Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

I nabbed a plugin to fix my borked LJ Crossposting script... mine was not behaving nicely. So this is mainly a test to see if/how it works.

Test.

Test 2...

Big Test

Now we're testing an edit, and adding in a link to the plugin's home.

Tragically, there was another school shooting at the beginning of this week. This one was in Finland, and their second in 12 months which left 10 dead, 11 including the shooter. We can expect the cry for more gun control, both domestically, and in Finland, so I pulled out a post I've been saving due to not having time to finish it.

Finland

First I want to address the Finland shooting. Finland is third in the world in terms of gun ownership per capita, behind the US, and Yemen. This is because hunting is huge in Finnish culture, as one person puts it, "the national sport". And yet more people are killed by knives than guns (according to that article). The youth are raised around weapons, they can legally own a firearm at 15 with parental permission, and for handguns they must be a member of a gun club. Yet until 12 months ago, they'd never had a tragedy like this.

The conclusion we should be able to come to, is its not the gun's fault, its the human's. You have a person capable of cold-blooded, calculated murder, and no amount of laws will stop them from carrying out what they want to do. It requires human intervention: Parents who care, friends who realize when someone's hurting inside, kids that are strong enough in their self-image that they can get through school without bullying. As many are so fond of criticizing the War on Terror, its more than just people with guns, its a social problem that requires compassion, and understanding. However, if those fail, you had better be prepared to fight for what you love, because when a person reaches the utter mental darkness these killers were in, there's going to be no reasoning.

Its worth pointing out that in this most recent case the killer had homemade bombs with him, as did the Columbine shooters, if they had no access to guns, they would have still been able to kill.

But that brings us to Gun Control.

Gun Control

Gun Control: At its heart, the idea is fairly basic, to control the guns that are in public circulation so that bad people can't get them. While I know people who would argue against any limitation on weapons, I think most will agree that there are people out there who shouldn't own firearms, just like there are people who shouldn't be able to drive, people who shouldn't be allowed to practice law, and people who shouldn't be allowed to practice medicine. One obvious answer here is felons, if you're convicted of a violent crime, you forfeit your right to bear arms.

Unfortunately, in recent years gun 'control' goes way beyond 'control'. Now people want a gun ban in the name of gun control in some places, such as the District of Columbia (recently overturned), and Britain. Yes, this will keep guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens, unfortunately we have to remember that these guys who shot up their schools were not law-abiding. They committed many acts of cold-blooded murder, and no gun ban would have prevented that. Now, it would have made it harder to get the gun, but as we can see from Britain, it would by no means have stopped them from getting guns. There violence went up once private citizens lost the right to bear handguns. I've heard first hand accounts from friends that if they ever did something wrong, and the bobbies wanted to stop them, they'd simply run, since the worst they had to face is a night stick, and they could out run the cops.

Piracy

Now, I'm going to play to my (intended) audience for a while. You know I'm not just some crazy gun nut, I also fancy myself a (white hat) hacker, and know most of the arguments for and against music|software piracy. What does that have to do with gun control? Lets examine DRM, or "music piracy control". DRM is a system whereby a company can have "absolute" control over their intellectual property, in this case lets say music. If I went to any hacker, and said that Congress passed a law requiring DRM on every digital music download, to prevent piracy, do you think they'd be put out at all? No, they'd laugh, and explain how in 3 minutes or less they'd be able to bypass the DRM (I'll refrain to linking to those news stories... I value my freedom). I know, I know, this is completely unrelated! Or is it?

In both cases we have an arbitrary control system, X, designed to stop the user from doing Y. In the case of gun control, X is "legal ramifications" and Y is "buying guns", and in the case of DRM, X is "DRM", and Y is "copying the music". In both cases it is the honest people that suffer here from a lack of freedom and security. In the case of guns its physical security and the freedom to defend yourself, and in the case of DRM its the lack of freedom to use what you've bought and the security that if your computer dies you can have a backup. So why is it that one of these is a perfectly smart move, and the other will never work?

