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In the hardest difficulty accessible without a code, all enemies already one-shot you, so it would probably only affect enemy HP?
To be honest, I wasn't aware of that difficulty until just now, so I don't know for sure what it does.
Edit: Oh, that explains it.
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Pokota wrote:
I keep hearing "Qualified Immunity," so I asked a friend of mine who was in the police academy what it was.
Essentially: It's protection from civil suits for police officers who acted in good faith on bad information - the person you get to sue in civil court is the person that gave bad information in the first place. In the case of Breonna Taylor, the persons you sue are the persons who gave her place of residence as the service point of the warrant (the judge, most likely) as well as the officer and/or dispatcher who confirmed "yes, this is the correct address."
It stops when you get to the root of the problem - the officers who killed Floyd would not be protected by it at all since it was under their judgment call that he was killed, for example.
That's how qualified immunity works in theory.
In practice it also means a police officer can use "I thought it was legal" as a defense for their own behavior, and since their is no clear singular person or organization to point to for originating the notion "it is legal for cops to shoot a suspect simply for fleeing" no wrongful death suit can be filed at all.
Also a police officer can use "I thought that was illegal" as justification for arresting a person who was not committing a crime. Similar results.
No other person gets to use ignorance of the law as a defense for acting in contravention of it, only the agents that society uses to enforce the law.
Furthermore, police are often granted immunity from criminal prosecution, not just civil, on the criteria of qualified immunity. Additionally, this immunity is often inappropriately applied to actions that officers take while off-duty.
Agents of the government are supposed to have immunity from criminal and civil liability for the actions that they are directly required to take in order to discharge their governmental duty, but only for those actions.
For instance: A TSA agent, who is required as part of his duty as a federal agent to screen passengers before they board airplanes cannot be charged for sexual assault when giving a non-consensual pat down to a passenger's genital area. Nor can they be sued civilly for this.
However, if that same TSA agent grabs a person's crotch against their will at a night-club, there is no legal basis to claim they have no civil or criminal liability.
Currently, in fact, if not in law, the situation for police officers in most cities in this country is that, no matter what they do, no matter when they do it, regardless of any aggravating circumstances of their action, they are generally immune from any prosecution for anything.
This happens for a list of reasons
Police officers ignore citizen complaints against other officers, preventing investigation.
Public prosecutors frequently decline to prosecute police, for fear of damaging their working relationships with the police department.
When forced to indict, by orders from a superior, prosecutors still view cops as their allies, and will often lie to juries about what the relevant legal standards are.
Average citizens typically don't have much interaction with police, and tend to believe that most police officers are impartial defenders of the public, therefore this specific officer is probably giving an impartial account, and therefore conflicting accounts can be disregarded. (This thinking is compounded when cops give supporting testimony as character witnesses.)
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CoolHandMike wrote:
Breonna Taylor's story seems to be more of an argument against no knock warrants. She and her boyfriend thought the plainclothes police that forcably entered into their home were intruders and shot at them, then the officers fired back.
Correction: Her boyfriend, and only her boyfriend thought the police that entered were home intruders and shot at them. Then the officers returned fire but only managed to hit Breonna because she was still asleep.
Also:
the no-knock warrant was not for Breonna Taylor's apartment.
The person the warrant was for was already in police custody.
Breonna's boyfriend was initially charged for her murder, and attempted murder of the police who illegally entered his home, and the charges were only dropped because of the massive public outcry that it was clearly self-defense.
I'll agree that, like, the first two points here seem like they may have been legit mistakes/miscommunication that are just a massive argument for no-knock warrants.
I do believe that there is a chance that, for a white person, the police may have responded to gunfire by announcing themselves rather than firing back without a word, but I don't have a huge amount of certainty about that.
Whether or not the events played out as they did because of issues related to race, the fact that the police completely lied about what happened on the incident report is a massive argument.
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Blazephlozard wrote:
There's also rewriting language to do away with male and female assumptions, like, "people who menstruate"...
