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Be careful.

Last time I pointed out how bad this was, a bunch of Sony Fanbois downmodded me.

They seem to spend far more money on faked astroturf ad campaigns than they do on security, anyways. Remember the PSP incidents?

The Sony Fanbois today are pretty much a standing example of FanDumb... not surprising since anyone with any sense jumped ship from Sony a long while ago.

Mario Galaxy gets away with using lives the same way Super Mario World did: by making them overly abundant and ridiculously easy to get, along with making the consequence of reaching game over be practically non-existent.

Overall, "lives" is a pointless mechanic and has been for basically the past two decades. The games that still have them do so by making the mechanic entirely meaningless.

The null hypothesis in Science is "I don't know", not "A Wizard did it."

Frink: "Yes, over here, [...] in Episode BF12, you were battling barbarians while riding a winged Appaloosa, yet in the very next scene, my dear, you're clearly atop a winged Arabian! Please do explain it!
Lucy Lawless: Uh, yeah, well, whenever you notice something like that... a wizard did it.
Frink: Yes, alright, yes, in episode AG04-"
Lucy Lawless: Wizard!
—The Simpsons, "Treehouse of Horror X"

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

Developers have been getting rid of level, class and HP for a while. This is widely despised as making modern games "too easy" compared to older, more complicated ones. [Ignoring JRPG which is a genre founded on its lack of change]

Oh, and the level, class and HP abstraction works fine BTW, it may be a pain in the ass to manage on paper but video games have a computer to do all boring the number crunching for you. Getting rid of it may make a tabletop game more fun, computer based gamers don't care since it was already fun. Your rant also sounds dangerously close to complaining about things you don't play anyway, so why does it matter? You already have your tabletop game to keep you amused.

I'm not sure we disagree as much as you think. I'm not arguing in favor of transitive properties of the relevant laws--just the opposite! I'm pointing out that your initial analogy of CNet and computer makers was flawed because CNet distributed Limewire, while computer makers merely create devices which can, in theory, be used to run Limewire. To me, it was your original analogy that seemed to rely on the non-existent transitive properties of these laws.

As for whether CNet was stupid, I'm reserving judgement, but I don't think the situation is quite as simple as you suggest, even though I mostly agree with your second and third posts (as far as they go). If CNet wasn't stupid and didn't promote illegal activity (which I admit is at least plausible, though I reserve judgment at this time), there might still be a question of whether they should have known that Limewire was a tool promoted for illegal purposes. This is a bit of a stretch for the plaintiffs, I think, but I do believe that there is precedent for liability based on what you should have known. Anyway, I'm not saying I think CNet going to lose; I'm simply saying that your original analogy was flawed, and, moreover, it strongly resembled a class of stupid arguments I regularly see here on slashdot. Since it is now apparent to me that you don't subscribe to the stupid argument version, I apologize for assuming you did, but the analogy is still flawed.

(As for the programmer-with-a-screwdriver thing, it's an old joke. I'm sorry you didn't get it, but I have 'N' word privileges here, so get over yourself!) :p ;)

If you watched the last 9 episodes of The Daily Show, then you're probably going to watch the next one. That means your computer doesn't need to wait for you to record it

Automatically joining a multicast of the next episode at the same time as a unicast of the current episode works when you have told the system that you are having an archive binge or are otherwise watching each episode in order, or when the system determines that you are. But it doesn't work so well for the model of random access to individual clips cited on other web pages.

If you're unpredictable, or refuse to plan ahead on general principles, or just have a sudden lark, then ok, you will need to incur the extra cost of unicast in order to get the job done. But most of the time, that just shouldn't be necessary

Except most of my online video streaming experience has in fact been unpredictable and/or long-tail. How would multicast help video providers like Dailymotion and YouTube, which don't have as much of a concept of "all episodes of a series in order"? How would it work for movies, when the system can't predict which I'm going to want to watch first as easily as it can for TV shows? And how would multicast get routed over the backbone, or would publishers of video need to negotiate with individual ISPs?

By "extra cost of unicast", you appear to refer to Netflix switching from "watch instantly" to "we'll choose a few films in your queue to send to your DVR, or you can pay extra to watch instantly". Do I understand you right?

The problem with IQ is not one of acceptance or usefulness. Some scientists have already pointed out that taking the results of IQ tests at face value has some very Unfortunate Implications, see this article by Paul Barrett for example. (the article points out consistently measured significant differences between IQ scores between races, for example). Basically, IQ is an undefined construct which has a purely statistical basis at best. Nonetheless it is a very widely known construct which has nested itself deeply in the collective psyche.

We read "Oryx and Crake" for a class of mine, and while I wouldn't call it the greatest literary accomplishment of modern SF, it's still a pretty decent book. It's certainly not "old hat", because genetic engineering is the new nuke.

Really? Worse than _any_ other genre? I think you're exaggerating a bit. I think probably only 90% of all science fiction is crap. Which about matches what i find when i take a look at what's on the shelves in other areas of the bookstore as well. Clearly the bit about Heinlein is just you being a troll or a case of your mileage varying. Personally i've found only about seven of Heinlein's thirty-four books to be "crap." That puts him at about a 75% success rate for me.

And the "filter for sorting through the drek" is the exact same thing you use for sorting through all the drek in other genres of literature, all the drek in television, all the drek in film, and all the drek in every other form of entertainment. You can read reviews, you can read synopsis, you can ask your friends, you can sample a little before investing in the full product, and you can put all that together to make an educated guess.

If you honestly think you can pick up _any_ non-science fiction book at random or just turn on the TV to a random channel and expect good odds of finding something of quality then i think you're bound to be severely disappointed.

No one is going to willingly downgrade to a windows phone.

Unless, say, the mobile side-game for one's favorite Xbox 360 game is Windows Phone exclusive.

How long does it take to get a 30 megapixel image from the 25x25 with CSI processing?

CSI Software runs at... the Speed of Plot .

*sunglasses* YEEAAAHHH!

Cheaper than on the Moon? Using Phlebotinum I presume?

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

Linking to tvtropes is worse than linking to goatse. You're a bad person.

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

We should chart popular shows agains the Sorting Algorithm of Deadness and plot them against time. If the average gets to 2.5 or below, there's a problem.

There's well-established connection between hackers and very hot foods, as documented in the Jargon File. See, for example, the entry on food and laser chicken. I know numerous nerds who are obsessed with the Scoville ratings of their condiments.

Also, as an AC noted, SCIENCE! But in this case, science that touches on a common nerd obsession.

It's a Mathematician's Answer.

All that engineering talent and still Reed Richards is Still Useless.

Perhaps he meant anonymity of the victims? You know, Red Shirts.

It's candy, FYI.

Gives a whole meaning to Humans are Cthulhu.

Can Captain Obvious be far behind?

See Death of the Author. Anyone can define their own canon.

I don't recognise the movie or the remake series as canon; by that, Doctor Who ended a long time ago.

That sound you're hearing is the Whoooosh! of a low-flying aircraft, with unencrypted transponders.

WARNING TVTropes Link, do not follow at work! WARNING
What could possibly go wrong?"
WARNING TVTropes Link, do not follow at work! WARNING

Carrying a second charged battery

If you tried that on the DS Lite, you'd get prompted to reset your name, the clock, etc.

And in those cases, a simple 12v solar charger would be all you need for passive recharging - on a sunny day you could possibly run AC off it.

Or I could just stick to Wild World and run AC without being tethered to a charger. It's not like City Folk for Wii is any big improvement, and I'm sure the changes in AC for 3DS will cause civil war among the fandom just like AC1 vs. Wild World did.

Even if applying the lucrum cesans principle to this context was not bullshit (which it is), it would still be completely different from theft.

...if ISOhunt changed their search engine for a day, so that any searches were just forwarded to google with a filetype:torrent string appended?

It wouldn't make any difference to the legal case of course, which is more about ISOhunt being poor and accessible (and therefore prosecutable), unlike google. It'll also show users what magic incantations they need to mutter if/when torrent aggregators are closed, and maybe then we'll see MPAA vs. Google.

I don't torrent myself, I just buy lots of DVD's (except when I can't get a hold of a work by legitimate means - I'm not aware of anyone who's able to sell Dunvavi Karatan Adam for instance), but there are plenty of people at work who do (well, torrent and newsgroups), and every so often you'll come in and find an unmarked 500GB drive on your desk. People who don't contribute to the drive but copy stuff from it have to buy the first round at the pub. People who bring in a drive are excused from buying rounds next time at the pub. Works remarkably well for groups of 5-10 people.

P.S. I'm told rounds aren't that common outside of the UK, but I'm thinking that, seeing as they're obviously a facilitator of illegal file sharing, they should be banned. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BritishPubs

The two obvious possibilities are capping - with possible charge for overage - and shaping. Or both. What do geeks want to see?

I, and several other geeks whose Slashdot comments I've read, appear to want home Internet service providers to take a third option. Route revenue from subscribers into long-term investment in the network to improve the capacity of the service rather than paying short-term dividends to shareholders. This goes double for those parts of the country where the typical home connection has a 5 to 10 GB per month cap because cable and DSL aren't available.

Cowboy Bebop who is always at his computer.

If everybody in the future plans on selling micro-games

Micro-games at micro-price keeps gaming interesting, so that you're not doing the same thing over and over for the 50 hours that the $50 game might last. Perhaps my taste just differs.

with abysmal graphics

I didn't think the graphics seen in the video of Tiny Wings that you linked were that abysmal; they're just stylized. Is it that you prefer the "real is brown" art style?

