>> ^MaxWilder:
Nice review as usual, but I really wish he'd done the PS3 and Xbox360 version. The game royally sucks. It is an incredibly difficult button-masher, where all the bosses have to be invulnerable to 7/8ths of your attacks because you're so overpowered. And when an enemy knocks you down, which is often, you are unable to move and vulnerable for several seconds. Talk about frustrating.


Yeah, the PS3 version is not that great. I haven't finished it yet, largely because Disgaea DS came out, but I am constantly irritated by the massive delay in between when Starkiller gets knocked over and when he can move again. He has to fall on his ass, rest for a moment, get back up, dust himself off (almost literally; there's a short gap in between when he's standing and when you can move him again), and then he's good to go. Naturally, the enemy AI (at least on Hard) knows exactly how long it takes Starkiller to get up, and just about every action has a delay before it actually executes, so there's a 50% chance that you will be seriously injured or killed after any random enemy manages to knock you down.

So it's not altogether horrible, but it's just a little disappointing. Yes, Starkiller has crazy force powers that can throw Tie Fighters around like popcorn, destroy reinforced titanium doors, and electrocute everything within a fifty foot radius. However, it's really annoying that he neglected more utilitarian force powers like force jump or at the very least force get-your-ass-up-off-the-floor. And having the lightsaber be about as useful as a letter opener is just insulting. The thing does crap for damage, leaves you wide open to attack, and makes you wish after a few minutes that Starkiller would just say "to hell with all this Jedi crap" and pick up a damn blaster.

Little Big Planet = 2nd

In reply to this comment by mizila:
A review to the first game that makes me wish I had a PS3.

Replace "first" with "only."

A review to the first game that makes me wish I had a PS3.

Replace "first" with "only."

This makes me wish humanity finally got to the point where it annihilates itself.

Times like this make me wish I could downvote. Pieces like this just encourage everyone to trade in stereotypes and personal attacks. Replace "Republican" with "Democrat" and this is exactly the type of "journalism" you'll find on Fox News.

Eurosport > ESPN. Makes me wish I lived in Europe.

Makes me wish more of this video was posted, or, perhaps, existed.

This makes me wish I could promote.

Semantic games here. Delving into the true nitty-gritty of political politics makes me wish there was a clear-cut language for expressing ideas.

In programming, binary trees have a very specific definition. You wouldn't confuse a binary tree for a linked list even though they're similar.

In politics, it seems possible to say things like this, and get people to go along with it. He makes the following assertions (as they sound to me):

1. Acting on individual freedom > acting on collective good
2. "Small" government supports individual freedom
3. Government "size" is based on how much money (tax) it costs
4. Government "size" is based on how much control it has over you
5. Corporate action is individual freedom
6. Democrats act for the collective good, but it costs money to do that
7. Republicans act for the good of a few, with the express intent of increasing the control of government over people
8. Democrats and Republicans are therefore both the same
9. This is why FDR was bad for creating the Food and Drug Administration (?)

He also says "history has proven statism leads to disaster", which is a bit silly -- at best you can say history proves the elimination of free markets within a state ruins a state's ability to compete in a global free market. If you read history with a somewhat less opinionated view, you might notice that there are plenty of cases where the evil "government programs" did good throughout the world, including right here in the U.S. of A, particularly those alphabet soup programs FDR created.

There's no guarantee any human plan will lead to success, and while there are certainly cases where individual programs have failed to achieve the desired effect, there's insufficient evidence to declare that statism is so fundamentally flawed that it cannot possibly work. It's not the answer to everything, but it can work sometimes.

The way I see it, even if I treat #1-#5 as givens, just listening to his statements of #6 and #7 should immediately call into question whether what's being done by each party is really morally equivalent, simply due to the difference in intention, if nothing else.

Personally, I consider #1, #2, and #5 to be unproven assertions in need of serious scrutiny. To me, "collective good" is always the goal. The great thing about America (and this free market thing we pretend to have invented), is that it turns out you can do a lot of collective good by increasing individual freedom from where it was in the middle-ages.

Nowadays, people seem to believe the only kind of individual freedom that matters is the freedom from taxes. Nevermind the freedom to go to whatever doctor they want, never mind the freedom to buy food be sure it's safe, never mind the freedom to go to any college you can get accepted to (without being saddled with massive debt).

Other countries consider us backwards for the way we limit our citizen's freedom in that way. I'm not sure why making me free to fend for myself is so great, when it's not like my salary (even if I paid no tax) makes up the difference in the "market" cost for not having those freedoms.

