"I like how to consider better visuals = Hollywood = bad."

It's not merely "better visuals", it's the cinematic techniques where you stop say in Call of duty, to say call of duty isn't one giant action movie would be an understatement. I'm saying the "trying to be in a movie" bits distract from actually making a game because "immersion" and videogame like gameplay are at odds in say a single player campaign.

What happens is you start to obey the generic laws of the real world and the expectations of how things 'should' behave to a larger extent which limits the kinds of gameplay you can have in the game, which makes for incredible boredom from one sequel to another.

So you have little idea what you're talking about sadly. It's not 'merely' great graphics, it's the kind of design vs hollywood action sections in a game that conflict with one another. You simply can't do insanely crazy things because you've got the hollywood mindset happening and not the videogame mindset happening.

"The supporters of Kickstarter are always pointing to games that haven't been released yet as examples of its success."

Faster than light. Shovel Knight and Shadowrun have been successful, the first Shadow run was rough but they more then made up for it with Dragonfall. Developers who've never made a game in a genre or been away from it for many years go through a learning curve as they relearn the ropes of making that certain type of game. So that is somewhat forgivable.

Kickstarter has defintiely been abused but to say its a total loss is idiotic, I'm awaiting Retro

Shovel knight

https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...

http://www.gog.com/game/shovel...

Faster than light

http://www.gog.com/game/faster...

Shadowrun Dragonfall

http://www.gog.com/game/shadow...

"It's become a stagnant genre, and it's time we had an Doom/Duke Nukem/Unreal/Half-Life successor"

The reality is many games single player aspect back then don't hold up very well if you play them back to back with modern games if you measure them on a feelings and "this is so awesome" standpoint, the rise of the cinemtic game - even as me an older gamer has shifted my preference hierarchy to want "both". I force myself to play brutal doom to get my "gameplay vegetables" because I hate the fact that hollywood props and cheap tricks give human brains higher highs in terms of excitement over intrinsic gameplay in terms of single player experiences. I really hate the fact that when I go back and play doom 2 I wish it was some hybrid of the cartoony doom I know and love and the best elements of hollywood deadspace, but minus the hollywood hyper realism. I was never a fan of the push towards realism in doom 3 on mars, I always loved the pixel art/toony type style of doom 2 and it was kind of awkward seeing the Cyber-Demon rendered realistically, when doom 2 had more of an artistic comic vibe with it's enemies like the walking spider brain that felt poached from Teenage mutant ninja turtles.

To say that modern games are all boring is a bit of an overstatement, they certainly DO cause excitement in their hollywood parts. I enjoy Assassins creeds world even if I have serious issues with the dumbed down combat when compared to prince of persia series also made by Ubisoft. I really do think the push for hollywood has seriously made developers dumber, newer generations of developers raised on Halo regen shields and hollywood handholding campaigns has been infecting all of gaming, I seriously question developers, that "they know what they are doing". Too often even simple and cheap to program things are missing in many modern games.

The problem modern games main problem is gameplay, PC (modding/dedicated servers) and challenge related but this is publishers trying to drive DRM and control the market by confiscating game ownership with encrypted steam games via steamworks DRM for multiplayer/matchmaking. Shooters FPS/TPS, they are most certainly by the numbers but the mass gaming audience prefers hollywood action movie over intrinsic gameplay generated by fun and challenge. To be honest with you, I thought half-life 2 was just a giant pile of fail, trying too hard to be the hollywood action movie type game it never really was really "here's an empty base with an experiment gone wrong, you are on your own". Half life one did it's best to get out of the players way, while Half-life 2 feels like a very force sequel. I think it comes down to Valve not really not know what they are doing storywise. When I got to the buggy desert/section I gave up, I just got too bored. Half-life 2 was poorly made in many areas and poorly paced. I lost interest.

Half-life, while it was one of the first 'movie based games' where there was story integrated into it, but it wasn't done as obnoxiously and overbearingly as it is done today. That being said, some obnoxious overbearingness works, if you play the singleplayer campaign of Transformers - Fall of cybertron, you'd be hard pressed to say that it couldn't compare in terms of fun to Doom 2.

Doom was made at a time before the integration of 'hollywood action movie/cartoon show inside a videogame' was mastered. The newer generation has problems going back and playing games that haven't mastered the hollywood integration like Mass effect 2, Call of duty and transformers fall of cybetron (sp campaign). I don't fault newer genreation gamers for that because even I as an older gamer know that when CPU/GPU power hit a threshold it was just easier to use high def AV to flash our primate brain in sensation, problem is instrinsic feelings related internally generated gameplay are easily overwhelmed and outcompeted in many (not all) instances of set piece hollywood bullshit. The kind of excitement we get from the hollywood is of a different character them the stress based excitement from challenge and mastery.

