Internet Scofflaw

From Frederica Mathewes-Green.

UPDATE (6/30): The National Review opinions are mixed.  Greg Pollowitz and Shannen Coffin didn’t like it, but Jonah Goldberg did.

Popular Mechanics has a fun article about the evolution of the dual analog thumbstick controller and how it is being adopted by the military. (Via Instapundit.) Here’s the key bit:

By now, the dual analog thumbsticks on both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 controllers have turned the standard logic of the first-person shooter (FPS) into muscle memory for most red-blooded young American men (and I’m sure a few women, but I’m willing to call a gender bias on this one). Die-hard PC gamers will argue that a player with a mouse and keyboard can outgun a console player while eating a ham sandwich, but the portability, durability and easy ergonomics of the gamepad make it ideal for military use. “It’s interesting that all of the game paddles have evolved toward a similar thumb-based design,” says Bigham. “And when we’ve talked to our human factors experts, what they’ve told us is that the thumb is the most precise pointing instrument and requires the least energy.” While that low-energy, high-efficiency control may lead to less sunlight and exercise for hardcore gamers, it also allows soldiers to remotely fly UAVs effectively for long periods of time.

Some might say that all those teenagers “wasting time” on Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 are actually the warfighters of tomorrow, training themselves at zero cost to the U.S. taxpayer. In fact, when offered the choice between the traditional airplane controls and gamepad controls, many younger soldiers pick the thumbsticks that are familiar to them.

This is interesting, but the notion that the thumbstick is the perfect controller is nonsense. You don’t have to be a die-hard PC gamer; you merely have to have played both desktop and console games to know that a mouse is much better for aiming than a thumbstick.  (If it weren’t, would there be a market for this?)

Furthermore, the idea that the thumb is the most precise pointing instrument is ridiculous. Consider the trackpoint interface (that’s the rubber nub in the middle of the keyboard, common to ThinkPad laptops). You use it with your index (or “pointer”) finger, not your thumb, because your index finger is more precise. If you want to argue that that’s just because the trackpoint is placed conveniently for the index finger and not the thumb, consider the touchpad common to non-ThinkPad laptops. The usual placement of the touchpad (below the keyboard) is most convenient to the thumb, but still most people prefer to lift their entire hand off the keyboard into order to use the touchpad with their index finger. Moreover, while trackpoints and touch pads are very nice for computer work, nearly anyone would prefer a mouse for gaming.

I think that the big advantage of the thumbstick is ergonomic, not precision. You can put two thumbsticks plus several additional controls onto a controller that you can conveniently hold in your hand. With the keyboard/mouse or a joystick (i.e., airplane controls) you are affixed to stationary controls. (Yes, you could hold an old 1980s-era joystick in your hand, but then you got only one directional input, not two.)  So I think the “low energy” part of what they’re saying makes sense.  Also, the thumbstick is pretty good for movement (as opposed to aiming), and that may be more relevant to the military’s applications.

I saw two movies over the weekend: Prince Caspian and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. This was a rare treat for me; since my daughter was born I’ve seen about two movies a year on average.

Prince Caspian is a good movie, but it’s not the movie that I hoped it would be. I had high hopes, having read more than one review that said that the movie was even better than the book. I should have read between the lines and interpreted that to mean that the movie improved on the shortcomings of the book (as perceived by those reviewers). The book is a tale about faith in which there happens to be talking animals and a big battle. The movie is a story about big battles involving talking animals.

Crystal Skull is not a very good movie. All the previous Indiana Jones movies were implausible, but within the genre you could suspend disbelief. The latest installment crosses the line into farce.

(Spoilers follow.)

Read the rest of this entry »

The London Times reports:

Leaders of the Communist Party of St. Petersburg have accused the actors Harrison Ford and Cate Blanchett of being “capitalist puppets” and promoting crude, anti-Soviet propaganda in their new film, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” . . .

The swashbuckling archaeologist’s fourth adventure is set in the Cold War in 1957. It pits Indiana Jones against a sinister KGB agent, played by Blanchett, who leads a ruthless team of Soviet spies in the hunt for a skull endowed with mystical powers.

The Communist Party’s ideology committee in Russia’s second largest city saw red over the plot. In an open letter, it declared: “Your work in this film is an insult to the Soviet and Russian people, who remember the difficult Fifties when our country was concluding its reconstruction after the Great War, but did not send merciless terrorists to the USA.” . . .