To equate that with the Republicans, who want to limit civil rights along with civil services? Madness, sheer and utter madness.

I'd almost think such an argument was designed to encourage a vote for a 3rd party (or in this case, a sub-party). But no, Ron Paul would never, ever use propaganda, would he?

^NordlichReiter:
I'll let someone else tear you a new one. This makes me wish we had a mandatory military like germany. It would really open your eyes to the respect your taught to give everyone even your enemies. Go to a recruiting station for any branch and tell them you want to shoot people and that's the reason you want to join. Please do so and tell me what they say. I think you'll be surprised.

Of course, no one in his right mind (i.e. not mentally ill) would say that he likes to kill people to anyone, army recruiter or not. You'll have to revise your 12th grade pop psychology and look up "subtility", "concealment", "repressed desire" and "uncounscious desire". Man is a machine with a big and powerful nervous system (yes, that last bit means essentially "powerful brain") and it would be idiotic to think everyone is always open about their feelings to others and even to themselves, or that they even know about their true feelings, emotions or beliefs. This may go against your christian-centric "freedom of will and everything else" worldview, but science doesn't care about you or religious ideology­.

On another note, I too would like for mandatory military service, like Switzerland (they provide for a much better political and economical model than Germany at present), but obliviously for different reasons than your warmongering american ones. There is value in defending one's life and the lives of your kin (which, in my book, should a priori include every human being in the world), but essentially your right to do so stops where the right of the others to defend themselves begins. This may be a cliché, but it is a useful one nevertheless. Of course, where to draw the line in real situations is difficult, but the principle should be remembered. When you are invading a whole country with the pretense of defending yourself, in this case Afghanistan and Iraq, you have to ask yourself some big and important questions, and the answers should be as strong as your claim is: that you somehow have the right to invade someone else for your own protection as a defensive action. Now, you may think, and probably many americans do, that you have the right to bully and push around anyone else you may want to just because of the fact that you exist: that's called "survival of the fittest" thinking (or "being a dick" for short), and as game theory shows, it won't take you far in the long run.

If you can't be a dick and your freedom to defend yourself is restricted, why would you want a military, let alone a mandatory military service? Two big reasons: one, you sometimes do need to actually defends yourself against "I-have-a-bigger-dick-than-you-so-do-my-dad-and-I'll-show-you-why" type of idiots, who either don't know, don't understand or couldn't give a fuck about game theory if their lives somehow depended on it (yes, military officers know about it, but your COMMANDER-IN-FUCKING-CHIEF, the supposed equal of George Washington, has got not even a hint of the most little clue) and they are best dealt with a quick and impressive show of actual or what seems like actual force, not bombastic military parades though these can serve to frighten some kinds of idiots. Two, being in an actual conflict, even and perhaps especially on a peacekeeping mission, can sometimes have a calming effect on trigger-happy or shoot-first-ask-later kind of young men and women. This effect is of course not guaranteed since every one is different (another useful cliché, in moderation).

As an aside, a corps of able and ready young people can be useful in humanitarian situations. Military training can also provide useful skills that some might not want or be able to get elsewhere (navigation, survival, basic weapon and self-defense, etc.). If not misused, a military can be a boon, like everything else in life.

Sorry for the long posts, but even with this (or maybe because of it? The internets are not used to reading long, thoughtful and rhetoric- and logic-filled discourses, especially not this abstract) many don't get what I'm trying to say, so imagine if I just said "EXCUSE THE FUCK OUT OF ME?". That could be deviously misconstrued as rock throwing if I was former military personnel, proud of my time of duty, responding to an anti-military statement!

P.S. I never said everyone in the military is lowlife scum or that everyone is joining to protect their country. From what I said would follow that in the worst case, half of everyone would be lowlife scum, and the other half would join to defend their country (in the case of the present american army stationed in Iraq at least). Of course I do not think it is so clear-cut, that was rhetoric. But far worse and damaging rhetorically is the typically american FOX-Newsy "misunderstanding" (conscious or not) of quoting me as saying they were all lowlife, or that they were all joining to defend their country. These are statistically very improbable situations, to say the least! There are also those who join because they need money they can't get otherwise, those who want to make their daddy proud, those who want to continue a familial tradition, those who are planning their political careers, etc. But they are not the focus of this discussion since I believe they form a minority, all the more so when you look at the true, hidden motives.

>> ^Bidouleroux:
>> ^MarineGunrock:
>> ^NordlichReiter:
The majority of your enlisted occupation troops are lowlife scum

EXCUSE THE FUCK OUT OF ME?