The "people who menstruate" thing was literally about people who mentruate, including girls (and possibly trans boys) as young as 8, and not including most women over the age of 55.
Saying "women" would have been incorrect regardless of trans issues, because of menopause.
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Mitjitsu wrote:
Wobmiar wrote:
I don't see how showing your gender is really political. That's like showing your age, or showing your name. It's nothing more than a "stat" written on the birth certificate (most of the time). Showing off a stat is not political :P
You would be right were it not for TASvideos allowing you to select more than 2 genders.
Nope, only being able to select 2 genders would also be a political decision.
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I want to take a moment to clarify my intentions with this message.
I am not intending to attack anyone who has not made an explicit statement supporting my view of the issue. I will accept any decision the site comes to about whether or not to make a statement.
However, I do think the issue is important enough that any decision about whether or not to comment needs to be made consciously, by the community as a whole, rather than simply through inertia.
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Espyo wrote:
The extra HUD encode was surprisingly entertaining. It's pretty elaborate, and really shows how complex of a game Ecco 2 really is. I'd love to have a more in-depth explanation of what all of its elements are.
As for the run proper, it's just as great as the previous one! Easy yes vote.
In 2D game mode:
Mostly, things are color coded:
Ecco has a variety of possible collision tests
His nose point is lime green, bounding zones that test against his nose point are lime green or have lime green outlines.
His mid point is red, bounding zones that test against his mid point are red or have red outlines.
His tail point is blue.
Bounding zones that test against his nose and tail are cyan (lime green + blue) or have cyan outlines.
Bounding zones that test against all three main points are white, or have white outlines.
His intermediary points are yellow, the one type of object that tests his intermediary points is yellow with a yellow outline.
His head box and dorsal box are slightly off-white. Bounding zones that test against Ecco's head/dorsal boxes have slightly off-white outlines.
Other bounding zone outline colors exist.
Orange: tests for a specific object that is not Ecco.
Blue: tests for Ecco's sonar blasts.
Gray: Has an activation condition that isn't currently met.
Many things have infill that is color-coded by what happens when a collision occurs:
Off-white: standard wall-type collision (horizontal and vertical ejection toward the nearest bound on each axis)
Yellow: Walls that eject in only one direction (have a single line that indicates the direction they eject toward.)
Reddish-purple: Standard enemy type collision (damage Ecco and knock-back if not charging, take damage and stop Ecco if he is charging, take damage from sonar attacks).
Gray: Has an active state and an inactive state, and is not currently active.
Diagonal Lines across the bounding area indicate that Ecco can push the object.
Also orange lines exist:
Ecco and almost all objects that move have orange lines that indicate their motion vectors.
Some objects that don't move have orange lines that indicate nothing because oops.
Opening/closing doors have orange lines that indicate how far open they are.
Camera scroll controllers have orange lines that indicate the direction and speed they will lock (or are currently locking) camera scroll into.
Objects that navigate towards waypoints cause the waypoint they're currently navigating towards to fill in orange, and have a second orange line that stretches directly towards the waypoint's center.
Waypoints have orange lines that stretch directly to the center of the next waypoint in the series.
Objects that are stuck within certain regions have orange lines indicating boundaries they cannot cross, or will trigger behavior changes.
However, boundary triggered object behaviors are too diverse to use a uniform color coding for all of them.
For instance, in the final level, the Vortex Larva objects have two octagonal aggro radii. While Ecco is within the outer, yellow radius, the vortex larva will count down until the frame it can become aggressive. When Ecco is within the inner, red radius, the vortex larva will become aggressive if the countdown is at zero.
These colors were chosen for intuitive reasons (I think of them as "yellow alert" and "red alert") rather than to fit in with any systematic color coding.
In 3D game mode:
Most objects have lime green coloring for their XY-plane collision boundaries, and mid-points.
For visibility in a very cluttered display environment, Ecco and Teleport Rings have orange coloring for their XY-plane collision boundaries, and mid-points.