“You have no future in Russia any more. Speaking plainly, it is better for you not to come here. You will be beaten and despised.”

Good show, Ford and Blanchett; you’re making good enemies. I wonder what the Communist Party ideology committee thought of Charlie Wilson’s War.

By the way, here’s a good example of the kind of “reconstruction” the Soviet Union was doing during those difficult Fifties.

Joss Whedon, the creator of Firefly (the best television show ever), has a new series called Dollhouse. It is scheduled to premiere on Fox in January.

One hopes that Fox will treat it better than Firefly.

This short time-travel story by Desmond Warzel is very clever.  (Via the Corner.)

I had been excited to see Iron Man. Now I think I’ll wait for the video. Interestingly, none of the trailers let on that this is a blame-America movie.

A friend of mine got into the BF:BC beta, and emails me his review:

There isn’t a party setup in the beta, so you jump right into a current game and choose your spawn point. You have the choice of spawning at your base or with your squad members. The base spawn is the safest, but it means you have to go all the way back to the frontline to get back to the objective. The squad spawn is convenient, but it can also throw you right into the firefight. Similar to Call of Duty you have a choice of class (Assault, Demolitions, Recon, Specialist, and Support) to select before spawning.

For the beta two maps are available: Ascension and Oasis. Initially the server was having issues setting up the games. It took about 10 minutes for me to get the first match and I could only get Oasis for the games I played. Visually, it doesn’t match up to CoD4’s intense level of detail. During close combat games I encountered frame rate issues and drops.

The only gametype available in the beta was “Goldrush.” Unfortunately, the players, including myself, were not sure about the objective so it was more of a slayer game than anything else. The team chat was also not working making it difficult to get anything organized going.

I have to say I wasn’t impressed with the game. It felt like Battlefield 2:Modern Combat. EA’s server issues and their initial thought of charging for additional weapons (after an outcry from the gaming community, they are now free) add to my reluctance in purchasing any EA games.

This is just the beta, of course, but it’s not a promising sign. (Besides, it will still be an EA game when it releases.)

(Previous post.)

My sister’s roller derby team, the Camaro Harem, made the Everett Herald and is featured on the web edition’s front page. For those who haven’t been following, roller derby is a real sport now, at least in western Washington.

. . . to be released this year.  I’m not kidding.  I didn’t even know they’d made a second.  Based on the reviews, Starship Troopers 2 was even worse than the original movie.  I scarcely would have thought that possible.  Heinlein must be rolling in his grave.

NPR, as always, has its finger on the pulse of America.  In a piece on video games, they correctly observe that video games are now big business and bought substantially by adults. But, they continue, “some critics” say that they can’t be taken seriously until they start taking on serious political issues like the war in Iraq, or teen pregnancy.

Naturally, the teen pregnancy suggestion was a throwaway; what they really want is games that oppose the war.  Hollywood, they point out, has spent a lot of money making anti-war movies.  True enough.  Of course, those movies were terrible and lost (let me check the figures) a gazillion dollars.

Undeterred, NPR (er, “some critics”, I mean) wants the video game industry to do the same.  They laud the one game with the courage to speak out against the war, BlackSite: Area 51.  That figures.  Having played the demo, I can say that BlackSite fits perfectly into NPR’s mold: it was a bad game.  (Gamespot rated it 6.5; an terrible score.)  The game flopped, of course.

Great idea, NPR; we need more games like BlackSite.  We should quit wasting our time on fun ones.

The funny thing is, there are some good, popular games out there that touch on politics.  Dead Rising pits a photographer against a plague of zombies that (surprise!) turns out to be the US Government’s fault.  (You know what would shock me?  If the US Government turned out not to be at fault.)  Even better is BioShock, which deals with liberty, objectivism, and the nature of humanity in a really creative way.  I guess those games just didn’t lend themselves to NPR’s narrative.

I’ll keep my eye out for a game about teen pregnancy.  Sounds like a great idea . . .

Well, this is disappointing:

[Alicia Keys] tells Blender magazine: “‘Gangsta rap’ was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other. ‘Gangsta rap’ didn’t exist.” Keys, 27, said she’s read several Black Panther autobiographies and wears a gold AK-47 pendant around her neck “to symbolize strength, power and killing ‘em dead” . . .

Another of her theories: The bicoastal feud between slain rappers Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. was fueled “by the government and the media, to stop another great black leader from existing.” . . .

