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I've sent a copy off to snopes.com to have them verify it. I'll post again when the results are in.

Snopes rule 

EDIT: ... not that it's really necessary. It bears all the hallmarks of a fake video, albeit a reasonably well produced one.

The video begins by depicting a brave young surfer braving the reasonably deep shallows of presumably the Florida coast, has him lure and capture a Great White shark with raw meat at the end of a fishing line, exploits the entrapment by having the shark tow him upon his surfboard, after which there are shoreline celebrations of the feat, and at the end signs off with or advertises a certain "Notorious".

"Notorious" appears to reside in San Francisco, his Myspace (or so I gather) is here: http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.channel&ChannelID=375654827 and here http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=33367849. Note that this might be a hijacking "Notorious", but I'm inclined to think that this guy is responsible for everything. The other videos available from the first link are of a similar nature to this shark one - they're obviously fakes, and they're signed "Notorious". The gentleman in question is an excellent video editor who should be destined for Hollywood, but a shark-tailing surfer he is most likely not. Note that on the the second link, the one to the video we're talking about, one of the tags (check the column on the right) is "comedy and humor". For crying out loud, the producer's telling us it's a fake!

But, because it's yummy, here goes for the win. BTW, a large part of my real life job involves this kind of investigation, making me the luckiest man on Earth. The pay is lousy but to hell with it.

One. "The number of shark attacks averages about 65 worldwide annually, according to the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida. Expect about 30 attacks in U.S. waters, mostly near Florida." [verified 07/12/08 - http://www.livescience.com/health/080603-bad-medicine.html] Note the fellas floating about, languishing even, as a frigging huge shark trailing a maniac races by near the end of the video. Even accepting that, the chances of a shark being this close to the coast, but not initiating an attack on such deadbeats, and getting caught by a single coastal shark-hunter at a particular time of a particular day (let's say he waits three hours, which for a surfer I'd say is generous), are by my rough calculations at least 0.010274%, or about a 10,000 to 1 shot. These odds are similar to hitting a large win on your local lottery. Not astronomical odds by any chance but higher than you'd like to wager on if you had to suit up, spend about £20 (or I assume $40) on raw meat, go out and risk your life whilst videotaping it *every single day* until finding a shark. Note that my calculations are basic and that chances of success in finding a shark are increased by studying migration routes... this said the Great White is one of the most versatile of sharks (being able to moderate its body temperature in waters as warm as Florida from as cold as Alaska), and therefore, without anyone paying me to actually get a marine biologist to give me the actual lowdown, I'm gonna assume my 10,000 to 1 estimate probably is probably only far from the mark in that it's extremely conservative - this is a Great White near a human inhabited shore. How many of us have seen that?

Two. The main protagonist of the video, whose name appears to be John, initially throws the meat on his fishing line like a big girl's blouse, sort of trying to use his fishing rod as leverage. We have no reason to believe he could ever do better sat atop his board. We have no reason to believe he is not, in fact, a big girl's blouse. Either way, if he were to "catch" a Great White in this manner, it'd be more like the Great White caught him, since said breed of shark tends to like to spring out of the water on its surface victims - even if it weren't aware of John, he would likely be seriously injured or killed as the shark began its descent back towards the watery depths, pulling him along with it. In any case, he begins reeling his bait back in, at which point there is a jump cut to what appears to be a shark fin.

Three. About those jump cuts. And the shaky camera movement. Hmph. Clever but faux, I'd say. The first fifteen seconds of the movie contain cuts to and from a position on the pier with John, and a distant shot from the shoreline beneath the pier taken at an unknown location. When John throws out his board, it flies out straight. On the shot from the distant shoreline, it appears to be spinning. I know, this doesn't even really convince me (too much like "Loose Change" argumentation), but nevertheless I reckon that the throwing of kit and jumping into water of John took place twice for two separate shoots. When making a film ordinarily this is what you'd do anyway. Also, why not show a distance shot of the fishing rod going down, too? I reckon it was to save that forty bucks on fresh meat for the post-production barbecue. 

Four. At this point I'd like to announce that there's a lot more wrong with this video but I'm actually getting bored because it's like shooting fish in a barrel (boy will I be embarrassed if this turns out to be a genuine article!!!). Okay. Two more things. Here's the first: The "Great White"'s movements are inconsistent, as previous posters have correctly observed, with that of any wild animal being caught, never mind a shark. Hell, I caught a pike once and that was scary enough. I would definitely not want to be "surfing a shark"... except maybe a roboshark which goes in a straight line at a constant speed without going berserk at passers-by, of which there are several at this point of this video, which suggests that the coastguard (presumably Floridan but wherever it may be) were off duty and not putting up red flags to get people out of the water, well, at least ten minutes ago...

