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Dont you watch movies??

Sometimes I do. Sometimes I realize that they over-dramatize things in the movies to make them look cooler. And sometimes I get the urge to dream up engineering solutions that are even more efficient than those seen in the movies.

In case you're not just trying to CMTP, let me rephrase: Wheels not covered by treads work just fine for moderately light-weight vehicles traveling over relatively smooth terrain. But tanks use treads over their wheels because that is better for what they need.

and minimal porting costs

That depends on how Valve chooses which developers are allowed to release games on Steam. Will it be as open as Google Play Store or Mac App Store, or will it be as closed as Xbox Live Arcade and Wii Shop?

The comments about the mouse and keyboard are a McGuffin to mislead people as they develop a controller.

Do you mean MacGuffin, the thing in a story defined by the fact that everyone seeks it, or do you mean a red herring?

and minimal porting costs

That depends on how Valve chooses which developers are allowed to release games on Steam. Will it be as open as Google Play Store or Mac App Store, or will it be as closed as Xbox Live Arcade and Wii Shop?

The comments about the mouse and keyboard are a McGuffin to mislead people as they develop a controller.

Do you mean MacGuffin, the thing in a story defined by the fact that everyone seeks it, or do you mean a red herring?

But no, once again it seems to be London that gets the attention.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BritainIsOnlyLondon

WARNING: Hours will pass like seconds while visiting the TV Tropes website.

You seem to have some difficulty with the concept of 'original'.

I do have such difficulty in understanding originality.

If JRRT et al have laid claim to 'various concepts', then come up with your own, NEW concepts.

Tolkien essentially codified the genre of high fantasy. Not all writers are ambitious enough to come up with a new genre.

Granted, it may be much harder to come up with new concepts that anybody cares about, but that is not because of lack of money, it is because of lack of creativity and imagination. And that is why we reward the people who can come up with such things with IP.

In order to try to understand your statement about the nature of originality, I have a few questions. The following statements are in my view extreme, but they are intended to establish a continuum on which we can discuss weaker versions. Which if any of the following statements are true?

• All writers should attempt to come up with a new genre before releasing anything to the public.
• A free (as in freedom) shared setting in which writers can hone their skills should not exist. Instead, each writer must first learn to come up with his own setting from scratch before releasing anything to the public, and this duplication of effort is beneficial to society.
• The estate of William Shakespeare deserves royalties for West Side Story.

Because JRRT and those who followed in his footsteps have already laid claim to various concepts. I am aware that copyrights are not identical to patents. But under copyright, the combination of "access" and "substantial similarity" implies infringement, and courts have held that "substantial similarity" includes similarity of nonliteral elements.

You both seem to be missing the point.

If it's not LOTR, then it's not LOTR and just some pretender.

Either have the money to buy the rights you want

Where does a startup come up with such money?

make something up from whole cloth. JRRT did, why can't these folks take a REAL page from JRRT and do something original

Because JRRT and those who followed in his footsteps have already laid claim to various concepts. I am aware that copyrights are not identical to patents. But under copyright, the combination of "access" and "substantial similarity" implies infringement, and courts have held that "substantial similarity" includes similarity of nonliteral elements.

Google around.

around didn't provide relevant results.

But with the literal-minded housekeeper costume off, forge referer and spoof referer still don't. This page is from 2006, and this page likewise explains a flaw that has since been fixed. This page claims that it's possible to forge a referer in the visitor's browser using redirection, but only from a domain that the attacker controls. This result claims that the only way is to get the user to install a plug-in: "If you want to redirect a visitor to another website and set their browser's referer to any value you desire, you'll need to develop a web browser-plugin or some other type of application that runs on their computer. Otherwise, you cannot set the referer on the visitor's browser." A bunch of results were links to such plug-ins, but the viewer is likely to decline the plug-in installation. What am I missing?

But then isn't mutation the key to natural evolution?

Since our civilization isn't very natural anymore, the selection of species leads to a somewhat unpleasant conclusion.

you can pick the halfling up and toss him towards the dragon's mouth. Which I have actually done before playing role playing games.

Yeah, the technique is called a fastball special. Find someone small who's good with a weapon, and attack the dragon's weak point that way. Just be dang sure you can make the catch.

OMG, don't click on that link! NSFW!

Relax. It's not like I linked to TV Tropes or anything.

