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Comment Re:Mahjong (Score 1) 58

The differences between Mahjong variants are much larger than the differences between Go variants.
The differences between Go variants won't even come up at all in 99% of the games, specially not at amateur level. If I'm playing a friendly game someone new I won't ask what rules we are playing with because it won't matter, even if he thinks we are playing Chinese rules I think we are playing Japanese rules it won't actually matter until possibly the last few moves of the game and only even then if the game is extremely even.

For Mahjong on the other hand you really need to communicate what rules you are using, MCR vs Riichi for example change your gameplay significantly.

Comment Re:C forever! (Score 1) 58

You can not move a stone.
The rules differences are not really important, if 2 players outside of a tournament sits down to play a game they will not discuss before starting what rules to use, they will just play because in 99% of the games it won't matter.

The main differences are that there are 2 types of scoring, Area and Territory but outside special situations that might be ruled differently (bent 4 in a corner) you are looking at at most 1 point difference in score between them.
The other is how certain special situation that very rarely happen are ruled. Things like long repetitions (where you are not just repeating directly but a 3+ move sequence that results in a repeated board) which in some rules are not allowed (first person to repeat are not allowed to make that move) while in others have the game end with no result. Long repetitions are extremely uncommon, we are talking maybe 1 in 10.000 games at pro level and even less in amateur level.

So the whole premise of the article is broken, it's not that there are different rule sets that hold Go back.

Comment Re:How about just allow it? (Score 2) 85

And for a long time this was reasonable and how things worked but modern combination of cameras and pattern recogintion "AI" means decrypting is just too easy. There is no way you can encrypt something good enough for your teammates to be able to actually decrypt it and while also not being easy for a computer to decrypt.

Comment Re:Refusing to accept cash? (Score 1) 440

Having read thru the relavent Swedish Laws the only thing I can find is this (my translation in brackets):

Lag (1988:1385) om Sveriges riksbank [Law about the Swedish National Bank]

5 kap. Sedlar och mynt [Bills and coins]

1 ... Sedlar och mynt som ges ut av Riksbanken är lagliga
betalningsmedel. [Bills and coins made available by the National Bank is legal tender]

There is no clarification on what something being "legal tender" actually means in practices.

Comment Re:"visual novel" (Score 1) 134

So something with 1-3 pages of text for every image is a comic book? They are heavily illustrated novels, not comic books in any sense of the word. Why visual was selected over illustrated can be discussed but one has to remember that this is actually a game genre, and a large one to boot. I bet you that there have been more Visual Novels released than there have been Adventure Games, so why do the later deserve their own unique name but not the former? Why don't we call "The Secret of Monkey Island" an Interactive Comic Book instead, because IMHO you can't argue one without the other.

Comment Re:Immature and Gun Happy (Score 1) 1141

First, I was referring to (and I called this out later) percentage of households that have a firearm, where Norway is within a percent or two of the US. I think that's a more appropriate statistic because it weeds out the statistical outliers who own hundreds of guns in display cases. Second, why do you think there are more restrictions on gun ownership in most european countries than in the US?

There are guns and there are guns. While Sweden/Norway and the US might have similar number of guns per person the type of weapons own differ. In Sweden over 80% of all guns are hunting rifles and hunting shotguns. Of the remaining almost all are sporting rifles and pistols owned by active sport shooters

Very few of these weapons make for usable self-defense weapons which means their usability when committing crimes is also low.

Comment Re:Language Opportunities (Score 1) 572

I've watched Hollywood DVDs with the audio set to French and the subtitles set also to French (which I studied in high school). But the translations are never the same. They are always translated twice by different teams. And the dialog never matches.

There are subtitles and there are dubtitles. They are very different and serve different purposes. If someone is watching a movie in the original language then they don't want dubtitles. You will have dialog with no text and viceversa, very distracting.

Comment Re:Asian languages and vastly different grammar (Score 1) 142

This because Google first translates everything to English and then to the target language. I first noticed this when I was trying to translate into Swedish a Chinese site what where selling Go game boards. The Swedish translation used the word "styrelse" which means "board of directors" instead of "bräde" which means "gaming board". Neither in Swedish nor Chinese are these words homonyms but they are in English. It did make for a funny read at least :)

Comment Re:Wrong problem (Score 1) 475

The problem with something like apples is that it's a seasonal fruit. Different types of apples at different times of the year. Often the exact selection in the store will change every week. Especially in the autumn. Also the same type of apple grown in different places (or different times) can look very different so just learning the looks of the maybe 20+ apples types a store will have over the year won't help, you need to learn how they look right now. Those bad weeks when there are 6 different types of red apples you usually fall back to asking the customer. But even that won't work 50% of the time because most customer don't know what kind of apple they bought, they just picked one that looked good.

Comment Re:Why oppose it? (Score 1) 424

Just because the game have legitimate gold selling doesn't mean there won't be shady 3rd party sellers going for a lower than the official price. If you think that EVE's plex selling removed the hacking 3rd party sellers you are sadly mistaken. Reduced them a bit sure, removed them no way. Fact of the matter is that 3rd party gold buying is a huge gamble where you are not only gambling your game account but the content of your bank account and the existence of the game itself.

Comment Re:Why oppose it? (Score 1) 424

Why? Because 3rd party gold sellers are no saints.

If you think they are just macro farmers using normal payed or trail accounts then think again. Account hacking is the norm and when they do pay for accounts they are payed for with stolen credit cards, or with real cards where they after having received and used the game time they go to the bank and says they didn't receive the service. The bank issues a charge back and the MMORPG owner won't get any money and get higher CC transaction fees and penalties from the bank in the future due to the large number of charge backs.

Check the second half of this interview with the CEO of SOE if you don't believe me.
http://www.massively.com/2008/01/14/a-ces-interview-with-soe-ceo-john-smedley-pt-2/

So please think again before using a 3rd party gold seller service in any game in the future. These people won't think a second about hacking your account to steal the gold back or use your credit card to pay for more farming accounts.

Comment Re:Star Wars Galaxy of Hurt (Score 1) 156

Think you must remember wrong. Old SWG which had the proffssion system did not have a newbie area. After a very short solo tutorial it just dumped you outside the spaceport in one of the major cities (you could choose which one at character creation). Then you where on your own.

But you are right about money drops in a way. Most stuff you killed in SWG where animals and creatures which naturally did not carry any money. Humanoid npcs did drop money but mostly in fairly small amounts. You generally had to do the mission terminal mission if you wanted cash, the more quest like missions that existed unsually did not give much of a reward if any.

Comment Re:Without The Love Interest Please (Score 1) 164

Let's face it, how many fundamental concepts about science and engineering do we learn, not in school, but from educational programs or segments on TV or in other media. MacGyver, Star Trek, Mythbusters for more solid science. A lot of it is exaggerated yes, but the fact is that dramatic presentations of science do help inspire young people to see science as a career path.

You're not really pointing at television shows as paramounts of solid science are you? Mythbusters sure, I can see that, but MacGyver and Star Trek? Please. They might be great for inspiring interest in STEM but they're hardly chock-full of accurate information.

When I was a kid (don't remeber the exact age, around 10 maybe) I used to watch this cartoon http://akas.imdb.com/title/tt0284735/ (dubbed to swedish). 20 years later when I now think of what I still remember about human biology and where I learned it the majority are from that show and not from biology class.

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