I'm not sure a Sims expansion themed on incest is appropriate.

Sure we all know what you mean, but if you didn't smoke so much fucking crack and dropped out required words from your statements we wouldn't have to think about it- we'd just read it.

The quoted sentence is a grammatical mess primarily because of inconsistent verb tense. Corrected, it might read, "Sure we all know what you meant, but if you hadn't smoked so much fucking crack and dropped out required words from your statements we wouldn't have had to think about it -- we'd just have read it." I'm being generous and not counting the inconsistent spacing around the dash as an error.

[ Insert crazy temper tantrum about minor grammatical error here. ]

This comment was edited on Jan 19, 02:14.

Prohibition did (and does) cause violent behavior, through several well-understood mechanisms.

A causal link between video gaming and violence has yet to be established, despite the claims of a few statistically naive psychologists.

With Microsoft's current strategy an XBox360 costs you about $700. Sure, may be able to get one for $400 plus the cost of standing in line for hours, but if you keep it you decline the opportunity to sell it for $700. In effect, it costs $700, full stop, so which people (kids? I bet the median age of consumers of these things is somewhere around 25) get them is not the question. The question is who gets all those $300 increments in price. The author proposes a mechanism which doesn't change the price consumers wind up paying but does change who gets the extra $300. I agree with the first poster that the author probably underestimates the resentment the mechanism might generate, and would add he likely overestimates the revenues at stake. Over the life cycle of the product those increments on the first handful of units won't matter, but consumers have long memories.

This comment was edited on Dec 16, 13:41.

Follow the directions in the "safe turkey tips" link. The CDC, presumably to cover their asses, recommends cooking your turkey to an internal temp of 180. That'll be one bone dry tasteless bird. And an overly safe bird: anything that can hurt you dies by 160 degrees, so that's as much as you need to cook it. Follow directions like Alton's (who over-exactly recommends 161 degrees):

http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,,FOOD_9936_8389,00.html

instead of the Federal government's.

What "controversy?" The title should be, "Sony suspends universally derided CD production."

Sony's response that the virus won't affect your CD player is classic.

The byline for the Civ 4 review:

"Make sure you have slept enough, cause your about to loose alot of it now!"

Damnit, what is so freakin' hard about learning how many o's are in the word "lose." (There is also no such word as "alot" and the concept of contractions seems lost on this budding journalistic genius.)

I cannot count the number of times some anonymous individual who's just lost an online game has defiantly remarked, "your a looser." It's just rediculous [sic].

Pedantic uptight rant is now over.

This comment was edited on Nov 7, 14:22.

Thanks, got that to work.

That's good, but then let me change the request to "how about an easily accessible RSS feed?" I don't see the little orange icon when I access Blue's; I don't know what to do with an .rdf file and have little inclination to work it out, and googling for "blue's news rss" provides a number of hits but still no easy way to subscribe to the feed (as far as I could tell in my two minutes of intensive research).

Any chance of adding an RSS feed?

Technology no one can use (1), no one will be able to use in the forseeable future (2), and pointless even if someone could use it(3)! Awesome.

(1) Current HDTV standards are 60 hertz.
(2) Even 1080P, which no broadcaster has on the horizon, is 60 hertz.
(3) There are severe diminishing returns to frame rates beyond about 30 and human vision is incapable of differentiating frame rates much beyond twice that.

Make sure you read the letter Mr. Thompson sent the Seattle cops:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/18/1516223&from=rss
This comment was edited on Oct 18, 18:47.

Greg -- possibly after a long discussion with one of his superiors -- seems to have realized his wee error:

http://forums.vugames.com/thread.jspa?threadID=7093&tstart=0

The interview is hilarious. Uwe loves Postal (or POSTAL as he puts it), likes to play with his XBox, and is "excited to do Far Cry soon" -- although it would seem pre-production on the movie is well underway. He also compares his work to Quentin Tarantino's and imagines people will want to watch 90 minutes of his films, although possibly not three hours:

UB: BLOODRAYNE is R. In the Name of the King – a Dungeon Siege tale – will be PG 13.

