sure how mines on earth solved this, but it seems to me that the troublem would be harder to control in 1/6th earth gravity.