That would have been horrible.

Stop that "sol" nonsense!
The English name is SUN! The SUN!

Only people with a *giant* inferiority complex, who also use long Latin or Greek words when there is a perfectly good normal word, whenever they can, use “sol”.

It makes you look like a pretentious idiot. Especially to those who are on to you.

lots of cartoon animal names you can use

Which gives attackers the option to use the rainbow tables.

So what does that make KDE Plasma Desktop? The Kommunist Desktop Environment?

This is a legitimate job that has to be staffed 24/7 and probably requires about 20min worth of total combined labor in a typical year.

You can't know that.

SAC in the fifties became known for its relentless drill and discipline. It is what the military demands and expects on assignments like this.

Those who do not measure up get transfered out.

There is somewhere worse than mainland Alaska in the U.S. Military. An island called Shemya in the Aleutians, a group of islands off the coast of the Alaskan Peninsula. According to legend, the wind never drops below 60 knots, the temperature never rises above -20 C and there's a 10-foot visibility fog 300 days of the year. Primary duty there is clearing the runway of obstructions. Every time someone left, they took a rock with them so someday there would be no more island and no one would ever have to go back. Or so that legend goes/

Reassigned to Antarctica

Just because you don't use Windows systems, doesn't mean that nobody does, or even that nobody of your age or demographic does. Cause most people do. Just because you don't develop for Windows doesn't mean that nobody develops for Windows - unless by "for real", you're invoking the No True Scotsman trope, defining developer as inherently "someone who doesn't develop for Windows", which would be rather unhelpful.

Loads of people still program for Windows, and until a year or so ago I didn't see that changing ever. Now, though... Windows 8 feels like the beginning of the next disaster. I haven't heard too many people in my demographic saying they like the idea, and it's such a paradigm shift, UI-wise and development-wise, that we're going to be forced to support it anyway for those clueless users you mentioned (who accept everything MS says as gospel, or more likely, whose IT departments force them to), so that'll be fun.

No offense, though, but while the Linux kernel might be grand, all the UIs I've tried are still stuck in the dark ages. So it's not like there's really much alternative, other than just "don't 'upgrade'". Which only goes so far.

Yeah, phrasing is important. I once told an author who had me proofread their work that my main critique was that it was an Idiot Plot. It's a technical term, but the author sure didn't perceive it that way, and was very much not happy with me... It would have been much more effective to simply say, "Now why didn't character X do the logical course of action, Y, and completely avoid this whole mess?"

Sort of like this. ;)

Of course. Search this page for "He hates people".

Sasayaki! Damn, meeting you here of all places! I knew that name sounded familiar. How is your book sale going?

----

I remember reading about his book on TvTropes[1], and he offered his book free for a day. The problem was, it was not available for my region, according to Amazon's rules. So yeah, even if I *do* want to do something legally, I can't do it!

I don't know if the facts and figures match, but I personally feel most of the piracy happens in the developing countries, who simply *can't* get the item! (Don't consider torrents only, due to lack of reliable internet, most pirated stuff is downloaded once, and then burned onto CDs en masse, which are then sold at cost) Frankly, people here are happy with crappy vga cam rips, some thing hollywood could just let out for free and gain much more revenue on ads.

YMMV, but I feel that if you *have* created a global network, let it *remain* a global network.

[1]: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13261689090A06160200

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LetsSeeYouDoBetter

if they can access Engineering from any control panel in the corridor, why do they always rush down to the actual warp core?

So they can have a turbolift conversation on the way.

Otherwise the whole show would be one long IM chat log - including the aliens.

Sneer if you like, but you need the non-creative idiots every bit as much as they need you.

Eventually, AI will outpace the output and quality of even the most creative person. What then?

May I present to you the TV Tropes Story Generator?

It can certainly output the quantity of shows needed to fill the TV schedule. As far as quality, everything it emits has already been proven in the marketplace. With the right amount of recursion, it could carry a show from season to episode to act to scene, even offering some of the heroic quips and villainous monologues.

It's been rumored that TV Tropes was actually no more than this tool leaked from the BBC Programme Planning department.

Not to mention that it would be cheaper to get a couple of gamepads for the computer you already own than to pick up a console.

Yet a lot of PC game publishers don't realize this. Instead of selling a game in a bundle with a gamepad, like Nintendo did with Wii Play and Wii Play Motion, they just make a game exclusive to consoles.