Five. Well, there's very little twilight in the tropics, but in the Northern hemisphere I have yet to see the sky go from one colour to another in such quick fashion. Take a look between -47 seconds and -36 seconds: the sky color changes from a sort of overcast gray to a hellish yellow over this period and to be honest conditions seem to change from one cut to another throughout the video. This tape was taken over a day, not as a live episode. And from a hell of a lot of positions.

OK, one final one (I was hoping to be able to see more shadow evidence of time changes but gave up): Where the *hell* does the shark go after this escapade? And what the hell is "John" shouting about as he celebrates ("where's the [board/ball]"? if it's the board, it's in the water behind him, not sure about a ball). Beached Great Whites are big news events, never mind "surfed" Great Whites (try Googlng "great white surf" - nothing for this event turns up except for the sixth link... which is to this video) , and beaches are closed immediately whenever shark is sighted, even if it's unconfirmed (so those layabouts in the water and the observers, cameraman and surfer boy "John" would all have been, well, not around).

Just check out what happened yesterday:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=5355829&page=1

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/07/11/shark_is_reported_off_marthas_vineyard/

Enough already. It's fake. He said so himself. But it'll still be fun to poke more holes in it. I reckon I can find a few more. I reckon a lot of people can punch holes in my holes! It'll be fun.

I'll be back tomorrow. Goodnight!

Scott "jawns and says goodnight" Anderson.

I think this has been suggested but definitely second this suggestion.

+1

I usually just drop a point into whatever stat the skill I just upgraded or want to upgrade depends upon. E.g., if I decide my character needs a better bow or just more power draw, a point goes into strength.

My understanding is that by level 31 the question will gradually become moot, since the period between gaining levels becomes exponentially longer the higher your present level is. Your character is reaching the apogee of his skills anyway. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

140 men in a single party is pretty large but not the largest ever: http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,39039.0.html. Whether 140 is too many is a question of play style - if you like throwing recruits into battle then it's a good number, but 140 heavy infantry/cavalry/skilled archer types is going to get expensive to maintain and is perhaps overkill except, perhaps, for difficult sieges. Larger parties have disadvantages - expense, slow movement, diminishing returns on renown, lower morale... the need to sink even more points into charisma and leadership.

I'd be inclined to build fighting skills at this stage, but it is a question of personal preference and style.

You remind me of the 'Tournament of Tottenham', a late Middle English parody of romantic tournaments (if you're into this sort of thing I highly recommend reading the whole thing online or in any of several printed editions: try http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/canttales/sirthop/totten.html for starters):

I wot it is no children's game when they together met!
When each a freke in the field on his fellow beat.
And laid on stiffly; for nothing would they let --
And fought ferly fast till their horses sweat,
And few words spoken.
There were flails all to-slattered,
There were shields all to-clattered,
Bowls and dishes all to-battered,
And many heads broken.

In a way the present tourneys in M&B are just that, a parody. Especially the free for all practice sessions which are pretty much exactly what the cited poem was getting at. It is a bit of a shame, I tend to agree.

To add to your comments, I'd like to see the "beat so and so at combat because he's a scurrilous liar" quest from ladies combined with tournaments. Certainly in Arthurian legend tournaments were the public arena for settling feuds between knights. It seems strange at the moment to beat up Maleagant but have nobody there to see it  Sort of defeats the supposed purpose of trial by combat.

[EDIT - Adding a couple points]

The present system's not like jousting because there are apparently no rules involved. Jousting, and all tournament combat, was highly codified and breaking those rules was, well, I don't know what the penalties might have been because I know of no instance when the rules were broken - seems shame and honour still counted for something. For example, after the initial joust, if one knight was dismounted the other knight had to dismount and fight in melee - no taking advantage while still on horseback allowed. I wonder if the game could be modded to the extent of implementing such restrictions on combat for the arena?

It'd be nice to be able to change colours for tourneys only - I'm thinking about lady relationships here. If a player has good relations with a given lady then she could award him a garter to wear with her colours, and if the player is victorious then there might be an *ahem* award. Well, probably just further improved relations but who knows...

