"Do you have any idea how stupid you sound when you make such statements. You lose all credibility when you act like facilitating crime isn't in and of itself a crime."

The original crime was monopoly, Intellectual property and it's believers are the biggest scam going. The people who originally wrote copyright didn't expect it'd become eternal.

Look at the following chart:

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

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

If you still think he's a "criminal" you are too stupid and illiterate to see that the law is nothing but the rich man's tool to take away the rights of everyone else.

... this (mass surveillance) is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Look at the following graphs:

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...

And then...

WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap

http://www.businessinsider.com...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Free markets?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

http://www.amazon.com/Empire-I...

"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.

In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture—attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies—to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion."

"IIRC D3 wasn't the same dev team"

Incorrect, the Descent 3 team was originally part of Parallax Software (the original devs of descent 1 + 2).

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

... learning is trapped in the 19th century. I'd love to take this game and get a developer to polish it to AAA level graphics.

http://immuneattack.org/

We learn from things we do repeatedly, so it would make sense to discover how to take advantage of our pleasure centers to make certain kinds of learning addictive in and of themselves. Now this is NOT to say that traditional learning is all bullshit but there is definitely a severe dearth of talent and intelligence when concerning how data is displayed, interpreted, thought about and engaged with. Ideally you should take things that are complex and break them down into things that are both interesting and easy to understand to build bridges to higher order understanding of concepts. I think one of education's greatest downfalls is not realizing that presentation, aesthetics, etc, are just as important because they HOOK the interest of kids. If you can't hook kids curiousity and just say 'here grind through all this boring work for no particular reason' I don't think we're doing them any favors. How many adults really remember anything from school if we're honest? I bet most of us could embarass our political leaders by just flipping open a highschool textbook and asking some basic questions.

I look back on my own education and I see how limited in imagination the current system really is on a whole host of things, schools tend to kill kids curiosity if we're honest with ourselves. Many of us didn't enjoy learning until we got out of school/university completely because of the nature of schools structure itself.

I think there is still plenty left to learn about learning and things we don't yet understand that the old guard has trouble dealing with.

"I have very good memories of Descent 3 online"

Most people who moved from Descent 2 to the third knew the third wasn't as good as the prior two. Also D3 was not as financially successful as the prior two games which lead to them cancelling Descent 4. Which means there were major problems throughout the game.

The biggest problem was that when they made D3 they didn't carefully measure the mathematics of everything in Descent 2, i.e. how the ship moved, how the weapons behaved, ship model sizes vs weapon sizes vs level sizes.

Descent 3's biggest problem was they didn't understand all the small things that made Descent 2 (which is just a beefed up D1) so great. The level sizes in D3 and perversely, the free form architecture and 'outside' terrain created these massive open spaces that severely destroyed the pacing of the action. What made descent so great was constant barrage of action in enclosed spaces. In D3 they made lots of things just way too big and many of the ships and weapons felt 'off' vs the kind of huge open spaces and free architecture they had. I enjoyed D3 multi for what it was but the feel of many of the weapons and corny introduction of ships with varying characteristics perversely ruined the series for me.

What made Descent was the equality of the descent ship with the INEQUALITY (aka you have x and he has y) that arises in terms of weapons. This is what took me years to figure out and put into words, inequalities should be encouraged in the domain of powerups, not permanent ship statistics. This is why Descent 2 was so fun, aka if you had plasma and the other guy gausss. The other guy had homers and you had mercury, etc. And you ran around the maze hunting for powerups when you were out. This kept the pace of the action going. In Descent 3 they totally messed this up and you can feel it throughout the entire game. Too much space and not enough action leads to serious lulls in fun and it showed up in the descent communities reaction to the game and in the sales.

What they should have done is slowly build off Descent 2's legacy instead of retooling all the powerups and ship models, they should have stayed close to the D2. The real problem was Descent 2 was so well put together and the dev's didn't realize what made it what it was. Basically when you change the object properties of the levels/weapons/ships/etc without any understanding of knock on effects you create unintended consequences for the feel of the game and the pacing of the action which is what Descent 3 developers sorely didn't grasp. Most of the fun in descent 2 came from running around and escaping other peoples powerups in small tight spaces. If we went back and changed things like ship size and hitboxes of weapons in Descent 2 and experimented you'd understand immediatley that the values for these things change the entire feel of the game when you combine them all. It's all those little values that 'feel off' when you add them together that makes you realize they aren't fit together properly in Descent 3.

I wish they could have open sourced D3, it would have allowed the community to fix and modify what the developers didn't understand. That being said, check out Talon.

http://www.talongame.com/

... but the real problem was that Descent 3 was not as good as the prior 2. Descent really shined in multiplayer over LAN/Kail/Kahn. Back when I was playing with friends Descent was eclipsed by quake and other first person shooters because they were easier to play and the single player portion of the game always had serious issues.

I don't have confidence any reboot would understand why Descent 3 failed in terms of single and multiplayer. The developers of the original descent didn't even understand what made descent great then that doesn't bode well.

... the reality is game developers have more power than ever because the internet allows them to tap the enormous stupidity of kids and mankind as a whole. You can now sell an unfinished game before you even finish it. You can now F2P classic games and charge for endless money for "fake unlocks" that you'd normally get with a full game. Like with league of legends, heroes and skins, and it's friggin ridiculous because most gamers are so god damn tech illiterate. Game devs/pubs have finally reached utopia of stupid morons feeding them endless amounts of money for worse content as a whole. Diablo 3 sucked a lot more than diablo 2 from both a multiplayer and single player standpoint. Same could be said of other games where it's merely rehashing and taking fans for a ride.

That being said, there are some bright spots like crowdfunding but those possibilities have been extremely uneven and there's a high failure rate. We have yet to see if 'big games' can be down via crowdfunding and not be as lackluster as every other typical publisher funded game.

Or maybe they're using exactly the types of communication we're steadily moving toward: fiber optics for long distances, lots of low power transmitters for short distances. If they've expanded beyond their home planet, interplanetary communication would probably use lasers, so very very highly directional. All of these signals would of course be digital, not analog.

Anyone in a distant star system listening for messages would hear absolutely nothing.

Even the simplest calculation shows how absurd that claim is. The U.S. population is a bit over 300 million. Let's say 200 million are "working age". 50 million being out of work would be an unemployment rate of 25%. Ok, some people "aren't working" because they don't want to work. Perhaps they're staying home raising their children, while their spouse supports them. Though I'd argue being a full time homemaker is "working", especially if you're caring for children.

In any case, his number is clearly nonsensical. It has nothing to do with actual unemployment, the sort he's arguing this would make worse.

Exactly! Couldn't have said it better myself.

... hard drives are much cheaper and faster to backup data with than blu-ray discs. Blu-ray discs were too costly for the storage they offered vs hard discs and added only the most marginal improvement over DVD for video vs the size of the files. The cost, speed and size of hard drives far outpaced blu-ray. You get a 10 discs at 25GB a piece that is only a measily 250GB for roughly $12-16 bucks. You can get a 3 Terabyte hard drive for around $100, it's faster to copy and record things to and you can re-use it.

"I just don't know what makes him think that the current administration is on the "respect freedom" side of things."

He means respecting the freedom for the rich to do whatever they want, and for everyone else to suck it up.

... to survive, find mates and have kids. Everything else we got is extra. No one should expect the brain to do much more than what it was originally selected to do.

Are you suggesting I should instead write something like any_of(c.begin(), c.end(), [&e](int i){return i==e;})? (I'm not sure if I got the syntax exactly right. I haven't used lambdas yet.) That's even worse to type, harder to read, and more likely to contain errors.