And there really isn't much of a segment amongst fighting game players that are adamant about playing the genre on PC. Why would there be? There isn't really an advantage, because it isn't a genre about having lots of photorealism, CPU heavy calculations, or mouse/keyboard optimized.

If that's the case, a fighting game could easily run on the low-end PC that someone one already owns because it was bought for homework and Facebook, not built specifically for gaming. As you just pointed out, a $130 X-Arcade Dual joystick to connect to a paid-for low-end PC is cheaper than either HD console plus two joysticks.

Also.. fighting games suck on pads

I'll accept that for the moment with respect to Street Fighter style games. But consider Super Smash Bros. series and other platform fighters. Are those noticeably easier with a joystick than with, say, a standard GameCube controller?

Is Portal especially a new IP? I thought Portal's story was set in the Half-Life universe, as a gaiden game of sorts.

It's called the Four Point Scale for precisely this reason. Professional reviewers are very limited on how severely they can criticize the faults of a game when it comes from a big publisher.

When the critic reviews of a AAA game are all 80+, but the user reviews are in sub 4.0 red text, tread carefully.

Don't be ridiculous. There are no girls on the internet.

Perhaps 48 fps pushes the animation into an uncanny valley.

Nah. An increase in frame rate isn't going to change the film's subject matter (which is what the uncanny valley is about).

3D is a *much* bigger change than this is and nobody brought up uncanny valleys for 3D.

I couldn't make any sense of the comments on /. about how 48fps looks "too real". Isn't that kinda the point?

Perhaps 48 fps pushes the animation into an uncanny valley.

It's supposed to look real.

I thought it was supposed to look just real enough (and conversely, just unreal enough) for your brain to suspend disbelief.

But then you get into negative transfer. If one game uses thumb gestures for a particular action, and another game for the same platform uses accelerometer gestures, negative transfer will make it difficult to play one game after having played another. It's like how jump was always on the A button in the NES era; in those few cases where A was something else, jump was on B. That's why I want to know if developers have reached a consensus on specific gestures for common actions.

But then you get into negative transfer. If one game uses thumb gestures for a particular action, and another game for the same platform uses accelerometer gestures, negative transfer will make it difficult to play one game after having played another. It's like how jump was always on the A button in the NES era; in those few cases where A was something else, jump was on B. That's why I want to know if developers have reached a consensus on specific gestures for common actions.

I found it strangely amusing that Crowley found it "worse" that he might be branded as a pharma profiteer, rather than a child rapist.

Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking

More probably, a TVTroper: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool

Relativity (special relativity, that is) is pretty damn central to our understanding of quantum field theory

Which is why I read his "relativity" as "General Relativity". It may have been technically ambiguous to leave out the word "general", but there was only one reasonable interpretation of his statement, and pretending to be confused is very much a case of the Mathematician's Answer*--correct, uninformative, and useless.

Anyone who would potentially be confused by his "relativity" probably doesn't know enough about any form of relativity to actually be confused. :)

* warning: link leads to TVTropes, which may eat your brain.

Glad to see we may not be a Type 13 planet after all...

Well, essentially all TV is regurgitated, so complaining about Family Guy in particular is kind of unfair. Plot lines, characters, settings, relationships, tones--all of it gets reused, which is of course the basis for tvtropes.

Family Guy, The Cleveland Show, American Dad are basically the same, and are very similar to The Simpsons, Bob's Burgers, and South Park
Friends, Big Bang Theory, Seinfeld, Everybody Loves Raymond, The Nanny, Three's Company, ... ~= every other sitcom
Colbert Report ~= The Daily Show
Tosh.0 ~= The Soup
The Talk ~= The View
The Middle ~= Malcolm in the Middle
Star Trek (every version) ~= other versions, other sci-fi (eg. compare Deep Space 9 and Babylon 5)
Grey's Anatomy ~= ER, House
Every late night show, game show, soap opera, and reality show ~= every other one

The last line has some distinct categories, like high-stakes game shows vs. games of skill without much money; dating shows vs. dance shows vs. cupcake shows--yes that's a thing. But in any case, TV is only rarely even remotely original. I had trouble finding precedents for 30 Rock and Glee, though they're basically just crosses between two genres, namely sitcom/skit show and sitcom/reality-singing.