As a security professional I know that there's no such thing as a secure system, I don't believe that for a computer with limited physical access and a decent firewall. So why would I believe that any country, or even any city, could pull off a complete gun ban, eliminating the ability for criminals to get their hands on them? Now, in the case of my computer, I plan for Bad Things to happen. I keep backups, I make sure there's spare hardware around just in case, and I look at my security logs to make sure. But how do we plan for Bad Things to happen when the gun ban falls through? Should we sit around, and pray the cops come quicker than the 5 minute average? I've had my car trashed before, had two friends of the criminal take their time, and walk away right past the cops who took 10 minutes to get to my call. Do I have faith that they'll be that much quicker when I call and say someone's held me up at gun point? Or that Someone's broken in and has a gun? Of course not! I'm not saying citizens should take the law into their own hands, just be given a chance to defend themselves until the cops can show up.

Deal with the Problem
For the sake of the argument, I'll say we have a completely 100% secure gun ban in effect in America. This won't stop violence, as Britain has shown us, there must be another cause. In the end, crime is a human (not social, humans created society, therefore its a human problem at its root) problem, and will be around as long as humanity is. What we, as a society and a race, need to do is recognize those human problems, and combat them, not the weapons used. When guns are banned, knives will be used. When knives are banned, shanks will be made (look at prison), when all sharp objects are eliminated from our society, ropes will be used to strangle (again, look at prison). There's no end to violence, the best we can hope to do is recognize what causes humans to become killers, and fix it.

The most obvious period, is during childhood. There's a recurring pattern of these school shootings where the kids doing the shooting were "outcasts" in their school, or were ridiculed, or bullied. Those are by no means reasons for murder, not even for retaliation! But, those killers should stand out to school counselors as people who need extra concern (not pills, actual human care), and stand out to the students as people who need their compassion. We're a society who wants to do away with moral and personal responsibility, when what we should be doing is recognizing that a successful society will care for each other.

Conclusion
In conclusion, I feel that the true control needed in our society, is that of controlling ourselves. Guns are regulated enough, we need to turn ourselves now to the people next to us in society, that man on the bus who's always looking sad, that driver who just cut you off, the quiet kid in your class that you all think is just a bit odd. Take it upon yourself to say hi, or not flick off the driver, or ask him to sit with you at lunch. Not because this may prevent a shooting, or a suicide, or an incident of road rage, just because they're humans too, and we all know the dark places a human mind can go to when depressed. I guarantee you, if we spent as much time and focus on helping those next to us in society (I don't mean hand outs, socialized health care, or any of that, I mean honest to goodness one citizen helping another kindness) then violence will go down in a way we'll never know through straight gun control.

As I mentioned before, I'm putting together an AR-15, and my next few posts will be the story of how its been put together. I'm also using this project to test out Picasa, so I'll use that to post my images (just as soon as it finishes scanning a few of my automated rip folders, such as icanhascheezburger, forgot I had all them!)

Before I begin, I'd like to link to a schematic which can be found here. This way when I mention random parts you can find them and play along!

This first post is about the lower assembly, which is the buttstock, lower receiver (has the hammer, trigger, magazine well, etc). At this point I'd like to note I'm using a great book by Walt Kuleck and Clint McKee, The AR-15 Complete Assembly Guide, its got nice pictures and very very good detail on how you'll screw stuff up if you don't listen. Well worth the $17!

Parts

Lower Receiver
I bought a DPMS stripped lower receiver from a local gun enthusiast, which cost $158.73 after taxes, cable lock fee, etc. On the AR, this stripped lower receiver, meaning it is just the frame, no trigger, hammer, nothing on it, counts on its own as an assault rifle, because it has the serial number on it. So I walked out of there with a piece of metal in a locked dry box with a cable lock through the mag well, to make it 'safe' to transport.

Lower Receiver Bits
I'm not too particular about my trigger yet, so I also picked up a DPMS Lower Receiver Parts Kit for $56.99 (Don't buy anything direct from DPMS by the way, you can always find it cheaper). Some may ask why I didn't just buy a completed lower receiver, but I wanted to understand how everything works, and say I built every inch of this gun.

Buttstock
All that was left was the stock, and I snagged a Command Arms 6-position stock assembly, for $92.99. Its a very nice stock, and am quite happy with the sturdiness of it, as well as the function. It has rails on the right side, and a 4 battery storage area on the left side (can be swapped for more rails) which is more functionality than I'll need for a while. Went on in about 5 minutes, including forgetting to put a detent in, and having to redo it.

Assembly
The assembly was easier than I expected in terms of simplicity (piece X goes in slot Y), but harder in terms of executing it (piece X really does not want to go into slot Y, and X's spring is fighting me too). It took about two hours, including redoing a few steps to make sure it was right, flinging detents all over the room as I learned why they say to do something one way, and searching my house for various tools I thought I already had.

