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Comment: Re:Meh (Score 4, Insightful) 199

by BPPG (#42248269) Attached to: Own Every SNES Game Ever Made For $24,999

But you can't download an arcade where every game is 25 cents to play, not counting the many many gameovers that leave you needing more. You can't download that first gameboy your older cousin lent you for the week to play Dr. Mario over and over again just so you could beat his high score. You can't download the way it made you feel to finally get to the third stage of a boss that had kept illing you over and over before you knew how to time your attacks while avoiding theirs.

And twenty years from now, gamers from today won't be able to download the group dynamics of their MMO clan, won't be able to download the step by step evolution of Minecraft indev with it's back and forth between Notch and the smaller community. They won't be able to download all the achievements, trophies, ranks, and golden guns from their favorite FPSs. They won't be able to download the connection made between shiningly creative Little Big Planet level authors after wading through the seas of shoddily-made CoD clones and Mario levels.

I just recently got a smartphone capable of playing these old SNES games. I might download an emulator and play some games. But gaming on a touchscreen smartphone will never be the same as sitting on the carpet with my siblings, racing through the ghost levels on Super Mario Kart and figuring out exactly where to use my jumping feather to get an edge towards victory.

Comment: Hardly surprising, it's still a baby. (Score 0) 118

by BPPG (#41848597) Attached to: Security Firm VUPEN Claims To Have Hacked Windows 8 and IE10

Considering that W8 still has that new OS smell, this is hardly surprising. Like any piece of software, it will take a while before it is provably secure. Microsoft may not have the worst QA department in the world, but it the only way to really put it through its paces is to let the world bang on it like it is now.

The real question is, how many 0-days haven't been announced?

Comment: Re:DEFINE: Subjectivity (Score 1) 834

by BPPG (#28861479) Attached to: Are Women Getting More Beautiful?

Which is what TFA seems to want to point out. My question is, if a boy had an attractive mother, shouldn't he also have a pretty good chance of turning out more attractive than his dad?

I am no geneticist. I know it's always possible that some dormant gene in either parent could end up making the kid even uglier, but as a general trend, shouldn't both boys and girls tend to be more attractive where one or both parents were attractive?

Comment: Re:DEFINE: Subjectivity (Score 4, Insightful) 834

by BPPG (#28838855) Attached to: Are Women Getting More Beautiful?

"Gee, more women appear to conform to modern standards of beauty, than at any time in the past!"

Mid 19th century beauty can be deduced by portraiture. The pre-raphaelite stuff from Rosetti does a pretty good job of this:

They'd have seen Jessica Simpson as a freakishly stretched elf - on the verge of starvation.

I wish I had a mod point for you.

We're talking about a lot of different cultures in lots of different times, I'm sure not many of the average men from each instance would find today's average American woman (The data used was gathered in the US) much more attractive. And of course, if the qualitative assessment of how beautiful a woman is is based on how many babies they make, I'm not sure if they could really agree anyways; I could call a girl a perfect ten, even if she turns out to be barren.

I do find it odd, however, that the article states that today's men are supposedly as aesthetically pleasing as cavemen. This doesn't really fit with the argument they make in saying attractiveness tends to be hereditary. Smells a little too much like bullshit on the. Either that, or the scope of the study is too narrow. I'm failing at looking up any other real information about this study.

Comment: Just don't use that version (Score 3, Insightful) 391

by BPPG (#28739947) Attached to: New Linux Kernel Flaw Allows Null Pointer Exploits

It's important to note that there is almost never any "preferred" or "special" release of Linux to use. And obviously this flaw doesn't affect people that don't use any security modules.

This is not good news, but it's important news. The kernel's not likely to have a "fixed" re-release for this version, although there probably will be patches for it as well. And when in doubt, just don't upgrade. Not very many machines can take advantage of all of the cool bleeding-edge features that come with each release, anyways. Lots of older versions get "adopted" by someone who will continue to maintain that single kernel release.

Comment: Re:I think this experiment illustrates quite clear (Score 1) 895

by BPPG (#28603311) Attached to: Researcher Trolls MMO, Surprised When Players Hate Him

I'd say that you had better tread carefully when comparing democracy to an online RPG. The researcher did no hacking, and only broke the "cultural" rules. A group of Quake players may have house rules against camping or spawn-killing, but the real "rules" are the only the ones put into place by the designers/developers, not the players, and so-called "spoken" rules don't really matter without modifications or admins to enforce them within the game.

I'm not saying I think your conclusion is incorrect, I just think it's a funny context to draw it from. So in this case, if the high level players are the cultural elite then what does that make the devs?

Comment: Re:I think the real problem is... (Score 1) 289

by BPPG (#28390179) Attached to: Censored Video Game Content Stifles Artistry

+1 here,

In much the same sense that art exhibits can be art themselves, and a movie exhibiting artful video clips can also be artfully arranged, so can video games be art.

But due to their interactive aspect, games deserve a slightly different attitude. If anybody took a board game or a pen and paper roleplaying game and treated it as art, it would be hard to take them seriously. In fact, the only real "serious" games are the ones that are based on high-strategy and skill, such as chess or sports or card games. There's nothing really "artful" about those, except that the real art is in the game-playing, as it ought to be.

Of course, everyone has a different idea about what a good video game is. And with the industry seeing a major influx of casual-gaming customer base, the power gamers are seeing less and less stuff aimed at them specifically. Casual gaming is quickly becoming kitsch, as power gamers already tend to view it as.

Comment: Re:Lava life? (Score 5, Informative) 180

by BPPG (#28322337) Attached to: A Supervolcano Beneath Mt. St. Helens?

Not to be a nit-picker, but lava and magma aren't actually the same thing; lava is magma flowing on the Earth's surface. The properties of the two are the same, aside from lava being surrounded by relatively cool air, and magma being surrounded by insulating earth.

I know that doesn't really answer your question, but consider this; It's not lava yet.