There's really not that many situations that I can see where developing for a web browser would be more advantageous than developing a game for a native OS architecture, whether it be for a console (xbox, PS3, etc.)

I can think of one: a developer may be too new or too small to meet Nintendo's or Sony's requirements for a license. I can provide a citation for such requirements if you wish.

Native application SDKs exist for android, iOS, and the like

Windows Phone 7, the platform that Nokia just bought into big time, doesn't have native apps; it has the .NET Compact Framework with Silverlight or XNA API. What's the big difference between Silverlight in a browser and Silverlight on Windows Phone 7?

"Sofa king", "so fcuking", "so fscking", "so foquin", and the like are censor dodges for the present participle of a certain slang word starting with F.

The Geminoid family, a series of ultra-realistic androids, each a copy of a real person, has a new member

A bit realistic perhaps, but definitely not ultra.

I agree, since this is a Japanese company, I'd say they've achieved S Class animatronics...( not Ultra, and certainly not over 9000! )

The jerky movements aside (it's a rough mechanical test), once its software is fine tuned I could see something like this hooked up to something like IBM's Watson (but with opinions & emotions instead of just answers in the form of questions).

Personally, I'm looking at the cyborg implications -- Take today's synthetic lungs, heart pumps, dialysis, and IV nutrient delivery and combine it with a thought control input device to control the robotic shell, and I'm one step closer to putting my brain in a robot body.

Nah, with all due respect to the author of my favourite series, he was slow. Though it had more to do with his fascination to delving way too deep into often unnecessary details rather than him unable to write a plot in a first place. (For instance, did he really need to spend all that all that screen time on Galina?). That meant that he ended up wasting too much time summing it up.

Brandon Sanderson really did cut out the "no-doubt-interesting-but-ultimately-irrelevant" plot trivia. That's why he was able to bang out two books in about as many years. Him and Jim Butcher are some of my favorite modern day authors. I highly recommend their works.

Though if you like, you an replace "Pulling a Jordan" with Author Existence Failure, but that will entail you loosing all track of time :P

Disclaimer: I am a fan of the Jordan books, although I don't think I could explain the plot to you.

Which is my Preferred Theory on what happened to Jordan: I don't believe he had the whole thing plotted out, and ended up in Twin Peaks land - so many plot points to clear up that it just couldn't be done, and he couldn't decide which ones to abandon. (I think Sanderson has done a great job just focusing on the important ones, while keeping the general style.) But if I had to compare Wheel of Time to another series, it would be like taking all the Dragonlance novels and running them as one continuous series instead of breaking them up into particular three-four book plots.

Nah, with all due respect to the author of my favourite series, he was slow. Though it had more to do with his fascination to delving way too deep into often unnecessary details rather than him unable to write a plot in a first place. (For instance, did he really need to spend all that all that screen time on Galina?). That meant that he ended up wasting too much time summing it up.

Brandon Sanderson really did cut out the "no-doubt-interesting-but-ultimately-irrelevant" plot trivia. That's why he was able to bang out two books in about as many years. Him and Jim Butcher are some of my favorite modern day authors. I highly recommend their works.

Though if you like, you an replace "Pulling a Jordan" with Author Existence Failure, but that will entail you loosing all track of time :P

I fear I may be falling prey to Poe's Law here, but given your quote of choice from your sig, I don't think I am and you're actually serious.

Anyways, the reason you believe "God" is the simplest answer to the origin of life, the one meant to be assumed under Occam's Razor, your idea that evolution is a "web of lies" that scientists "believe in" because "otherwise their whole career is demolished" and that scientists need "faith", all of that is simply due to one factor: your own ignorance of science in its entirety.

Honestly, I could spend hours explaining to you all the myriad ways you fail Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Psychology, Logic and Philosophy in a single post, but without the knowledge that comes with a formal education in sciences, chances are you won't get it and will instantly fall back upon your "no! God did it!" security blanket so I'd rather not waste my time. Really, study and you'll understand the world you live in far better than you currently do.

Bear in mind, that sort of intrusive product placement is nothing new; it was done in early radio as well as television. George Burns and Gracie Allen would be having some conversation when a neighbor would wander by and start telling them excitedly about how much whiter her husband's shirts came out since she started using new Spud! laundry detergent or whatever.

Then of course there's the infamous Flintstones cigarette ad...

Bear in mind, that sort of intrusive product placement is nothing new; it was done in early radio as well as television. George Burns and Gracie Allen would be having some conversation when a neighbor would wander by and start telling them excitedly about how much whiter her husband's shirts came out since she started using new Spud! laundry detergent or whatever.

Then of course there's the infamous Flintstones cigarette ad...

I'm going to break a cardinal rule of slashdot here...

Are you a mathematician?

That there's a duplicate Earth on the exact opposite side of the Sun!