The trigger guard's been the hardest part so far, since its roll pin just did not want to go in, and required a "motivator". After that went in, I put in the magazine catch, so I could mount the gun on a handy little bench I have, and then moved on to the trigger and disconnecter. Somewhere in there the bolt catch went in, and that's where I stopped last night. This morning I got up and put in the hammer, safety, pistol grip, and buttstock. It was very straight forward, but like I said above, there are a few places where you really should get a tool to do the job for ya, like the front take-down pin. Otherwise you're gonna shoot the spring all over the room, and don't even think about finding the darn detent afterwards!

So now I've gotta go order all the upper parts, a receiver, bolt/bolt carrier, barrel, and some hand guards. I'll be getting a scope eventually, but may pick up flip up sights due to cost for this first build, not sure. I have pictures of the whole process, if you know how to get a hold of me in real life I'll pass on the URL.

Its been a long time since I've written anything, I've kept busy at work and at play. On the work side I'm going to look into what it will take for me to actually run Three Planets as a real company, mainly for tax purposes and my own sanity. On the play side, there's been a LOT more developments.

I just picked up a motorcycle about two months back since one thing I love to do while stuck on some code is drive. Naturally I figured that riding would be an even better escape. It turns out it is, but I'm concentrating too much on the riding to be able to head-code. The upside is, this is probably the most fun activity I've ever found. So, meet Kari:

I realized on Sunday that I've put 1000 miles on her in the month and the week since I got my license, not too shabby considering I probably spent on the low side of $100 of gas for that entire time! Since she's an older bike, I'm doing as much of the maintenance as I can, so that I'll only need a mechanic for major operations. More on that later.

I also (very, very recently) decided to get into Gun smithing. To that end, I'm going to be making an AR-15 over the next month(s), and keeping track of my progress here.

So, what do the two new activities have in common? Both of them stem at least partially from an interest to be reliant upon only myself for work. This comes from the programming I do, where I have chided others for not thinking outside of the box, and really doing anything they want with the code. It finally dawned on me that that goes in all walks of life, and you can even approach it in the same way.

Lets take the Gun smithing, for example. I'm approaching this from a design perspective first. I laid out what I want to use the gun for, then set my constraints (money), and planned out the parts. This is exactly the same method I take for programming: First I'll plan out how I want it to look/act, figure out what corners I have to cut to keep it within my memory/CPU/bandwidth bounds, then start with the functions.

In this case I decided I want something for (eventually) match target shooting, for medium ranges (100-600 yards). My constraints were that I wanted to build it all myself, short of fabricating the parts, and that i didn't want to spend more than $700 on the total cost. So far I've decided on the following:

• DPMS Lower Receiver, stripped (already purchased)
• DPMS Lower Receiver parts (already purchased)
• Advanced Technology 6-position collapsible stock
• Ergonomic pistol grip
• 20" chrome lined barrel (not sure of manufacturer yet)
• Flat top upper receiver with rails
• Generic bolt/bolt carrier, stripped

It should be a really fun project, I look forward to learning a new machine and how it all works. This will also mean that from now on my firearms will be like my computers, completely unique, and I'll have an intimate working knowledge of each and every part.

So why now? Why am I trying to learn all this new stuff once I get out of college, and not while I was in it? The answer here stems from some conversations I've had about why I enjoy firearms, and thoughts I've had after them. The short answer is: "I'd rather learn how to shoot now, when I don't need to, than later when I need to, but don't know how." I don't think carrying rifles in public is necessary, though I am a vocal defender of the 2nd amendment, however I do think it is very short-sighted to assume you'll never need to use a firearm, and therefor write them off. Didn't you learn how to change a tire, even though you may never need to, perform CPR in gym class, or how to balance an equation in science (or for the scientist, write in plain English, or not blow up the world)? Sure, all of those will be needed a whole lot more than shooting, but other than CPR shooting might be the most important to know if any of those situations came up.

Now, I considered myself set once I learned safety, and how to aim properly. But lately I've been thinking that its really short-sighted of me to assume the rifle will work perfectly all the time. More importantly, I don't know when its not working at 100%, because I don't understand it all. Just like the sorority girls whose computers I'd clean up at the end of the school year, I might not realize all the junk that is building up inside my gun. So, I've decided that I need to know at least basic gun smithing, just in case. Knowing this will keep me, and those around me when I shoot, a whole lot safer in the long run, plus save me money!