Sonar blasts XY-plane are lime green for their with non-ring objects collision bounds, and orange for ring object collision bounds.
Most objects have blue coloring for their XZ-plane collision bounds.
For visibility in a very cluttered display environment, Ecco and Teleport Rings have red coloring for their XZ-plane collision bounds.
Gray points and shapes indicate the predicted future spawn points of objects
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TiKevin83 wrote:
However, I would say that accusing people of committing violence by not endorsing positions stated in text is a bridge too far. Assuming ill faith on the part of people who disagree with you is at the least not a great way to convince people of anything
I did not make any statements ascribing intentions to the decision not to speak up. There are many, wide-ranging, possible reasons that a person might decide not to speak up in a situation like this. A non-exhaustive list includes:
Fear of being targeted for reprisals by the people involved.
Fear of damaging relationships by subsequent passionate disagreement.
Ignorance that the situation exists
An incorrect assessment that the situation is not really that bad
A correct assessment that the situation is not really that bad
Fear that, even though the situation is that bad, a hyper-correction may occur that makes things even worse.
Active support for the current situation.
I do apologize if my statement gave the impression that anyone who disagrees, or hasn't spoken up, is acting in bad faith. It was not at all my intention to make such a statement.
However, silence, inaction, and "neutrality" in any situation of abuse is inherently supportive to the abuser. People who have a tendency to commit abuse will not stop unless challenged. Institutions that have a tendency to commit abuse will not stop unless challenged. Therefore, from a consequentialist perspective any behavior other than challenging the abuser(s) or directly aiding the victim(s) to escape the abusive situation is complicit in perpetuating the abuse. So, I will not back down from my statement that "silence is violence," because regardless of intention, the consequence is the same: abuse is allowed to continue.
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Lobsterzelda wrote:
Hi everybody. I've created this thread in response to the recent submission text for the new ecco movie, which can be found here: http://tasvideos.org/6789S.html
A lot of effort has been made to use existing rules to interpret whether the inclusion of political messages in movie submission notes should be allowed. However, the reality is that this sort of situation hasn't really occurred before, so the current rules neither explicitly allow nor prohibit such inclusion of political messages.
As such, I have made this thread so that we can all have a debate about what we believe should be the norm going forwards.
Feel free to post your opinions about this topic below.
First: thank you for making this thread. I agree that the two topics are very different, and merit different threads for discussion.
I do also recognize that constant exposure to the harsh realities of present-day politics is exhausting, and everyone needs to have times and places where they can retreat and recharge, and that this site is one place people reasonably do use for that purpose. To which end I do not actually oppose that discussion of current events mainly be kept in the "offtopic" (or a hypothetical "politics") forum.
However, I also recognize that refusing to discuss politics is inherently supporting of the status quo, whether the reason you refuse to discuss politics is for fear of reprisals, or because of total agreement with all of the decisions of the people and systems currently placed in power.
Because of this, I believe that when certain types of abuses occur, it is also important that no individual in society simply be allowed to ignore "politics" and current events, either, which is why I chose in this instance to make a statement in what I believe to be a more visible location.
So basically, I think that the previously existing norm that submissions be reserved for entertainment and technical discussion should continue. However, I believe that it is important that there not be any site enforcement of this norm, the only consequences should be the social consequences of making a statement on a potentially divisive subject, so that authors are free to do this when they believe the situation merits it.
Lobsterzelda wrote:
However, if anybody wants to debate the views in the submission thread, they should make a thread in the off topic section for the purpose of discussing these views (ex. for the current Ecco submission, all debating messages could be put in a thread called "Ecco Dolphin Workbench: Black Lives Matter Debate").
I think that the currently existing 2020 politics thread in offtopic is of a sufficiently similar nature that it can also be used for debating the content of my statement without the need to create a new thread.
