Domain: tvtropes.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to tvtropes.org.
Comments · 1,079
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Re:Terminals in the 1950s?
Coding, like all forms of creative writing, is best done on tools and methods tailored to them. The terminal, or electronic typewriter, is an image of the best physical device we have created to do that so far, the mechanical typewriter. Second only to pencil/pen and paper it enables those with the messiest of hand writing to become published authors.
Thanks to Sturgeon's Law the only thing that greatly increasing the number of coders does is increase the number of mediocre ones. Good ones are still going to be expensive and rare.
Fortunately there is not that much of a market for the computer version of Romance novels. Only so many companies can ripoff programs and games and still profit.
Software valuable enough to sell is often valuable enough to have Free/Open Source clones. And both require skills of laborers who charge quite a lot for this effort - either in salary or in commitment of "Intellectual Property" back. The artists and writers got screwed buy business a long time ago. Everyone can see this and aren't fooled. Trying to reduce the cost of the labor pool by increasing the number of mediocre programmers will only work to a certain point and not for successful projects.
To make it obvious, let's re-write the CEO's messsage a little:
"Instead of attempting to lure literate teachers away from Libraries, we need to revolutionize the way book-writing is done. Rather than fit the person to the tool, let's fit the tool to the person. Pop literature can help us get there, offering a gloriously diverse array of tools to match our gloriously diverse species. It's only a matter of time before the process of writing books itself is transformed, from one that requires a mastery of syntax -- the precise stringing of sentences needed to tell a story -- to the mastery of logic. Logic is the essence of plot creation, and the second step after mastering syntax.'
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Re: I'm glad Slashdot posted this
Or we are the aliens from the future.
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Re:Men's interests might be more narrow
I think men self constrain their interests based on "cultural expectations and bias"
Suppose we have a man who likes the Gilmore Girls, do you think he's going to mention that to his buddies? No, because he's afraid they'll call him "pussywhipped". Or say things like "are you turning into a girl on us bro, here, have another brewski" And a lot of that social censure against anything that isn't "knuckle dragging manly" is derived, to a certain extent, from misogyny and homophobia. Basically, and in "man speak"
"Fags are like women so anything that women like will make you a fag if men like it."
And another part of that social censure is artificially created by madison avenue to sell more beer, unhealthy food and oversized gas guzzling vehicles to men. Think about it, american media and advertisers go out of their way to imply that "high culture" like literature, theatre, opera, classical music, and ballet are for women and gay people.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...
When it wasn't that long ago that MEN took pride in supporting and attending such things. And in fact they're almost all created by MEN in the first place!
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Again, Car sharing
Are you also saying tht unattended places are immune from people bustung or messing them up? Is this going to be different from other unattended places?
All of your self driving perfection is ignoring the fact that ATM's get held up - and they have cameras, public restrooms have issues. Somehow some way this taxicab that won't have money is somehow immune.
On the other hand, fully unattended car-sharing DOES ALREADY EXIST OUT-THERE (and that's just the few with which I have personnal experience), and none of them have reported the chronical "people-taking-a-dump-in-cars" problems that you are afraid of, despite being as unattended as ATMs or public toilets.
I'm not throwing imaginary technical solutions at you. I'm speaking how things are currently happening out there on the street.Yes it is going to be different from unattended places and - in the case of carsharing - is arleady different today.
The main difference is that while both your examples (ATMs, public toilets) and cars (car-sharing, self driving autonomous vehicles) are 100% unattended,
the former are percieved more or less as anonymous (though in practice some of your exemple do have cameras, as you mention, but that still requires authorities to track down the culprit - which they won't have the resource to do systematically, only in case of a big heist), whereas as the later are definitely not simply due to the fact how these service work (either today for car-sharing or potentially in the future for self-driving cars).As you're more or less anonymous in a public rest-room, or in front of an ATM (to which you haven't log-in already with your card), the GIFT comes into play (and this is nothing new to the internet, the concept of perceived anonymity possibly leading to anti-social behaviours has been debating since antiquity). The sensation that vandals have that: they aren't seen, won't be caught, and other will discover their deeds only to late - leads the vandals to feel impunity and try to do (litteral or metaphorical) shit.
Shared cars (and very likely future autonomous variants of it), by the very way which the service works, require you to log-in before being able to access the cars (They need to know who accessed which car when in order to correctly bill). You're not imagining yourself as an anonymous, uncatchable vandal. The person taking a dump in the car is clearly user John Doe, user-id #123456, billing info [blabla] - because he needed to unlock the door before accessing this substitue toilet, and he's required to provide that info to do the unlock. When the next user discovers the dump, billing you for the cleaning is absolutely trivial (just a couple extra line of code in the whole booking/renting/billing platform).