Visual guidance: the Tournament of the Cloth of Gold, arguably the pinnacle of medieval tourneys, reportedly looked something like this:

Personally I'm not sure about the dragon but the rest seems reasonable. Note - image is not actually medieval but a copy of an early modern oil painting.

Sorry for going on at such length. 

Arkatsson said:

It [religion] may offend someone (its Corporate liabilities and stuff *sigh*).

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Sorry to continue off-topic, but I'm not so sure. As long as we're not talking about contemporary real world religion there have been plenty of games which have either focussed on or featured religion quite heavily, from Pharaoh and Caesar, to Populous, Civilization, and notably Black and White series. All these games were successful and spawned sequels, so I'm taking a wild guess that those that may have been offended must have been heavily outnumbered by those that weren't.

And frankly, for a game set in a "medieval" environment, a lack of any real presence of religion really is quite startling. OK, some cities possess what seem to be churches (judging by their architecture), and if you pick scholar as background there's a mention of theology being part of your studies, but the visible, tangible presence of religion in the medieval world was huge, from simple wall graffiti to cathedrals (or their equivalents), from errant pardoners to great processions.

Anyway, the point is moot at this stage of the game's development, I reckon. It's so combat focussed that such considerations as culture get quickly forgotten anyway, so "when in doubt, leave it out", I guess. Maybe for reconsideration come M&B2...

zehnan said:

The patch works all right.

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Glad it works! I'm guessing you posted the info to the App DB, thanks for that 

One day I'll get round to patching my own Wine... 

I believe the OP's referring to a Flash Tower Defense game which may be found here, amongst other places:

http://armorgames.com/play/1716/gemcraft

It was made by gameinabottle.com but I failed to find the game featured on their own website. Anyway, it is a pretty addictive Tower Defense game, maybe even a contender in an increasingly saturated market.

When in doubt, go to snopes.com:

http://www.snopes.com/photos/gruesome/johnny.asp

Cassandra said:

I've been doing some reading on this game, and it seems very interesting, but I have questions first.

I can't find the system specs anywhere, so what are they? I have an AMD Athlon 5000x, 2 GB ram, windows XP, and an Nvidia Geforce 8600GT with 256 ram.

Click to expand...

I'd say you'll be fine running this game (and if you can run Oblivion I'd nearly guarantee it). To make sure, why not download the game and find out? There's no need to download again after purchase, if that's what's putting you off. You have nothing to lose trying the game out except some bandwidth.

If I love Oblivion will I love this?

Click to expand...

Again, you have nothing to lose trying it out. I expect you'd like this game, though.

Can I purchase it with a debit card? I don't have a credit card.

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I believe I bought mine this way, but my debit card's a Visa. I don't know about these weird Maestro thingies.

One does wonder where all those NPCs, and pigeons, come from, all the same 

It would be a nice flavour element to have kids running about in towns and villages, and in peaceful contexts they couldn't get hurt (let's not get them involved in sieges or raids, as Orion points out). But other than that they would serve no ostensible purpose.

Hi,

It's a known problem with Wine. Lookie here for one similar report for a different game:

http://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?t=55&highlight=

and here for the actual bug report at Wine HQ:

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6971

The problem boils down to Wine losing track of the cursor when it leaves the game window (or halting when playing full screen): you can see this happening for yourself by running the game in windowed mode, and also by escaping to the options menu to see where the cursor lies when you reach the right and leftmost limits of your mouselook (it'll be at the very left and right edge of the screen, I'll bet).

Of course, this shouldn't be happening, but it does, even with Wine config told to let DX applications to stop the cursor from leaving the window.

There is a hacky patch available as an attachment to the bug report at Wine HQ (link above), but that means compiling Wine and I don't have time to test this just right now (maybe, *maybe* later tonight). This would provide the environment option WINEFORCEMOUSEWARP to be passed and hopefully solve the problem, but it is just a hack and there's a good chance it won't work. But it's worth testing.

On a related note, this has been a bugbear for all sorts of Quake engine games, but they have an easier fix. See, for example, Medal of Honor Allied Assault:

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=882

They can just open the console and change an environment variable there, or change it directly in a config file. I checked out some of the config files in my M&B folders but sadly found nothing that even looked worth fiddling with, and AFAIK there is no console to be opened in M&B. Really, a dev would need to guide us as to any quick fixes that might be available.