The motorcycle is the same story. I have no idea what's going on, and if you read up on an inline-4 engine, there's really no excuse for that. So again, I'm teaching myself basic mechanics in order to keep my machines running as smoothly and safely as possible.

And if you think about it, these skills of checking the usual fail points, oiling the squeaky parts, and throwing your own custom parts in, are the same across many fields, not just mechanics, gun smithing, and programming. So get out there, and get yourself head first into a new field today!

For about two weeks now I've been working on a PHP version of the game Mafia. If you don't know it, mayhaps you know the name Werewolf, or Assassin (not Assassin's Creed, like I had some people guess.... there's no way I could port that to PHP). If you're still in the dark, check the Wikipedia page, or MafiaScum, one of the best forums for it. Harkins and I wrote it into Simud a year or two back, and I've wanted to see an automated version on the Internet for a while now (read: Not needing forum software, or a human moderator). The closest I could find is an email list, which of course I can't find now that I want a link, and frankly doesn't fit my description of 'browser based'.

So what I'm creating is a PHP/AJAX based version of the game, where players can create games of (so far) between 5 and 8 players. Upon creating the game, a random set of roles (random in terms of which roleset, NOT in terms of a hodge podge of random roles that could be very unfair) is doled out, and it goes immediately into the night phase. Each phase will last 24 hours, if everyone does their actions sooner, it'll end, but if you don't ready yourself before the time is up you'll forfeit your action. Game ends based on the roleset... typically once there's only town, or bad guys left, but in terms of Silent Killers it gets more interesting, but will be checked for after every kill, and after every lynching. Chat will allow for anyone to read it, and once the game is over all messages become public.

Unfortunately work has slowed down a bit since buying my motorcycle a week ago, but I'm still hoping to have a closed beta up in a short(ish) amount of time. I actually could put one up already, but am hoping to have a much higher degree of a product before the beta than I usually do.

The site will go live at Thieves Tavern, a site I got a long time ago for a gaming clan that is appropriately named, I think. Once it goes up, I'll put out a call for about 10-16 closed beta players, and then probably a week later another open invitation for open beta players. once it seems both stable, and a good recreation of the game, based on the opinion of all players, it'll become a public game.

You can follow the development either through Twitter, or in the #thievestavern room on irc.freenode.net, thanks to GitHub.

A bunch of us were chatting yesterday about ICANN's new TLD policy, wherein companies can buy custom TLDs for tons of money, such as .google or .microsoft. Peter Harkins, over at push.cx, maintains that this means 'WWW' will never die. The thinking is that now we'll need a way to indicate the start of a web address more than ever since anything dot anything might be one. HTTP:// isn't used much currently, it sounds ugly in commercials and no one ever types it, so there's no reason to assume that'll be it. However, I don't think that 'WWW' will be it either.

Now, many know that 'WWW' is not actually needed in the domain name, websites will work if you omit it, assuming the web admin knows what he's doing, which tells us that the 'WWW' is there to signify what type of address we have, and that's it. However, ordinary users that don't understand how the Internet works don't understand that its simply denoting a web address and this is where the dependency upon saying 'double you double you double dot" comes from.

So, now we realize that if ordinary users can be trained to realize that 'WWW' is just a symbol, we can be free of it! What better way to do that, than with a symbol itself? It needs to not be on the keyboard, so users won't be at all confused, and needs to not impact potential future domain names if ICANN ever approves multi-alphabetic domain names. To find such a letter I pored over the Unicode docs and found something I think many will agree is ideal. I give you 0x02AC or :

My name for this symbol is Dub-Dub, taken partly from shortening 'WWW' to 'dub dub dub', partly from dubbing my own symbol over what is used today, and partly from the likening of this to the heart of the Internet, with the sound of a heart beating.

What makes this ideal? First of all we clearly express the fact that it incorporates multiple 'W's. This will help ordinary users transition into thinking "Oh, this is what WWW meant." Secondly, this is a symbol that wouldn't occur naturally (more on why in a second) to prevent any confusion. Third, In the event of not having any way to produce Unicode symbols, one can simply decrease space between lines, and put another 'W' on top of a 'W' before the address, or make an image out of it using two 'W's. Fourth, by using a symbol, users will realize this isn't something they type, merely indicating an address, much like lerning that '@' helped to demonstrate an email address. Finally, this symbol is the IPA symbol for a "Bilabial Percussive", aka a lip smack. The only place it will show up outside of addresses is in phonetic or linguistic papers, and obviously not be an address. Better, since its not used in any world alphabet it shouldn't appear in a domain name even if ICANN approves other character sets for domains.