I'm not (only) speaking about a technical solution that will eventually need to be implemented.
I'm mostly pointing out that the current setup of car-sharing is a good enough psychological deterrent against poop-vandalism of cars. Not because of magic pixie dust, but simply by virtue of lacking the necessary "I won't get caught" sensation that is necessary to spark the antisocial incar-dump-taking behaviour.Imagine a world were, before getting access to a public toilet, we need to first swipe both your driver's license and credit card to open a secure door.
Do you really think that you'll see as much vandalism as currently ?
That's how car-sharing work (and very likely future autonomous car will work) - because the whole system need it for administrative purpose.My point, lost in this parade of people telling me I am wrong abot the whole thing,
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Re:Wow, sure
2) Mars is a dead rock. You can't "settle" a radiation-blasted Hell.
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Re:Delusion of "transgender"
a gay man is XY, has male body parts, and self-identifies as male
Ah, so the chromosomes and the body parts do play their part. Very good... Unfortunately, you chose to add the "self-identification" part into it too — despite my warning against it.
Because, if — as logical consistency demands — we take your approach to other cases of delusion, we'll have to agree, that this White woman is not White, and this human is not human. They both do not identify as what they appear, and thus — by your definition — are not that... (Not to mention the various other sufferers, who similarly "self-identify as" Napoleon Bonaparte and similar figures.)
Having thus shown your approach as self-inconsistent, I don't even need to creatively redefine, what "winning an argument" means — nor claim to identify as victor in this little debate of ours. I simply am. Remember to logout.
I did invent it.
Thank you for this admission. But we are still conversing in English and reinventing terms to mean something new is not acceptable.
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That's not debunking.
In fact, they confirm that they ARE collecting data.
While literally pulling a TV trope with that "we do not collect the data...such as throttle position, oil temp, and coolant temp" bit.Instead, data gets collected "only when it enhances driver safety or enables an important user experience, such as using GPS for mapping".
So basically, data gets collected only all the time. -
Hey, no big deal..
Scientists Discover How to Turn Off Light Bulbs, Coffee Makers, Sun
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw... (sort of) -
Re:Are Evangelicals dangerous?
biological basis for transgenderism
I don't know, what such "biological basis" can possibly mean.
There is no potential whatsoever for my body to turn into a zebra.
What a bigoted thing to say! Seriously, a few more revolutions in science, and it might become possible — but that's irrelevant. Any male body is much closer to Napoleon's, than it is to a female body — yet, people claiming to be Napoleons are usually locked up...
The "crazy" starts with the very rejection of who you actually are and continues into demanding to be made into and/or treated as something else. In that sense, my analogy is perfectly valid. I apologize for the term "crazy", but the earlier-used "confused" certainly applies.
If religious beliefs manifest themselves in how a person conducts his or her own life, that's completely fine. But if the beliefs are pushed onto others via public policy [...]
I contend, that "his own life" and "pushed onto others" are inseparable, if formulating and/or executing public policy is the person's very job.
And it is just that for most office-holders, which is why I accused you of wishing to ban the religious from public office earlier.
BTW, you are yet to explain, why you single out Evangelicals so fervently? Abortions are very illegal in Catholic Ireland and Mexico, for example, and don't even get me started on "Pride" parades in Muslim Jakarta and Tehran, or even in Hinduist Delhi.
Likewise, your claim of facing high risk visiting a wrong bathroom because of Evangelicals remains unsubstantiated.
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Re:Why is this engine significant?
So it was a 3D shooter version of a "Bullet Hell" 2D shooter game?
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Re:I don't have a problem with...I had to look up the meaning of the phrase you used: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ZergRush
Defeating a strong opponent with a very large number of disposable combatants.
I'd say that if any of the combatants were disposable it was those two, not a bunch of cops trying to stop the killing of innocent people.
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Re:Paranoids will freak at this
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Re:Penny's horrible hair...
I wouldn't be surprised if part of her change in appearance part of a coping mechanism of Ms. Cuoco's subsequent to her separation and pending divorce.
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Re:we used to not use BAC
I will grant that your reading comprehension is shockingly below average, but if you were as stupid as you say you are, you wouldn't be able to communicate it so directly. Show, don't tell.