Why would they not be lowlifes when they represent the 18-35 American demographic, minus all the ones that actually have respectful or high paying jobs? Not to say there aren't lowlifes in corporate America, but the lowlife scum tend to stay "unemployed". Anyway, a majority is fifty percent plus one, not ninety-nine percent. And these are enlisted troops, not conscripts, so you're gonna get only people who want to shoot muslims or people who want to serve their country so much that they want to put themselves in arms way, but not shoot muslims (these latter would go in the first category). And I reckon anyone that WANT to shoot someone else, for whatever reason, is by definition a lowlife scum. Everyone that is so blind to politics, backroom machinations and human rights abuse that he still wants to enlist in a military without wanting to actually shoot anyone, is also a lowlife or at the very least stupid. Put these two kinds of people together and you get shitty operations like Afghanistan and Iraq. As we've seen over the past 7 years, the problems only start when you tell your enlisted troops NOT to shoot anyone anymore. They tend to get frustrated and remake the Dumb and Dumber movies. As for those that start out "normal", please refer to the Stanford prison experiment.
Also, you're not countering his point with your question, except by implicitly generalizing your own experience in your own squad in the marines (as I gather from your previous posts here on the sift). Yes, you may have "heard things", but there's a reason hearsay is not allowed as evidence in a trial: it's actually pretty unreliable. Also, keep and bear in mind that no one likes to think that he himself did "bad things" in a conflict. They always blame the other or perversely blame only themselves. And like your precious Jesus said: “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone at her.” I'm sure nowadays plenty of bible-churning rednecks would gladly obey and start throwing stones, but then again I'm sure that for all your other faults at least you're not that kind of person.


I'll let someone else tear you a new one. This makes me wish we had a mandatory military like germany. It would really open your eyes to the respect your taught to give everyone even your enemies. Go to a recruiting station for any branch and tell them you want to shoot people and that's the reason you want to join. Please do so and tell me what they say. I think you'll be surprised.

Oh wow! For sure this was inspired by the EBow.

Almost makes me wish I still played guitar.

From a brief look around, there would seem to be only one case of soft tissue from a dinosaur being found http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/03/0324_050324_trexsofttissue.html

Some soft tissue from inside the leg bone of a T-Rex. Which is pretty frigging amazing in my mind, they re-hydrated the stuff and could get out flexible, transparent material... stunning... stunning stuff to find from 65 odd million years ago.

But I was talking of a whole body like these Mammoths, being preserved... it'll never happen, and the things in La Brea tarpits are much more recent aren't they? Mammoth age and the like, Sabre Tooth tigers and the like, the age of man, not the age of Dinosaurs.

Still, amazing stuff... I guess since seeing Jurassic Park I've actually wanted to see it actually happen... minus the maiming and killing of course.

In reply to this comment by RhesusMonk:
In reply to this comment by spoco2:
And also, you see that large one in the diarama they show near the end... that's a friggen real stuffed adult Mammoth.

Makes me wish there was a T-Rex or Brontosaurus frozen in permafrost somewhere than can be found... imagine actually finding a dinosaur with skin, organs etc... it'd be incredible.

There are actually quite a few dino fossils that have preserved tissue other than bone. There are some at the AMNH that have skin and partial internal organs intact; and I believe the La Brea tarpits in LA are home to some extremely well preserved tissues as well.

In reply to this comment by spoco2:
And also, you see that large one in the diarama they show near the end... that's a friggen real stuffed adult Mammoth.

Makes me wish there was a T-Rex or Brontosaurus frozen in permafrost somewhere than can be found... imagine actually finding a dinosaur with skin, organs etc... it'd be incredible.

There are actually quite a few dino fossils that have preserved tissue other than bone. There are some at the AMNH that have skin and partial internal organs intact; and I believe the La Brea tarpits in LA are home to some extremely well preserved tissues as well.

[edit]: Seems I was wrong. La Brea houses fossils only as old as OIS 2 (the last ice age--about 11,000 years ago). The articles about other preserved dino tissues can be found here:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/071203-dino-mummy.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/03/0324_050324_trexsofttissue.html

Thanks to spoco for the correction and the second link.

In reply to this comment by spoco2:
And also, you see that large one in the diarama they show near the end... that's a friggen real stuffed adult Mammoth.

Makes me wish there was a T-Rex or Brontosaurus frozen in permafrost somewhere than can be found... imagine actually finding a dinosaur with skin, organs etc... it'd be incredible.

There are actually quite a few dino fossils that have preserved tissue other than bone. There are some at the AMNH that have skin and partial internal organs intact; and I believe the La Brea tarpits in LA are home to some extremely well preserved tissues as well.