So, I think that as people become required to add a 'Double you double you double you' onto many more addresses, they'll attempt to find a better way of expressing that. Its only natural to find a better, faster way to express something commonly used. My vote is for Dub-Dub, and as people start to pick it up it'll evolve into what is used in everyday life.

On the 15th of May, Symmetry Breaking put out this call for help. It seems that the PR department of Fermilab received a (handwritten) letter in code. A high resolution version can be found here. Since its been a few days, and mainly since Slashdot picked up on the story, there's been some breakthroughs. Of note is 'Geoff''s work found here (only linking to the most recent post). I heard about this earlier today, and found it rather interesting, both the code, and the assumptions people were making. I'm keeping my measly ideas regarding the actual code to myself for now, as most have been enumerated elsewhere, but I'd love to examine these assumptions.

(And for the record, I'm not assuming 'male', I'm using 'he' since its quicker to type than 'she', or 'he/she').

First, there seems to be a basic assumption of sanity for the writer. I think this is the worst assumption made so far, and the most likely to bite us in the butt. While there's a chance someone was simply sending a letter to Fermi to see what they thought, pranking their co-workers, or whatever the reason, I think its at least just as likely that this is a crackpot guy who saw that Fermi has a .gov address and decided to send in something relating to their abduction, a secret formula, or world peace.

Three bits of evidence for this. The first (that hurts my thought of mental illness) is that the address it was shipped to is not given on the main website's contact page. This seems to imply sanity and foreknowledge, or at least some stalking, to come up with a different address. If we use Archive.org, you can see that while the address was different a year ago, it was a formatting, not substantive change. In fact, the address the letter was sent to is given on the website in quite a few places, so it is conceivable still that the author came across it coming to their site from a link, and not the main page looking for the address.

The second bit of evidence is the symbols that are used. As some have pointed out, this looks a lot like a Rosetta Stone for another message. While some of the symbols look clearly human (Upper case Phi, no doubt about it), others simply can't be found in our alphabets, yet look close to what some hypothesize should be a galactic, math based language. Where am I going with this? Perhaps (and please take this with a grain of salt, I don't personally believe in it) someone who believes in abductions found this message, understood it, and is trying to teach the language to only those humans who are worthy of learning it. Hence my thought of 'crackpot'. Sure, it may come out in the next 24 hours that these symbols match up to something else, and the guy is sane. Just remember, if it does come out to be a conspiracy, you heard it here first.

Finally, Fermi sat on the letter for a year before dusting it off and passing it off to the public. I can think of three reasons for this. The first is they honestly didn't have the people to bother. That could be, but judging by the reaction of the Slashdot community and other scientists I know, them putting this up in a break room, or an internal email, would garner a lot of attention during down time. The second thought is that they just didn't care. This would lend credence to my mental illness thought, they wrote it off immediately upon receiving it, rather than even attempt to decode it. Or, perhaps they've been working on it for a year, and got no where. I'm sure they would have the top and bottom solved, but maybe the middle bit has eluded them as well, which again would lend credence to it not having any real meaning at all.

Second, a lot of people seemed confused on the time frame. Fermi started they received this over a year ago, but some were reading into stories of interstellar communication that they assumed were related. We can't assume anything about the time frame other than any information made available after March 5th, 2007 is *not* involved in this message. In fact, due to the elaborateness of this message, I'd guess at least a week before that, as well. So anything after the end of February 2007 cannot play a role in this message. Of course, if research was going on before then, and only released afterwards the author may still have obtained a copy, or even worked on the project, and could have that information.

Third, there's the assumption that the middle portion (the symbols/'hex' characters) is a straight key, meaning one character corresponds to its hex character. I think that's wrong. A simple frequency chart shows the following:

As you can see, the frequency still fits into our base 3 assumption. I think that's very important, as the author uses base three (we assume, and can come up with English-correct translations for) in the top and bottom portions. So, rather than say that the sideways triangle equals 'F', we should say that it equals 3.