Your only refuge would have been satire, but when satire lacks humor or insight, the hopeful smiles turn to disappointed sighs. That's not even good craft. C'mon, man!
Here's how I would fix your post, to make it better. I am not an expert writer by any stretch of the imagination; I merely assert that I am your better. So learn:
And yet I had 100 people blow
.14 and 101 of them passed the field sobriety tests, so let's stop pretending you have any clue what you're talking about. Since we all know that everyone is identical, that means you're lying if you say your reactions are noticeably substandard at 0.04%.
And even if you were slower-than-sober at that point, so what? You know how everyone is always saying the roads never have any surprises ("Another day, another complete lack of people-who-don't-give-a-fuck-about-their-own-lives darting into the street on that charming block that has both a methadone clinic and healthcare-for-the-homeless clinic(*)") and no other drivers are bad ("I just want to say, yet again, nobody drifted into my lane why they were on their phone. Why do I even still bother to pay attention to all the other cars? Everyone is so well-behaved!")? That lack of there ever being any hazards is why slow reactions don't matter, you lying moron.The reality is, we have stupid legislators because of people like you, who explicitly said they would not enact a BAC limit based on their personal experience due to the fact that they know different people have different performance at different BAC, and if I had paid attention to what I was ranting at, I would have at least lampshaded (**) that fact.
Don't you see how that would have been a better way to say the exact same shit-for-brain nonsense that you said? This isn't even fancy and I'm sure you could do just as well, if you tried. But you didn't. So the question is: dude, what went wrong?
(*) This is a real place on my commute to work every day. It's awesome but in my fantasy, that same magic stretch of street would also have a 1970s style porn theater, a plasma donation center, a casino, and a sausage factory with a secret tunnel to a nearby funeral parlor. "Hey, why is the sausage factory always receiving shipments of sandbags? Their sausages don't taste like sand at all."
(**) tvtropes link included out of spite. I hope I just made your life shorter.
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Re:Vigilantees not the best justicae system?
It gets funny when you realize that vigilantes are what appears when the government is not doing its job. In this case, the government is apparently not seeing to it that Donald Trump is censored, so these good citizens are stepping up and doing it themselves. Hurrah to them...oh...wait a minute
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Re:We should not get excited about private charity
Private charities can look at the needs and allocate their resources accordingly. Government can't do that, it's going to be a political fight over pork barrel spending. Moreover, we the people should be able to goddamn well decide where we want to spend our own goddamned money without any goddamn government telling us it would be a better idea to give our money to them instead. In a culture of confiscation like you advocate, people like Gates and Zuckerberg would have never founded their companies in the first place and society would be mired in continuous poverty.
You know you've gone off the edge politically when you're arguing against charity. Seriously, what the fuck? You need to have a Heel Realization sooner rather than later.
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Re:English
And the elite all speak with British accents, so you know they're elite.
A British accent is usually a sure sign that they are evil too. That and well groomed beards, favoured by bad guys everywhere. I guess they need something to stroke, and cats are never around when you need them.
I do not mind the language and accent thing so much given the alternative of listening to them speak in an artificial language or at best a strong accent which has no contextual meaning. In historic war movies, I prefer the Germans to speak English with a German accent instead of reading subtitles; it gets the point across so I can watch the movie without distraction.
As far as facial hair or the lack thereof if they are exploiting the Bald of Evil, it can serve the same purpose as having the score turn unsettling when the character is seen; it is an additional communications channel with the audience. The movie Aliens did this particularly well with the company boardroom scene; the executive's clothing immediately identified them as "suits", a well known stereotype, to the audience.
In "A Knight's Tale" we see spectators watching a jousting competition and the whole event resembles a modern football or soccer game. Is that historically accurate? Not a chance. But it gets the point across to the audience with a context that they can easily understand.
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Re:Road Signs
Highly apropos. For the uninitiated, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...
The campaign's byline should instead be "virtual racism, real glory" because that's what it's going to look like for the trolls. -
Re: Increase productivity??
He's admitting to his own judgment becoming similarly impaired, at which point the (other) intoxicated people seem less annoying.
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Re:Scale and Flotsam
While I agree that Tauriel was a Romantic Plot Tumor, I can live with that; she adds a few minutes to the movie at worst.
No, the worst offenders were those long, drawn-out set pieces, like the chase scenes such as the one through the Goblin Kingdom in the first movie, or that muddled mess at the end of the third movie. That's just Jackson being self-indulgent, cutting that crap would have brought the movies down to two, and some judicious editing might have brought the whole down to only one movie.