This is why while we might have all enjoyed mass effect 2, it left us with a kind of shitty aftertaste like we lost something, and we did. Since hollywood stimulation and gameplay stimulation seem to compete and often times are at odds with one another in our brains where one drowns out the other, more of then not, gameplay losing out because it causes stress and costs the brain energy and passive audio/visuals goes down easy.

"Nowadays America, my adopted country, has turned into something that I ran away from, where the "Press" no longer collaborate with the authority, where the "Media" willingly becomes the mouthpiece of the power that be"

America has been at war and over throwing others since it's founding, you do know that right? Only someone naive would believe this. America has always been the way you are seeing it, you, like most of the ignorant masses of mankind don't do well to become historically literate.

"Both of which, BTW, want you to hate Fox News, which you are dutifully doing."

Just because the CIA does something doesn't mean it is necessarily bad or irrational, it's in the governments interest to decrease political extremism where fox foments it if we're honest with ourselves.

They found a statistical relationship between the results from "normal" people and "people with cancer". This means that it MIGHT be possible to develop this into a test.

But this "result" (a statistical difference) might be that they got an average score of 98 +/- 10 for the healty people and 102 +/- 10 for the people-with-cancer. So someone who scores 100, healty or has cancer? 105? Can still go both ways.

The number of passengers has been adjusted from 280 to 283. There were 15 crew on board.

I take such news with a grain of salt. In my experience/estimates, about 80% of security experts report "not possible to reproduce/impossible to exploit" for REAL exploitable bugs.

I'm guessing that of the hundreds of thousands of people who get that "mass mailing", some are reporting the mails as SPAM to the authorities. Even if there is an "unsubscribe link" somewhere.

Those that do this, might have subscribed in the past and now no longer use Microsoft software. Or maybe Microsoft at one point decided to add a class-of-users to the list automatically (which I think they shouldn't have done if they did).

In any case, with so many users, the chances of being reported as spammers are 100%. So I understand the pressure to stop.

Here in holland and across europe the same is being done. The thing is, technically, many homes are hooked up with a line physically capable of say 20mpbs, but with only a 10mbps subscription. The extra bandwidth can be alotted to "guest users".

Similarly, even if someone has a 20(or more) mbps subscription on a 20mbps line, he/she won't be using all of it all of the time. So you can again use part of the bandwidth for guests. In this case it would be fair to give the original subscriber priority to use whatever he/she wants, and put the guests at a lower priority.

Oh, security wise they also separate the original subscriber from the guests.

I have the impression they do this "sensibly": the subscribers don't really have a valid reason to be upset about it.

And the thing is: If you're a subscriber, suddenly there are hundreds or thousands of places where you won't be using your 3G datalink but a wifi hotspot. Faster, cheaper!

Getting into "admin" mode is a big deal. Even if you don't see a direct way of making money off that, someone else might. (see ingenium's post).

And even then, it should be "confidential information" how much money is in there. If the crooks get to check on the amount that's in there over a period, they can decide to crack it open at "just" the right time. Should improve their "profits" by a factor of two on average.

If you're right and absolutely the only thing they can do is to dispense bills into the "not-dispensed" basket, there is a "denial-of-service" attack: Dispense all bills into the wastebasket just after the machine has been filled. Now the machine will be empty until the next refill. VERY annoying for the people who out-of-habit only go to one ATM.

You have this creditcard. It works in the mall, it works at the cinema. You go somewhere where you know your brother/friend/whatever also has a creditcard that also works in the obvious places. Do you remember to call the credit card company?

What if the bad guys manage to find your account details at a badly protected webshop? They call the creditcard company saying you'll e doing a few purchases across the country (or abroad). Try it once or twice to see what the creditcard company asks to verify it's you, and most likely the crooks will be able to prepare that information.

You're too uninformed to comment sadly.

"Oh, hang on. Sorry, he was writing about socialism, wasn't he?"

Orwell, is a democratic socialist. He was criticizing stalin's russia

"... for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

AKA he wanted to revive the socialist movement. He stayed a socialist.

"I must stress that I am not a socialist or communist by a long shot, but there is something wrong with a society that can't pay their workers a proper wage."

That's the nature of capitalist society, capitalism naturally breeds inequality. Marx's analysis of capitalism still holds true.

Dealing with the effects of capital accumulation on the working class, Marx states:

"They mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of the appendage of a machines destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hateful toil; they estrange him from the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power. ... It follows therefore in proportion as capital accumulates the lot of labourer, be his wages high or low, must grow worse. It establishes an accumulation of misery corresponding with the accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, accumulation of misery, agony, toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole."