Some of the worst parts of the prequels were in "the frontier", with Anakin making crap out of dirty old parts. The reason the prequels sucked wasn't because of details of the setting or because there wasn't enough arms getting cut off or something. It's because the story was poorly written and the acting was horrible (mostly due to script/direction problems).

He needs a different filming setup for this to work as well as it should - as it stands, focus blur kind of gives stuff away (you could see this even in the thumbnail). Cool anyways.

If anyone thinks corporations will pay it's employee's an upper wage for no reason when they can keep it for themselves then they're wrong.

There's plenty of industries where there's competition for workers, and companies are forced to pay higher wages to retain them. Where unions tend to increase wages is where there isn't competition for a type of labor.

And you're vulnerable to the same argument you're making. If you don't like what a company is offering for pay, or how dangerous your job is, just go find another one? The answer is that's not always an option. That's why unions came to be, and similarly, a lack of options can also make unions a big negative for some workers. My dad's union was a huge negative for him through his career, but there a government monopoly in his field so he had no choice. That monopoly and union broke up in the last few years before he retired - he made triple his wage, while many of the co-workers he'd carried for years couldn't find work.

Yes it's worth understanding what unions have done (and continue to do) for many workers - but they're not always a force for good. They reduce choice, consume resources, and open the door to negative politics and corruption (this is what hurt my dad, he could do his job but couldn't play the political games).

If anyone thinks corporations will pay it's employee's an upper wage for no reason when they can keep it for themselves then they're wrong.

I see this bizarre, absolute anti-corporatism everywhere right now, and
it's not just wrong and misinformed, it's poisonous. Lots of companies see success by paying their workers more, voluntarily, and reaping the benefits of having workers compete to work for them, value their jobs, and generally be better employees. Compare Costco and Walmart. There isn't only one way to corporate success, and many, many companies understand this. Reactionary anti-corporatism is as naive and wrong as blind corporate fealty.

But if you imagine that employment is a perpetual battle, instead of a mutual beneficially relationship, you are writing a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I would have assumed several of these items were CG, mostly because their animation had the stilted look of poorly-done/early CG films. I think the Engineer head wouldn't have looked better as CG with expressions captured from a real actor.

That right there would be priceless to see the right look like fools.


That already happened when he released the birth certificate.

But it didn't actually accomplish anything. Trump, in this video, makes it clear he doesn't actually accept the birth certificate ("or whatever it was..", he said stupidly). Why expect him to believe in your college transcripts? There's every reason to believe releasing college transcripts would just start the next round of stupid, and wouldn't get any charity any money.

Why would Obama play this kind of stupid game (again, a game he already won, in everyone's mind except the irredeemably stupid persistent birthers) with an idiot who shows no integrity?

I would at least defend the idea (not the marketing)


Fully agree - if they'd put a non-zero amount of effort into design (pretty much anything legitimately different) they could have had a small, if unexciting, win here.

Obviously this isn't a terribly useful sample size, but the fact that they got evidence of wrong-doing so easily is still kind of telling. It's hard to imagine they just got lucky, and it's very hard to imagine that the TSA has good procedures in place to prevent this kind of abuse.

1. Basing any game on an hours play is stupid.



So, what, I'm going to play every game out there for 6 hours? What if it only gets good in hour 12? Maybe I should put a few years into every religion too, just to make sure? Of course not. There's plenty of games I like, and I can't think of any of them that weren't fun in hour 1. If you're regularly putting more than an hour into a game you don't like, I think you're crazy. Most games put their best foot forward.

2. You talk about how you loved GW1s story, yet you ignored the story in GW2 which said wait for the NPC



Sorry, when I said I liked the campaign in the first one I didn't mean the story per se - it was generic tripe. But playing through that narrative (skipping whatever dialog might have popped up) worked really well and was pretty fun. You could explore it at your leisure, by yourself, and (as before) it made a nice tutorial for the game.

The GW1 system was powerful, but impossible to balance.



It was fine. And other game designers somehow manage to balance games with more real skills and far, far, far, far (far) more variety and power to those skills (again, thinking of DotA here, where characters actually do different, powerful things). I think they could have made it work again.

All this information was in the manuel linked right from the launcher.



Somehow I manage to play every other game I've bought in the last 10 years without ever consulting Manuel (I assume he's Spanish?) - including purposefully crazy games like Dark Souls. Oh, and Guild Wars I. Seriously, though, do you really read the manuals for games?

Anyways, it's a credit to their ingenuity that they found a place to hide this from me.

Of course, they also almost killed me in the tutorial because I couldn't figure out how to do a basic attack. Turns out I was holding something that I accidentally picked up while trying to talk to the quest person (who looked just like the 900 dudes wandering around the tutorial zone) and holding something apparently disables auto-attacks. When I checked the "hints" to see why I wasn't attacking, it helpfully told me about the "downed status".

You dont grind equipment and levels


Again, you're forgetting that I actually did play the game. I pulled Zombies out the ground and killed them until a meter filled up telling me I'd killed 10 (or 20 or whatever). Then I poisoned some bugs or crap. Those things happened. Or was I playing a different game? Maybe you're playing a different game? Are you going to tell me that killing 10 zombies is not generic RPG grind (ie. exactly what I don't want, and exactly what you're saying you don't do)?

Maybe the first hour of the game is completely opposite to the rest of the experience. Maybe at minute 61 they pull back the curtain and say "Hey, that's the last of the stupid filler crap in the game". Maybe there's a code in the manual that you can enter to play something entirely different that doesn't suck balls.

I'll never know, as I spent minute 61 uninstalling.

As for jmzero... I dont think hes even played it.



Well, uh, you're wrong. I've played about an hour, which was a half hour more than I needed to see this wasn't the game for me. I played the first game really quite a lot.

There are many things you can say about GW2, both good and bad, but "slightly different flavor of WoW" isnt one of them.



I don't think YOU'VE played it. Ha! See how annoying that is?

Anyways, it's a hell of a lot more like WoW than Guild Wars 1, though I suppose MMO connoisseurs probably see all sorts of distinguishing characteristics. I played through the storyline of Guild Wars 1 and only played with other people once or twice (using the AI mercenary things as required). In Guild Wars, I didn't even get to fight the "boss" thing at the end of the tutorial - someone killed it before I got close. That's not the same kind of game.

And they've futzed with the multi-player (which to me was the actual game). I can't just pick the skills I want. I can't just jump into a reasonably balanced (and levelled) PvP character (or, if I can, they didn't present that option very well). In the first game, I made a PvP monk with a bunch of heals, and was doing multiplayer (and having fun) immediately - like, within 10 minutes of installing the game. I have no idea how far off the horizon that is in Guild Wars II, but even when it comes I'm quite sure I don't want to play it. It plays completely different - far more action-RPG focus instead of the old focus on skill-selection and tactics. If I want an action-y game, I'll play a game style that supports that - like DotA.

Guild Wars 1 was a really appealing game for me. Guild Wars II is nothing of the sort - and to me it goes in the same trash-heap as every other "kill 10 rats", "grind equipment and levels" MMO that came before it.

Oh, but yeah, I didn't realize that it's set in the same painfully, painfully generic fantasy universe (I really didn't). Thanks for straightening me out on that.

I liked the original Guild Wars. It had a short, tight, enjoyable narrative that served pretty much as a tutorial - and then you played an interesting multiplayer game that revolved around skill choices and interactions between different characters across team archetypes. The team arena in Guild Wars was somewhere between Magic: The Gathering (you kind of built a deck almost) and Defense of the Ancients, with just a hint of Diablo gear collection and what not. I thought the skill acquisition system was great, and there was a great variety of skills (though the skills often felt underpowered). I only quit playing because it was stagnant, and I was quite looking forward to the sequel (especially when reviews were generally good).

I should have paid more attention to what they changed.

The new one is just a slightly different flavor of WoW, and I assume the glowing reviews are from people who generally like WoW but wanted a different flavor (or no monthly charge). It has nothing to do with the original game. It's the fastest I've ever completely given up on a game I spent $60 on.

I'd totally vote for this guy. I'd love a candidate who was open about changing his opinions over time, and open to supporting policies he didn't necessarily agree with IF he believed that's what people wanted.

Unfortunately, even if Mitt was that guy, he would never be able to say it in a way like this. Too bad.

My point was that, if you buy "nice" enough parts (like all parts of an Apple system are "nice"), you end up with a PC that costs about the same as a Mac.



OK, your point is way, way stupider than I thought it was. "Nice".

I was gonna list my PC specs and their costs and then realized what a waste of time that is. Just for one example my case cost $400+, not $250. It's a big giant black hunk of brushed aluminum. It's bad-ass.



Meh, if you'd finished your price list, and assuming you went about "$400 case level" on all your components, I think what you would have demonstrated is how much more PC you can get for $2500 (just as I demonstrated how you can get that same hardware for much cheaper).

And I wasn't lol'ing at you for being a Mac fanboy or something. I was laughing at the idea that there's general price parity between Macs and PCs. There just isn't.

(Again, to avoid some pedantry, that doesn't mean people shouldn't get a Mac If you will be happier on a Mac, the price premium you pay on a model like this will almost certainly pay itself over the years.)

Did you even read the rest of my post?



Yes, I did, that's why I said "- and for just the kind of reasons you mention." My point was simply that this Apple doesn't come with the kind of stuff that would make me be happy about the extra cost.

but you won't get a Dell or HP workstation much cheaper even without those support options



We seem to. I haven't run numbers, but our normal Dell workstations are around this same class and come in $1500-$1600 (with a service plan, and after discounts). Anyways, I didn't compare this sort of thing initially because it's hard to compare apples to apples - I was just seeing what value there is for a consumer in this Mac Pro. Anyways, as before, I think there's Macs that they price reasonably - and others (like this0 that they're still gouging on because they can (there's segments of their market that are very price insensitive).

Oh please - stop it with the DIY PC vs. Mac Pro comparisons, they are just ridiculous.
A HP Z8x0 or a Dell Precision for example



Well... I can't really compare it to, say, the Dell machines we get at work - and for just the kind of reasons you mention. My company pays a premium to Dell (though not as much as we'd pay for Apple) because Dell will drop-ship us a replacement at our whim and gives us reasonable corporate support.

With an Apple you're pretty much just getting the box at that price as far as I've ever figured (we do have some Macs here at work). And if you just want a box, I think it's fair to compare out the price of parts. That's why I compared it like I did. I mean, yeah, if they were doing some sort of corporate support at that price then it would make more sense.

You're gonna look real funny trying to use that computer without a power supply, keyboard, mouse, cables, fans, heat sink(s), software, etc



Yeah, sure, whatever - there's a couple $100 worth of stuff there (more, depending on how you value the software obviously). But, uh:

install Linux and whatever other free software you want for probably about 20% less.



How do you figure that? Even if I spend $1500 (and by now I've got better components in every single slot), I'm still left with $1000 to, uh, buy Linux. That's about $1000, or 40%. That's significant. And the fact is I'd rather have my current home computer (worth $1200 when I bought it a year ago) than that Mac. You're just not getting much for $2500.

Again, if there's some reason you want a Mac, then GO FOR IT! - but I don't see how you can deny there's a significant price premium, at least on this model (again, there's other Macs that I think have reached reasonable price levels).