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Re:We're at "holistic"
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Re:Which is it?
Unbeatable, or hard to match?
Also keep in mind that most of them are produced by a single untalented person. The quality of tools has created even more crutches for those who lack basic skills to pollute the field with their attempt at being "innovative" (look at what mental handicaps one must have toward programming to consider a language like, for instance, Inform 7).
This is true. Moreover, I'll see your "90% of these games are crap" and raise you a "90% of video games (including the AAA titles) are crap" and even go so far as to say "90% of everything is crap." People have been noting and complaining about Sturgeon's Law since the beginnings of Science Fiction (and probably long before that).
I'll also say that I see no problem with a good fiction writer who has no idea any "basic skills" in programming. They should know narrative pacing, evocative language, dynamic characterization, compelling plots, and other literary tools. I would value a good writer who could program just as much as a kernel programmer who knew about scenes and sequels; they are a more well-rounded person who is that much interesting, but those cross-skills are not really useful for their work in any substantial sense.
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Re:Too bad...
SOME flexibility on "tripe" nonsense
The GP used the word "trope" intentionally. -
Re:So, the bullies win
That picture being "these things are bad, and you should feel bad for playing them".
That's your interpretation, not hers.
Let's examine the commonly used "man's wife gets killed, the adventure is his roaring rampage of revenge" sometimes called the:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...Those are excessively used, so when she says it is overused, she's saying "come up with something better and more imaginative rather than using this one too much"
If someone starts using social justice weasel words like "patriarchy", "privilege", "toxic masculinity", and "objectifying women",
Those aren't weasel words, those are actual things. They exist.
it's a safe bet that they're trying to shame you for liking what you like,
Maybe a little bit of shame might be a good thing? Maybe YOU can complain to developers who keep using the same tropes over and over again.
But, if the speaker is someone who is constantly throwing social justice terms at you as an "educational" device, I'm really sorry, but it doesn't matter how disingenuously apologetic they are about it, they're still trying to indoctrinate you.
It's the 21st century, you should know about those so-called "social justice terms" already. Really, you should know about them already She's not trying to indoctrinate you, just tell you about things you should have realized or known already.
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Re:So, the bullies win
That picture being "these things are bad, and you should feel bad for playing them".
That's your interpretation, not hers.
Let's examine the commonly used "man's wife gets killed, the adventure is his roaring rampage of revenge" sometimes called the:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...Those are excessively used, so when she says it is overused, she's saying "come up with something better and more imaginative rather than using this one too much"
If someone starts using social justice weasel words like "patriarchy", "privilege", "toxic masculinity", and "objectifying women",
Those aren't weasel words, those are actual things. They exist.
it's a safe bet that they're trying to shame you for liking what you like,
Maybe a little bit of shame might be a good thing? Maybe YOU can complain to developers who keep using the same tropes over and over again.
But, if the speaker is someone who is constantly throwing social justice terms at you as an "educational" device, I'm really sorry, but it doesn't matter how disingenuously apologetic they are about it, they're still trying to indoctrinate you.
It's the 21st century, you should know about those so-called "social justice terms" already. Really, you should know about them already She's not trying to indoctrinate you, just tell you about things you should have realized or known already.
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Re:Article summary
Only if I can also have Princess Ardala (Pamela Hensley) in those skimpy sparkly outfits in glorious HD.
How was I to know back then that so much of her attractiveness was due to being tsundere.
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Re:Sigh
i think you are refering to:"You can ask an audience to believe the impossible, but not the improbable." from http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief
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Re:Vantablack anyone?
Here's a picture of some vantablack applied on top of aluminum foil. It really looks like something out of those Wiley Coyote cartoons with "portable holes".
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Re:nonsense
- our detection technologies, while highly advanced from where they were, are still astonishingly rudimentary, largely only by deduction (not direct observation
Direct exoplanet imaging is a thing.
Speaking of arrogance: so many bad assumptions, so many wrong numbers. Where to start...
- our universe is about 13.8 billion years old, with stellar formation around 1 billion years
...call it 2 billion, just to be conservative.Age is good, but that stellar formation number is a clear PIDOMA. (Asspull is apparently a different thing.)
WMAP estimated the age of the universe to be 13.772 billion with an uncertainty of 59 millions years. Other projects (Plank) put it at closer to 14 billion. Stellar formation started very soon - blue supergiants starlight is the best match for what caused re-ionization only 150 million to 1 billion years after the big bang.