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I am generally in favor of decriminalization of all drugs, but I can see arguments for keeping criminal penalties for drugs like, say bath salts, or PCP which have a tendency to incite extremely violent behavior in their users.
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There is a lot of boring repetitive stuff before getting to the final battle, but, having played the game, the fuel management is still impressive.
I also very much liked the ending. I didn't know it was possible to have a victory with your ship destroyed.
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Dacicus wrote:
Patashu wrote:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6080222/
When it comes to the police killing civilians, they don't MAJORITY kill black people, but they do DISPROPORTIONATELY kill black people (at a higher % than the number of black people in the overal population).
The authors themselves point out that the NVDRS database they used "is not nationally representative; information is only available for the 17 states funded at the time." There are 50 states in the U.S., but the population is not spread evenly among them, so it's not clear from the article what percentage of the U.S. population was covered by the states in the database.
There is no particular reason to suspect that the proportions would be better in states that don't participate in the police violence recording and reporting program. If anything, there's an argument to be made that police in states that participate in the NVDRS database program have an additional incentive to try to make the statistics look good over police in states that do not participate.
With a quick google search, I found that the states participating as of 2009 (the starting period of that survey study) were MD, MA, NJ, OR, SC, VA, AK, CO, GA, NC, OK, RI, WI, KY, NM, UT, MI, and OH.
The study states it was a survey of 17 states, which means one of these was not included. However, this is a very diverse group of states, in terms of population statistics, and political ideologies, so I believe that, even excluding any given one of them it would still be fair to take it as a representative sample of the nation as a whole.
The "disproportionately" part comes from the rate ratio in Table 4, I assume. What I wonder is why the authors didn't calculate or report a confidence interval to show that the ratio is statistically significant.
Because anyone trained in statistics can tell you immediately, without performing any calculations, that for a sample size of 812, a rate ratio of 2.8 is statistically significant, and therefore the authors felt no need to defend that part of their conclusion.
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Warp wrote:
upthorn wrote:
Saying "let's not discuss politics" implicitly declares certain topics as "political" and certain topics as "not political."
Actually it doesn't do it implicitly. It does it quite explicitly, because it's true. Some topics are political and some aren't. And everybody understood perfectly what I was referring to in this case.
Yes. It was perfectly clear that you would prefer that we avoid discussing certain categories of facts that are uncomfortable to think about for a certain segment of our userbase.
So uncomfortable, in fact, that a sub-group of those who find them uncomfortable will refuse to accept that these are facts, and instead loudly decry their validity.
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Warp wrote:
KennyMan666 wrote:
Warp wrote:
It appears my wish was not fulfilled.
The irony is that your post in the bundle topic is what triggered this entire fork of discussion, so, you really only have yourself to blame at this point.
Is it like a reverse psychology thing? Asking for no politics causes political discussion. The person who asks for no politics is to be blamed for the politics.
Saying "let's not discuss politics" implicitly declares certain topics as "political" and certain topics as "not political."
In general, what communities consider "political" is anything that the community doesn't have a consensus on.
One things that most communities (including this one) don't have a consensus on is which topics are "political" and which topics aren't.
Therefore, "let's not discuss politics" is, itself, a political statement that will almost always begin a politics discussion.
This is exactly what happened.
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I actually did find this entertaining. Though I think the submission text was more interesting than the resulting video.
I will say, though, that this is a different enough TAS that I don't feel like it should obsolete any existing ACE/game end glitch SMB3 movies.
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Gameplay is slow and a little repetitive. It would be borderline on yes/meh if it weren't for the frequent pauses.
Between the level load-times, and the half second pause every time a key is collected, it's enough to make it difficult for me to want to finish watching.
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Also, while you can't get line-by-line execution, you can still set breakpoints with the debugger, and BizHawk will pause on the frame it hits any breakpoint, and show which instruction caused it, and the disassembly of the surrounding area.
Only problem is if a breakpoint gets triggered multiple times in a single frame, it'll only show the last (or possibly first?) instance.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