GVK: Any truth to the reports that the film will be over Three Hours in length?

UB: Or longer. Maybe we have to do the KILL BILL variation – two parts. Nobody wants to sit so long in the theatre.

Will i[In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Taleparts I and II top the LoTR trilogy? Only time will tell.

great cast (Kristanna TERMINATRIX Loken, Ben Kingsley, Michael Madsen, Billy Zane, Meatloaf, Geraldine Chaplin, Udo Kier, Matt Davis and Michelle Rodriguez

It would seem Ben Kingsley (Searching for Bobby Fischer, Schindler's List, Death and the Maiden, House of Sand and Fog) is really, really, really hard up for cash these days.

Simply because some dumb kid VU hired to man the forums said something ridiculous isn't reason enough to avoid the game (Derek Smart, meet VU-Greg, your new public relations specialist). But it is disturbing that there seem to be loads of people with ninja systems and performance issues.

As someone in that thread correctly points out, an unintended consequence of draconian piracy prevention software is to increase the incentive to pirate, since the pirated version will often work better precisely because it lacks the problematic security algorithms. I would guess the most profitable prevention scheme is something extremely simple that prevents only the most casual of pirating. Anything more than that is largely ineffective because determined pirates will succeed anyways, and largely counterproductive because it will cause problems for legitimate customers.

Marc's reasoning is invalid. Under the current system, the value to a customer of buying one of his games is:

( value of the game ) + ( value of option to resell).

If on the other hand the resale market were shut down, the value is:

( value of the game ).

That is, demand for his games could be higher because resale exists. Shutting down the resale market would not necessarily increase his profits. Nor would a system under which part of the revenue from a used sale goes to the original developer.

Finally, the markup on used games may appear higher, but so too are the costs of selling these games. In addition to the cost of buying the game from a customer, the store must inspect and repackage the goods, and the return rate is probably higher. There are no barriers to entry into the used or new video games markets so there is no reason to expect there are excess profits to be had in either, which implies amongst other things that the profits from used sales are more or less equal to those from new.

Without question it was the most overhyped, over-rated piece of shit I have ever played. It wasn't even a game. I don't know what it was. That review was the sole reason I dumped 'PC Gamer' forever and I haven't looked back.

Sounds like something I would've said up until Doom 3 (PC Gamer: 94%, PC gamer score for B&W: 94% ) came out. In fact, look at the disgraceful list:

http://www.gamerankings.com/htmlpages4/914356.asp

Two-thirds or so of 67 reviews give this piece of crap 90% or better. There is no more depraved and useless industry than gaming reviews.

This comment was edited on Jul 18, 19:10.

First jpeg, now DVRs? Couldn't we just disband Forgent and banish the company executives in the interest of the public good?

And how are points determined? Why by a direct relationship to kills!

As has already been pointed out several times in this thread alone, no, points are determined by many actions *one of which* is kills. So, no, there is no "direct relationship" between kills and points: you could score lots of points without ever making a single kill, to take an extreme counterexample.

Then go read how rankings are done for any of the Unreal Tournament games, for World of Warcraft's honor system (which is far from perfect, since there's no dishonor), or numerous other games (including open source ones). It's not hard. Consider each death event a one-on-one tournament

So your solution to (your imagined problem that) points are only given for kills is to implement a system which only works for kills? The BF2 system rewards players for many actions besides kills; again, I don't see how this system could be integrated with chess-like rankings.

Who's the better player? One who kills 100 newbies in the space of 4 hours and dies 200 times, or one that kills 50 decent players in 2 hours and dies 5 times? Right now there's no scoring difference -- they both get the exact same number of points.

There is no way of knowing who the better player is in the situation you describe because -- in case this hasn't been said before -- rewards in BF2 AREN'T JUST BASED ON KILLS AND DEATHS. Go play Quake 3 if you want such a game.

It would be trivial to adjust the current system to reflect time played, such as using points-per-minute rather than just points. I, for one, am happy they didn't go that route.