Posts for Kyrsimys


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pirate_sephiroth wrote:
It is. Wiimotes and PlaystationMove are jokes compared to Kinect.
That's really not very convincing, you know :D
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I would say that no, it's not worth getting if you already have a PC and an X360. Unless you're the type that really, REALLY needs to play GT5 or MGS4. But then, if you were one of those, you'd already have the PS3.
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funnyhair: be sure to pick up The Silmarillion once you finish the LOTR. For me it was even better than the original trilogy. Children of Hurin was also surprisingly good. Christopher Tolkien is very faithful to his father's writing style. I'm sure most of you have at least heard about The Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin, so I'll just say that yes, it does live up to the hype. The series has been going a little downhill with the last two books but they're still great and definitely worth your time. About American Gods: meh, it was OK. The premise is great but the book is just too long. Nothing Gaiman has done has gotten even close to the awesomeness and ingenuity of the Sandman graphic novels. Check them out if you haven't already.
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partyboy1a wrote:
Well, it becomes even more complicated: If someone dies, there is a small delay, and the bubble starts from the right side again -- and it can be hit by a fireball from fiery Mario (or Luigi or Toad)... This means that the fastest strategy could be to have one die many times just to join again from a bubble at the right side... And: the more distance between the other players, the larger the current screen becomes, the further to the right the dead player joins the scene in a bubble...
I don't really see how this could be a very fast strategy. First of all, when you die, the screen stops for a moment, so you lose some time there and second, you start at zero speed when you come out of the bubble. By the time the second character has maximum speed, you've probably already run further with your first character, since fireballs aren't THAT fast.
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zvsp wrote:
Here is my testrun from 5-5 to 5-8.
I enjoyed this very much, thanks for sharing. Input display + boss music in 5-8 was absolutely awesome!
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Super Putty?
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On evolution/creationism: I agree with Warp in that being a creationist tells a great deal about a person. It tells me that this person rejects scientific thinking and ideologically sticks to a position that is supported by no evidence whatsoever, even though there is a widely accepted scientific theory available. People like that who will accept no position except their own even though they are shown mountains of evidence to the contrary just make me want to punch them in the dick. Of course I see your point, Brandon, that those kinds of people might still respect other peoples' positions and not force their own ideology on others, but that still doesn't mean I would want them running my country.
Brandon wrote:
Don't pidgeon-hole him
This I whole-heartedly agree with. People should think about each issue individually and not adopt ideas in chunks. Sadly, this is one of the things that in my eyes makes Ron Paul unelectable: most people DO adopt ideas in chunks. For Paul the problem is that democrats will be put off by his conservatism and republicans by his liberalism.
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I read the text. The things you mentioned, using propaganda and false-flag operations and expanding the government's control in the name of something good aren't really exclusive to the Nazi regime, but have been widely used in most dictatorships. There is nothing really new about comparing current administrations to the Nazi regime or other dictatorships, and I think it actually kind of works against itself: the Nazi/Hitler card, for me, is a huge "turnoff" when reading argumentative texts. In my opinion it's much more effective to simply present facts about the PATRIOT act, for example, and let the reader make the connection (and any educated/intelligent reader probably will). Also, a final piece of criticism: having sources in your text doesn't automatically make it more convincing or reliable. Citing websites like blacklistednews.com actually makes it seem less so. Despite my criticisms of the text, however, I think the things you write about are indeed important and alarming. From what I know about the PATRIOT act, it's a very extreme example of the government infringing on peoples' constitutional rights and privacy in the name of something good or holy, but similar developments can be seen all over the western world. In Britain, they actually used this poster as part of an advertising campaign for CCTV. How much more orwellian can you get? In my opinion, the scary part is not that the government is doing things like this, but that people are simply letting it happen without putting up any kind of a fight. Here in Finland, ever since we joined the EU, more and more of our legislation is being drafted AND voted through by people we did not elect and cannot change. People just don't care, they seem to be happy as long as there's beer and chips available. After the massacre in Norway, several politicians, including ministers, have suggested limiting anonymity on the Internet to restrict "hate speech". I'm sure everyone here realizes the impossibility of such restrictions, so I won't get into that, but in any case the proponents of restrictions seem to greatly outnumber the defenders of free speech. People are panicing, and as you said in the text, in times of panic it's easy for politicians to push through whatever agenda they want. Many politicians feel strongly that the current hate speech legislation should be tightened, and the ombudsman for minorities has suggested that "even statements that do not fill the criteria of hate speech laws should be punishable". So basically anything she feels is offensive should be punishable, whether it's illegal or not. I'm sure everyone sees the similarities to the Soviet Union, where saying certain things or criticising certain groups or individuals publicly (or even privately) was a sure way of getting a one-way ticket to a labor camp in Siberia, regardless of how well founded the criticism was. This woman is now running for president, although thankfully she doesn't really have a realistic chance. Oh yeah, you criticized the media for not explaining why Ron Paul is "unelectable". I don't know much about American politics but I think it's kind of obvious why someone proposing the legalization of prostitution and marijuana would be considered unelectable. Finally, I have to mention this hilarious (terrifying) thing I came upon yesterday. I found an ethics textbook targeted at 10-11-year-olds, published last year by the ministry of education itself. It included a section dealing with racism and oppression, and it had instructions for teachers on how to use the book. A quote from those instructions: "Children's prejudices and racism can succesfully be influenced by taking the following simple but persistent actions: 1) highlighting positive examples and stories and disregarding all negative experiences completely 2) highlighting examples of positive development and making impressive documentaries and big news stories out of positive experiences 3) this brings up more positive examples which are also given lots of publicity 4) thus we are collecting evidence for the fact that change in attitudes and behavior is possible, that there are positive examples of change and that the members of the group that I belong to, specifically, have changed their attitdes and have positive experiences" Is it just me, or does this kinda sound like brainwashing? And I kid you not, these instructions were actually under the subheading "free thinking"!