Keys’ publicist, Theola Borden, said Keys was on vacation and unavailable for comment.

A new science-fiction program is coming to Fox:

Fox has given the green light to “Virtuality,” a two-hour back-door pilot from “Battlestar Galactica” mastermind Ronald D. Moore.

The sci-fi project, from Universal Media Studios and producers Gail Berman and Lloyd Braun, is set aboard the Phaeton, Earth’s first starship. It revolves around its crew of 12 astronauts on a 10-year journey to explore a distant solar system. To help them endure the long trip and keep their minds occupied, NASA has equipped the ship with advanced virtual-reality modules, allowing the crew members to assume adventurous identities and go to any place they want. The plan works flawlessly until a mysterious “bug” is found in the system.

Jonah Goldberg worries that this show sounds like the dreadful holodeck epsiodes from Star Trek. Perhaps, but I’ll withhold judgement. Moore did a good job on Galactica. He also worries that Fox cannot be trusted to shepherd a good science-fiction program, recalling Firefly. He has a point there.

It occurs to me that if you want to strand people in virtual reality (I’m speculating here), a better concept might be an all-virtual ship like the Field Circus from Charles Stross’s Accelerando. The Field Circus was a coke-can-sized starship carrying the uploaded minds of its crew in a virtual environment.

The Battlefield: Bad Company beta gets a bad review from Amazon Game Room for having green friendlies and red enemies, making it unplayable for people with red-green color-blindness.  (Via Instapundit.)  Also, the BF:BC beta is getting bad reviews from my friends for being not a very good game.  Plus, just about everyone hates EA.

The Amazon review is titled “Gaming while color blind,” but, to be fair,  I think most shooters get this right.  Halo 3 paints characters red and blue, plus it floats an icon over friendlies.  Rainbow Six Vegas 2 has just the icon, which is good enough when it’s not clipped by a doorway.  In Gears of War, it’s humans or monsters.  Call of Duty 4 does have a floating name in red or green, but you can also look at the uniforms (and half the time you have to anyway).

The new maps for Call of Duty 4 released today. Naturally, Xbox Live has collapsed under the strain, as it does every single time anything happens.

From Call of Duty 4 on the Xbox 360:

Error during initialization: Microsoft error SESSION_FULL when calling XSessionJoinRemote() for session gameSession for clientNum 12 — xuid 9000001965691

What, no stack trace?

Bill Belichick, coach of the New England Patriots, insists that the time they got caught was the only time they ever cheated.  The Patriots are under investigation again after allegations that a former employee has illegal tapes of a St. Louis Rams practice.

Best quote:

“I’ve never seen a tape of another team’s practice. Ever!” [Belichick] said Tuesday. “Certainly not that one.”

He also argues that their successful season proves they aren’t cheating any more.  I’m not sure I follow his logic.

For the record: I don’t see anything really wrong with gathering intelligence at any open event, but the rules are the rules.

Also: Why the hell is the US Senate involving itself in this?

The system requirements for Crysis:

OS - Windows XP or Windows Vista

Processor - 2.8 GHz or faster (XP); 3.2 GHz or faster (Vista)

Memory - 1.0 GB RAM or 1.5 GB RAM (Vista)

Popular Mechanics has an article on the balance between realism and gameplay in military shooters like Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (R6V2).  (Via Instapundit.)  It’s a good article, but I get the feeling the author is not a serious gamer.  The article gives the impression that R6V2 makes great strides toward realistic gunfire, except for a few compromises.  My impression, having played the game, is that R6V2 is actually less realistic than its predecessor.

It may well be that they calculate accurately the amount of damage done by a bullet after penetrating cover and/or armor, but there’s another side of the equation, which is how much damage a soldier can take before going down.  In reality, a soldier would go down quite quickly, but in R6V2, a player can endure quite a lot of punishment.  Its predecessor was less forgiving.

Now, I don’t care all that much about realism for its own sake, but I did enjoy the unique gameplay that arose from the Rainbow Six Vegas’s realism.  In R6V, a player firing first from cover would nearly always win, making it possible for sneaky old guys like me (I’m 36) to beat the kids, despite their vastly superior videogaming skills.  That style of gameplay has not been duplicated in any other game, including its sequel.  In R6V2, players are tough enough that run-and-gun becomes a viable strategy, which puts the kids back on top.