So yeah, Family Guy can be called regurgitated pap, but that's a hardly unique criticism, and why are you watching TV if that's your only complaint?

By this same token, a duochrome-colorblind person can petition for color-adjusted films.

Have you ever wondered why movies are trending toward an orange and teal color scheme? That's the scheme that happens to work best with common forms of color blindness.

Personally, while I like the discussion idea of the three laws, I tend to think the order is wrong: The first law needs to be the second.

You don't want to reverse the first and second laws, because you'd end up with a Literal Genie.

(I linked to TV Tropes from Slashdot. Woot!)

First there was Scorched Earth. Then there were things like Gorilla.bas, Solar Wars, and the old Mac game Cannon Fodder, which are rightly called "Scorched Earth clones" because their gameplay is nearly identical. Then there are things that transform the market from clones to a genre, like Castle Clout, CtC, and Angry Birds, which established the "destroy something with arcing projectiles fired from a fixed turret half a screen away" genre.

Likewise, first there were Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. Only after Goldeneye and Half-Life did "Doom clones" become the genre of "first-person shooters".

In other cases, trolling is done by pathetic people who enjoy sucking the life out of beneficial dialogs. Meanings, its a sad, sad cry for attention. Usually the later are people who are seriously emotionally damaged and trolling is their primary source of social interaction.

Effective trolling requires understanding people and how your messages look to other people. People who have little social interaction are typically very bad at this. Thus, basement-dwellers make bad trolls.

Which basically means, those who believe trolling means someone disagrees or finds a post unpopular are themselves likely a troll.

More likely, they are taking the easy way out: since you are not only right, but obviously right, anyone who disagrees with you is either evil or stupid or both. So, if their message is typed coherently, they must be evil people who are disagreeing with your obvious truth just to be contrary - in other words, trolls.

The real trouble starts when people take this outside the Internet, and start assuming that anyone who disagrees with them on economy, sociology, morals or whatever is arguing in bad faith. It becomes impossible to reach any kind of compromise or even intelligent debate when both sides assume that the other is a card-carrying villain. The Anti-Life/Anti-Choice abortion debate is a classic example.

Ah, the mathematician's answer. It's logically correct, yet completely unhelpful in context. Allow me to rephrase:

You claim to be aware of a model for financing production of a television series that is better than artificial scarcity. Would you please describe how to put this model into practice?

Hasn't anyone ever watched Castle? " There are two kinds of folks who sit around thinking about how to kill people: psychopaths and mystery writers. I'm the kind that pays better."

They'd have a fun time trying to do their jobs, if any time they tried to google for information for their job*, they got feds at their door... (I hear that actually already happens occasionally, but it'd be pretty lame if it were happening -constantly-...)

* http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ItsForABook

Might be useful for discussion. Search Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness at TVTropes, I'd direct link it but I don't want to be a dick.

I don't mind.

But how well do the skills in solving moon logic puzzles or strategy guide bait puzzles transfer to the real world?

But how well do the skills in solving moon logic puzzles or strategy guide bait puzzles transfer to the real world?

Except by even proposing something like this or stating something akin to "in fiction it would work" she is showing she has less cognitive reasoning capacity than an average teenager. "in fiction it would work"... Yeah, in badly written chock-full-o'-plot-holes fiction it would work. Seriously this goes beyond "did not do the research" and into willful ignorance.

I see no evidence that the two party system suppresses good people from running or that multiparty systems create great politicians.

What a multi-party system does is give a credible threat of revolution.

In a two-party system your choices are bad and worse (from your point of view), and the parties know this. What do they care about pleasing their base; where is it going to - to the even worse party? No, all that matters are the swing voters and unaligned groups.

On the other hand, in a multi-party system there are always opportunistic smaller parties ready to capitalize on dissatisfaction and welcome defectors. And if there's not, you can simply find one yourself, based on whatever ideals you seem fit.

So, in other words, a multi-party system encourages political involvement by the general public, while a two-party system encourages darkness induced audience apathy. A multi-party system is great if you trust your fellow citizens more than politicians, and a two-party works wonders if you want the plebes to keep their filthy paws off of power while still giving lip service to democracy.

The Law of Conservation of Ninjitsu works against you here. You need to keep the number of Ninjas low.

How funny you should pick the 10% figure.

Your pluralses are showing. Are you a Selkie fan?