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This one is my favorite.
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Wow, that reverse image search thing was completely new to me. That is very cool.
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alden wrote:
I cheated, but Mordor: The Depths Of Dejenol?
Bingo! How exactly did you cheat, though?
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Nach wrote:
It reminds me of a Sierra game for some reason... Probably wrong though.
Wrong indeed, not a Sierra game.
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My avatars are from an awesome Windows game from the 90s. I wonder if anybody here can name it?
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This is what you are missing:
diggidoyo wrote:
I strongly believe this game should be timed with the in-game timer.
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Here are some of the reasons I voted for the True Finns (and I'd like to repeat what Bisqwit said about the name; the translation is not very fitting and the original Finnish name does not sound as nationalistic or mean that immigrants can't be members or anything). 1) The media. I am sick and tired of the media trying to tell me what to think. Mass media in Finland is controlled almost completely by green left-wing academic liberals, who think anyone voting for True Finns is a hillbilly redneck who doesn't understand what he's doing and only votes for True Finns because he is angry and wants to protest. For the last month before the election, all major Finnish newspapers were filled with articles where arrogant editors tried to analyze why the Finns are so angry and explained how voting for the True Finns will drive us into an era of darkness filled with hate and racism. I'm glad people instead decided to make their own minds and didn't fall for the smear campaign. 2) Freedom of speech. Even though the green party claims to be the most liberal major party in Finland, the green minister of justice Tuija Brax has passed or tried to pass laws which significantly diminish freedom of speech. The green party seems to think that to eradicate racism and hate speech, any means are acceptable. And they should of course be the ones who define what racism actually is. They have among other things tried to pass a law that would make posting a link to a website containing racist material (or, again, what they consider racist material) a criminal offense. It is the green party and their friends who are taking our society into a more and more totalitarian and orwellian direction, even though this is exactly what they blame the True Finns for. The green party is not the only culprit here; when the Muhammad caricatures were published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten in 2005, the then Finnish Prime Minister rushed to apologize to the Muslim world, even though Finland had nothing to do with the incident. When the Danish PM was asked if he was going to apologize, he said "listen here: we do not apologize for our freedom of speech". In general, it is this kind of spinelessness and political correctness gone crazy that characterizes Finnish foreign policy, and it really brings my piss to a boil. 3) Immigration. Immigration is something that our politicians simply can't see as just another branch of politics that can and should be viewed analytically and critically. Personally I believe this is because we have been taught to tip toe around the subject ever since we were kids for fear of being labeled racists, because being a racist in this country seems to be a bigger offense than being a rapist or a pedophile. Immigration has be seen by our politicians as some unavoidable phenomenon that we simply need to adapt to, even though it's not. Immigration policies should be looked at from the point of view of how they benefit or damage Finland, because immigration can never be a solution to world poverty. I could write like a hundred pages on this, but I'll just stop here as I'm sure most of you know what I'm taking about. 4) The EU. I'm not as anti-EU as the True Finns party. I do think, however, that the EU has weakened Finnish democracy a great deal by taking decision making further and further away from the people. Something like 70-80% of our legislation comes from the EU, and we have virtually no control over it (well, Finland does have 13 out of the 736 representatives in the European parliament but you can guess how much power they have over anything). The EU passes (and has passed) ridiculous laws and directives, which don't take into account the differences between countries at all; is it really that surprising that the same laws and directives don't work for two completely different countries like Romania and Finland? In this light I'm very worried about how almost all other parties in Finland want to move towards a single united European nation. The EU should be a trading union, nothing more. 5) Sentences for violent crimes. The Finnish justice system is completely screwed up. Raping someone or sexually abusing children usually gets you a few months of conditional discharge plus a small fine, i.e. no punishment at all. Drunk drivers get fined a bit and might lose their license, but that's it. Then again if a 17-year-old burns down a church by accident, he gets sentenced to several years in jail or when someone tries to stop a fight or defend themselves, they go down just as hard as the assailants. Writing hurtful stuff on the Internet about politicians recently got one man over two years in prison. Well that's OK, he said, because in Finnish prisons prisoners can earn over 2000€ a month by working. Sometimes prisoners can earn more than the prison guards! A foreign prisoner once described a Finnish prison as a 5-star hotel. Hopefully we'll see some changes now. --- As for compulsory education of Swedish, I'm against it. In fact, I think that the position of Swedish as our second national language should be re-evaluated. I just don't see why Swedish should be preferred over Russian, German, French or Spanish just because 6% of the people speak it as their native language. This is coming from a future teacher of Swedish. In my opinion there should be a second compulsory language, but kids should have more languages to choose from. The teaching should also begin earlier than it does now (7th grade, 12-13-year-olds) to avoid students developing negative attitudes toward whatever the language they study.