Now, translating the message into the frequencies, then decoding as we did for the top and bottom portions yields something cute (assuming that 222 is a space, not 000). We get:

111_1_111 111_1_111 111_11_111 11_111_11
111_1_1 11_11_11 111_1_11 11_111_111

OR

D D G G
E _ F S

There was speculation initially that the 'Basse' 'misspelling' in the message meant the middle bit should be a song. Well using this translation we have a song! It can be read left to right (half note D, half note G, quarter note E, quarter note rest, F sharp), or top down (quarter note D, quarter note E, quarter note D, quarter note rest, quarter note G quarter note F, G sharp). Of course, in many circles (especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Independence Day) music and lights are thought to be 'universal' languages to chat up aliens with. Hmm. Not saying that's the answer, but playing it is kind of catchy.

Going along with this assumption was the thought that 1 and A (and also 's') needed to be assigned values. I'd argue that they are assigned values as seen above. They're included in the chart 0 times, so they're all worth 0. And if you're as good with off by one errors as I am, that will get your hopes up for the 'initials' between the 'key' and the bottom.

Well, those are my thoughts on the assumptions that are being made so far. Hope it helps someone out there!

A new study conducted by me shows a link between Google News and a lack of productivity on my part. I use Google News because I like getting my news from lots of sources, since every source is biased, but unfortunately combining all these sources into one page leads to mistakes. Such as the following bloopers snagged from the main page at various times in the last few months:

Apparently Bill's new project is the Apple iPhone SDK

Looks like McCain got a facelift since I last saw him!

Look at the pre-historic dinosaur ready to crush and eat his prey! Oh, and there's also a T-Rex skull.

Sure, it makes a little sense. The McCain article mentions Democrats, I'm sure Newsweek was mentioned in the iPhone article, and Dinosaurs fit into Science, but there's at least one little blooper I notice a week where the picture next to the article would give the wrong message (Such as the Obama McCain one). Clearly someone got their script to work 99%, and left it at that, though that last 1% of images that are mistakes would be very hard to catch, I think. Anyway, I hope I can do a regular potpourri of these images.

A year ago today the Virginia Tech shootings occurred. As I mentioned a year ago, it somewhat surprises me at the sadness today has evoked in me, considering I was hundreds of miles away that day, and still am. It didn't seem like it was a year already, but I was reminded this morning when I turned on the TV to see an image that's been stuck in my mind ever since. I poked around on the Virginia Tech Memorial site, but couldn't find it for some odd reason, which is a shame because I think that image captures the moment perfectly.

The morning news had that Bugler image up this morning, and immediately the first two lines of the following poem popped into my head:

Blow, Bugler, Blow

Blow, Bugler, blow, let all hear you play,
The hope of our nation's enshrined in your lay.
The notes flow like tears poured out from your horn,
Splashing our souls and hearts, broken and torn.
Floating past candles held high in the sky,
Twinkling like stars who whisper "Good-bye."
Tonight there'll be pain, and tomorrow the same,
But during it all, we stand and proclaim:
"We are Hokies, America, as strong as they come,
From the siblings who visit to the oldest alum,
We know our potential, what we can become,
We'll always fight on, we'll never succumb!"
So blow, bugler, blow, let all hear you play,
The hope of our nation's enshrined in your lay.

ADMIN EDIT: Missed a line in there, had to add it.

A few weeks back I acquired a PS3 (another post on that is in the works), and nabbed Assassin's Creed as my Single Player game for a while. From the previews I was expecting a game with decent open-ended game play, decent graphics, and some good fighting. Boy were my expectations blown out of the water.

Plot: I won't spoil the surprise, somehow it remained one for me even after reading a few reviews. The basic plot ties into the Third Crusade, with Saladin fighting King Richard (more or less). The historical context here is that assassins rose into being during this time as a means of fighting back, with the word assassin coming from the Arabic "hashashin", meaning, well... hashish addicts. Specifically a Muslim sect during the Crusades that may have controlled their assassins with drugs and promises of heaven. Others that don't want to acknowledge possible negative connotations of the word claim it to have come from the leader's name "Hassan" (where Hassansin would be a follower of Hassan). In any case neither word is used in Arabic for assassin any more, so I don't think it should have any charged feelings either way.

The only reason I point out the etymological root of the word is because at one point your character is told that the Crusaders "Control their killers with magic herbs" and had to laugh. In most other respects, however, the designers did an amazing job with the plot.

The game does attempt to address some religious and political ideas but, with one exception, its nothing excessively in your face. The exception somewhat ruins the plot, so I'll hold my tongue further.