OK, just for the fun of it: what would be the most efficient method to check this hypothesis?

By checking how its gravity would effect other planets in the same star system. For background: Counter-Earth on Wikipedia, Lagrangian point L3 on Wikipedia, and Counter-Earth on TV Tropes. Executive summary: We don't have one, and we know this because if we did, we'd be able to detect its pull. Furthermore, such an orbit would be unstable.

Network decay is an ugly thing.

Never, ever link to that site.

A cable TV channel is a huge initial investment, and requires millions of dollars just to keep running. Nobody wants to declare failure - thousands of jobs, stock value, and reputation are at stake - so appealing to a long-term, well-entrenched market of potential viewers has to be done. If that involves synergistic clusterfuckery with content that doesn't belong on the channel according to its initial vision, there's not much to prevent people from blurring the lines in the name of saving the network. Unfortunately, with time that can go from "a well-intentioned but ultimately dubious patch" to flat-out network decay, where very little of the original material or guiding vision of the station remains. As a famous b-movie actress once said, "No one sets out to do bad work."

And Syfy's still better off than TLC, which has dropped any meaning associated with those three letters and shows endless permutations of freak show reality TV gawkery. Network decay is an ugly thing.

Oooh you better be careful there, some Anonymous fan will come whining about how Anonymous is not a group but its a concept or something along those lines ;)

"Anonymous" is the set of users of the set of Web sites known as "image boards". Since any two members of Anynymous can't be combined to form a third member, or in general any entity, Anonymous is not a group. Q.E.D.

What Anonymous is, is a bunch of nerds with unwarranted self-importance. But then again, they provide entertainment and drama on the Internet, so who cares :).

It's called a Perspective Flip, and that page has most of the examples in this thread as well as a few others. Warning, though: TVTropes can ruin your life.

True, but indie game devs usually do not have the man power to develop in C++

My experience differs. And even you disbelieve that it does, please replace "C++" in my comment with "any language not known to compile to IL that 1. is verifiably type-safe and 2. doesn't use Reflection.Emit". One situation is that someone has an existing game in an "unsafe" language working on one platform and wants to port it to 360. Or that a scripting language engine works on the DLR but the 360 doesn't support the DLR because the 360 lacks Reflection.Emit (source). Just as your team has skilled F# coders, my team has skilled Python coders, but IronPython uses facilities that aren't present on the 360.

And even beyond programming language barriers, the Xbox Live Indie Games review policy bans any written or spoken text in a constructed language. This would appear to ban the plot device of a community that speaks a foreign language until you get a plot coupon representing having learned that language, after which the translation convention sets in and you begin to see or hear that foreign language as English or whatever other language you're playing the game in.

A one-pass encode at an average of 10Mbps

When I encode slide shows, home movies, playthroughs, and parodies that I upload to YouTube, I don't use the "average bit rate" setting; instead, I use the "target quantizer" setting. Quantizer roughly controls the amount of noise introduced into the signal after block transforms. With more correlation between frames, P- and B-frames at the same quantizer level will have smaller differences and thus take fewer bits assuming the same level of noise. So your example of 90 minutes of talking heads followed by 10 minutes of shit blowing up would produce fewer bits per frame for the 90 minutes than for the ten minutes, with an overall shape of the bitrate over time similar to that of a 2-pass encode. I've watched enough bytes per frame graphs in VirtualDub's encoder status window for this to be abundantly clear.

Don't Explain The Joke

Assuming that you're not pretending to misunderstand, the concept of Squick fits the bill nicely. There, you've had your education. Other people see things differently and you need to tolerate their viewpoints, because they're just as valid as yours.

The "squick" link just says it's "a negative emotional response, more specifically a disturbed or disgusted one". We knew that was the response. My question is to why it was felt. And I never said someone else couldn't see things as differently - that's entirely your own invention. What I have asked is why someone should have a "disturbed or disgusted" reaction (if that is what it is), to a naked man. I have no such reaction so I'm curious as to where such a reaction should come from in some people.

Then again, if it starts reading tvtropes, we will have no trouble from it for a couple of years.

Assuming that you're not pretending to misunderstand, the concept of Squick fits the bill nicely. There, you've had your education. Other people see things differently and you need to tolerate their viewpoints, because they're just as valid as yours.

I tend to get really annoyed when animated movies use the same old big names you'd see in regular movies.

I'm familiar with that trend.

Especially when they go ahead and make the character look kind of like the actor.

An ink suit actor, in other words.

Why not just make it live action in the first place, then?

There are plenty of reasons to animate: child characters, non-human characters, zany violence, extensive violence, magic, etc. might be cheaper to do with animation than with traditional live-action special effects. And by the time you've animated 10% of the movie, you may already have the resources to do the other 90%, even if only so that the art styles don't obviously clash.