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Thanks for all the suggestions so far. Dawkins and Feynman are already on my list of books to check out and several people have recommended Guns, germs and steel as well, so that's definitely going on there. Singh's books and Cox's book about relativity sound very interesting (well anything about relativity sounds interesting I guess). The Carl Sagan book also sounds interesting, and the topic is especially well suited for upper secondary school students who haven't really received any education on the scientific method yet. A book with a similar theme but one that concentrates on psychology as a science was also recommended to me yesterday: Keith E. Stanovich's How to Think Straight about Psychology. Keep those recommendations coming!
Post subject: The best popular science books?
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Hello everyone! I'm currently conducting a study for my MA thesis, and I've received a lot of help from an upper secondary school teacher, who in return asked me to find her some good popular science books. I immediately thought of this forum, as there seem to be a lot of people here who read a lot and are interested in science, so I would like to hear your recommendations. Basically I'm looking for books that are written well (in an entertaining and interesting fashion) and are not way too advanced or technical; books that have opened your eyes or completely revolutionized the way you think about certain things. Anything that's really changed you. There are of course lists like this on the internet but I would really like to hear your reviews of the best popular science books from all areas of science. I myself read a very good book a while back called The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene. I've never been much of a science nerd and the book really made me understand why the idea of quantum mechanics is so revolutionary in the world of physics and what it's actually all about. It's written very well: it's understandable to anyone who has a grasp of very basic mathematical concepts, but it still moves forward with a nice pace and doesn't patronize. It cleared up many things for me that I have found confusing about relativity and spacetime. I definitely recommend it to anyone who hasn't studied physics but is interested in things like the theory of general and special relativity, quantum mechanics, the big bang and string theory. At the moment I also have Hawking's A Brief History of Time and Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat on my shelf but I haven't had the time to read them yet.
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Wouldn't any% be more appropriate?
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DarkKobold wrote:
So, yeah, unless you are making it critical, it is probably faster to use Normal Ammo.
Well unless I'm completely misinterpreting that table it looks like it's the other way around (24,3 power/sec for Normal ammo, 31,6 for Demolition). Of course the table might not apply to situations where you need to shoot an extra shot just to shave off a few HP or when the damage is being capped at 9999.
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On the 360, some games are region free while some are not. It's up to the publisher to decide. For PS3, all games are region free. EDIT: So yes, if you buy an NTSC disc of a region locked game, it will not play in your PAL console.
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nitsuja wrote:
I don't think this should be marked with "Heavy glitch abuse" since the only programming errors it uses are minor and hard to notice.
Agreed. I think there's been some confusion over the invulnerability period - someone thought it was a glitch instead of an intended feature and that's why the category is there.
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Oh my god this game was just made for TASing. One of my favorite runs.
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VirtualAlex wrote:
I love a good turn-based RPGs but I feel like they have been around since DOS.
Why does that matter? Are you only listing innovations from the last 10 years or something?
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Shadow Complex from XBLA. It's ridiculously long for an XBLA game and it's one of the best games for the 360 period. In case you're not familiar with it, it's a Super Metroid clone with a more realistic (which is perhaps not the best word to describe the game in general) and modern theme. Also from XBLA, Trials HD (it's really more like a puzzle than a racing game) and Mega Man 9. Haven't played 10 but I hear it's not as fun. From the God of War genre, I second Dante's Inferno. I also enjoyed Bayonetta and Ninja Gaiden II but for me, Dante's Inferno was the best one of the three. Mirror's Edge was fun but really short and had too many gunfights towards the end. Also, you didn't mention Mass Effect 2. In case you haven't played it, it's way WAY better than ME1, although I'm not sure if I just felt that because of my expectations for ME1 were so high and for ME2 so low. As long as you don't expect anything resembling an RPG and like good 3rd person action, ME2 is great.
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rhebus wrote:
If you want to state that Islam is not a religion of peace, you must first define what this means.
I'm afraid I don't have a ready made clear-cut definition for you, but I'm sure you know exactly what I'm talking about. News articles like this can be read every week in British newspapers and hardly ever do any muftis, mullahs or imams say that they disagree. Islam has barbaric conventions and practices and they are part of mainstream Islam and most muslims and especially muslim clergymen seem to have no problem with them. EDIT: mmbossman and NitroGenesis should look up Buddhism or Jainism.