4/5

Cut scenes: I enjoyed each and every cut scene in the game, and boy are there a lot! Around the first 45 minutes I started getting bored until I realized I could control the camera and minimal assassin movement which means that you can be your own director! Walk in, announce a kill, and during the ensuing conversation pretend you're in the Godfather. Another great touch is being able to change camera angles on the more important scripted 'boss' conversations, where you can get close ups of the guy speaking, or the innocent victim he's about to kill. Really gives it a good cinematic feel.

All I could ask for is, well, an option to skip them just in case they do get a bit long.

4/5

Graphics: I absolutely loved the graphics in the game. Assassin's Creed has clearly upped the ante for games in the coming year, giving both superb sweeping vistas and decent indoor areas (though indoors wasn't emphasized). The first time I climbed the Citadel in Acre and looked out over the city it hit me just how much work went into this game. It actually reminded me of my time in Tunisia, captured quite nicely in my TV. Running around Jerusalam gave me the same feel, while standing on the Dome of the Rock. Add to that the nice little particle graphics they add in when you find flags, or save citizens, and you'll be wowed no matter what game ya come from.

The combat graphics aren't great as well. When your character performs a kill combo or a reversal it jumps into a cinematic mode and shows one of a dozen (maybe more) moves being performed. As late as the 7th assassination (of 9) I was seeing new moves.

I came into the game assuming the cut scenes I'd seen weren't in game footage, but was greatly surprised to see the whole game looks that way!

5/5

Gameplay: I'll start by saying I really liked the control system. The first five minutes of button bashing made me think I'd make a mistake purchasing the game, but after familiarization (the tutorial is required, but extremely helpful) the controls felt natural. What they boil down to is the four buttons on the 'shape' pad. Triangle controls your head, Circle your open hand, Square your weapon hand, and X your feet. So in the context of walking, Circle is a gentle push to move people out of your way, Square shanks someone, and X makes you blend into the crowd and go unnoticed. When you move into conspicuous mode, those turn into a tackle, uber-shank, and sprint, respectively.

Once you get used to those controls, it makes it pretty easily to do exactly what you want to, such as slink along a rooftop, drop down into a group of guards assaulting a citizen, and shank two of them before they realize what's going on. Along those lines, the combat is very fun. Its fairly easy once you get down all the moves, but by the time you do that a fight can easily pull 10 guards at a time. While its easy to win, if you miss a break and let them get around you its also easy to lose. The combat feels very fluid, and using the short sword gives you a very nice whirling dervish look.

As far as replaying the game goes, I just "hurriedly" (took me a good week and a half doing it hurriedly) played through a lot of this game and yet still have a lot to go back and do. For one, each area has flags hidden in it, hundreds of them, and I've got, oh 50 total. Another fun thing to find is a large number of Templars that you need to kill. Finally, if you didn't do full investigations the first time, you need to go back and actually complete all the annoying flag finding missions for informers. Also its just darn fun running through Jerusalem and seeing how many guards I can get on me. Its like making my own action movie.

5/5

Openendedness (oh yes, that's a word... now): On the one hand you're forced to follow an approximate order of assassinations. However that's a very small hand, as most assassinations let you chose which city to do first. More than that, you can jump between cities if you like, and do the investigations as you want (each investigation being 3 of 6 missions consisting of pickpocketing, interrogations, eavesdropping, or informer assignments). I never once felt like I was forced into a path to chose, nor felt the game 'stop'. After an initial 10-15 second loading period, the entire city was at my disposal and by the end that equals a large area. I could run all over the city I was working in and only have to stop when 50 guards kill me--- erm, when I decide to.

There, again, is an exception that might be a plot ruiner, but at the end of the game I forgave all of it.

4/5

Ending: I loved this ending. At one point this afternoon I jumped up and said in a not so calm voice "Heck yea!" It was an appropriate ending, it fir the period well, and man are the fights leading up to it epic. I said before that knowing all the fighting moves makes fights 'easy', and for the most part this held true. Of course with the numbers you're up against, its darn easy to die quickly as well if you let them start landing blows. And with the final boss fight I died at least three times before getting him, and the fourth was darn close. And then, just before the credits, a lovely plot twist that actually had me come back and do some scenery watching for 10 minutes.

4/5

In the end, this is a game I recommend for anyone that enjoys a little sword play. Its only Single Player, but it does that so well I have to forgive it. You won't be disappointed with this game, even at $50.