On a slightly brighter note, this is a bug which effects quite a number of games and as such is likely to be reasonably high on the list of priorities the Wine devs have to work on.

Hope that helps but worried it won't.

Scott "Mouse Trapped" Anderson.

They do and you do. Unfortunately, they do not explain how to cool the processor. It fries.

I wish I could get paid for playing Mount & Blade.

This is a good idea for realism and strategic depth. The interesting implication is that retreating armies would be slower, and so easy to pursue by the victors. If this were implemented players might end up abandoning wounded units from the party just to be able to run away. This action would ideally negatively impact morale (a la "leave behind a number of troops to hold the enemy up" option), but at the moment I think it might actually increase morale?

Well, you can always force quit out of the game (is it still alt-f4 on Windows?) on the "battle is lost" screen before it returns to the map view to get out of any negative consequences, but that probably goes against the spirit of choosing the "realistic" save option in the first place.

There are murmurs that rainfall reduces crossbow damage (presumably due to the cord loosening), although I never really paid enough attention to notice this empirically.

I've usually found that the nearer the target the more damage will be inflicted. This is probably related to the velocity point made above.

Yeah, agreed.

I can't remember having such posses chasing after myself, but it seems reasonable that various bandit types should give up when they're out of their terrain. So steppe bandits should stop chasing after about half-way "up" the map (i.e. the northern half), sea guys vice versa, and forest and mountain bandits should stick to their various terrain. Invisible "borders" could be set up on the world map to prevent typed outlaws from crossing into territory they shouldn't be. Looters, on the other hand, should always have free reign... but then, who care's about looters? 

Turning this on it's head, I've often chased down bloody steppe bandits, who always move faster than my group, to the corners of the map, just for the hell of it. Because I hate them so much. There's nothing better than cornering a whole group (four or five posses) of them, and then slaughtering all of them one by one. Serves them right for causing me problems in the early game, the ******** **********.

This might be possible / easy to implement - the suggestion's along the same lines as the currently existing guild master response to quest refusal (i.e., "well, the job might be available for a few days so check back...")

The fact that this is the case suggests to me that the developers have deliberately decided that lords are going to be *****y about handing out jobs. If you bite the hand that wants to feed you it wont again, for a good long time. Whether this is good for game play or not is another issue. Personally I quite like the different behavior between lords and guild masters, but I can definitely see how it's frustrating from the player's point of view. Is frustrating ever a good thing for game play?

Just the thread I was looking for, seems like the search engine works after all 

Granted the game is still in beta but judging by the version number progression it's getting close to release and to be blunt the AI is unacceptably dim witted on the strategic map (let's not even start on battles).

There must be some way to stop the AI from being so easily distracted. I just followed the Rhodok king around, whatever his name is, as he raided, one by one, each and every village on the Nord coast. Without actually looting any of them. No, instead, after about a half a day's raiding he'd go into patrol mode and move on to another random village. Eventually this led to a loop around the Nord coast, and I quit testing when my army began starving.

Seriously, it seems to me like it should be relatively straightforward to fix these sorts of glitches... but what worries me is the possibly that the AI be (partially) governed by a dreaded Random Number Generator - at least judging by its on screen behavior this doesn't sound like an outlandish extrapolation. I really hope that at final release nothing will be random about the AI's strategic behavior on the map, at least. AI lords (and marshals in particular) should clearly have some mechanism to fix an objective (nearest enemy castle to friendly border would be obvious), and then focus on it and only it until it's done. I realize that this is hardly sophisticated (equivalent of an RTS "tank rush", in a way), but at the very least it's decisive. Otherwise M&B is going to face some serious competition from even golden oldies, like C&C, which at least have AI which grasps the concept of "if it ain't done yet, keep doing it". Really, the AI at the moment is weak and, what is infinitely worse, frustrating for the player who is asked to play along. Even for beta testing. This is not because of a lack of sophistication (I wonder if the devs haven't tried too hard), but because of a lack of effectiveness. It wants a blunt fix.

Berpol said:

If I ever capture him again he will find ground glass in his food.

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You'd be better off taking a shard of it and stabbing him repeatedly. See http://www.snopes.com/horrors/poison/glass.asp.

Sorry to be pedantic 

Got me   

I humbly reserve the right to not be in my most reflective mood when *I* am frustrated by the game 

Given the choice between keeping bandit ambushes and keeping cattle quests I definitely know what I'd sacrifice. Each to their own.