Early stars also fit the model for relative atom abundance in the pre-galaxy age. Since the stars already had to exist to start re-ionizing it and blue giants live very short lives it is reasonable to use the early start verses later start. And their lives are really short: only 10s of millions of years to die. And their supernovas produce lots of nice heavy nuclei (dust in Astronomer terms.) These are stars are basically the diesel engines of space, popping up and off to fart polluting dust into the local gas. And early in the Universe blue super giants continue to appear in distant galaxy images. They are heavily over-represented after galaxies started to form.
- If stars were forming at 2 bn yrs, and our system is about 6bn yrs, that means there could have been planetary formation and systems like ours developing for 5 BILLION years before today.
So we know stars were forming at up to 150m years. The first deaths to provide dust to make planets as soon 10m years later with current stellar evolutionary models. So planets could start forming as little as 160m years. Regardless of the frequency of Solar-type Systems the upper bound is more like 13 billion years. Not good for being off by 500%.
- Since our system is an entirely average sun, in an entirely average stellar neighborhood, it's probable that our experience is entirely typical.
Planetary systems like our look weird now but we think that is because of selection bias as mentioned.
If you mean with life then it's going to be very hard to model that due to our current lack of data. But one fact is certain: having lots of giant blue stars in a star burst galaxy or early in the Universe is not kind to complex organic molecules making up life like ours (the only kind we know.) Just being within two light years of a supernova will kill you from the neutrino radiation let alone the wave of photons that hit later. It's also not healthy for the dust cloud around a proto-star. It is likely that frequently dying stars will dampen planetary formation in the early Universe.
To deduce then that only 8% of potential planets have formed is nonsense.
15 billion compared to 100 billion to 1,000 billion years? Unless you think 15 is a large fraction 100, we are still in the early Universe. I cannot say how robust 8% is in the calculation without running it myself. But I suspect it is a high estimate just from increased galaxy collisions spawning waves of stars and disturbing galactic gas clouds.
The Greening Galaxy Theory uses the same logic as the article from a different direction and comes to the same conclusion
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Re:the English word is nebulous
"art" could mean just about anything in English, so yes video games can be art.
Other languages are different. For example in Korean, art means painting/drawing/sculpture. Music is not art, it's music. So for Koreans, video games are not art.
That is completely correct but entirely useless .
Clearly, you are a mathematician.
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Re:Silly story...
Movie makers are actually experts in how to make a bomb look like a bomb
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Re:Rupert Murdoch
Nat Geo is listed at "slipped" on TV Tropes's excellent Network Decay page. "The channel still shows programming related to its original concept, although it is significantly showing programming not related to their genre in some way."
"The National Geographic Society's website features the slogan "Inspiring People to Care About the Planet"; how exactly they're accomplishing this with The Dog Whisperer, Locked Up Abroad, Is It Real? and shows about bounty hunters is left as an exercise for the viewer. It doesn't help that Locked Up Abroad is a case of both tourists doing things that border on moronic (hence why the end up as in the title) and portraying countries that aren't Anglo-American as virtual hellholes."
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Re:Great to know that nobody can stand in the way.
Are you kidding? It'll work out great! Think of the cuddling potential! Okay, okay, sometimes it might be a bit awkward...
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Re:So, they invented...
... chips with integrated plastic explosives? As in, standard Mission Impossible/Inspector Gadget type stuff. If there was actually a market for such devices in the real world, wouldn't it have already been fulfilled by now?
There actually is a market for such devices in the real world. Anti-tamper implementations are required by DoD for the protection of "Critical Technologies" and "Critical Program Information" in order to prevent (well, really to make it as hard/expensive/time-consuming as practicable) an adversary from reverse-engineer a weapons system so it can be copied or countered. Implementations are invariably classified Secret.
Anti-tamper approaches that involve hardware can range from placing crucial software code in FPGAs to physically destroying crucial components through explosions or large jolts of electricity. "What we will do is destroy the microcircuit before they get to the algorithms" says Tarantine of White Electronic Designs.
"It can be a physical destruct with protective coating; it can be a serpentine mesh where they actually break the current going to the mesh; it could be a diode that triggers on X-ray, so X-raying the device causes an event to happen. I can have a diode that will count the radiation and once it reaches a certain level may use a pyrotechnic event to blow the chip up." (http://www.militaryaerospace.com/articles/2010/04/anti-tamper-technologies-seek-to-keep-critical-military-systems-data-in-the-right-hands.html)
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So, they invented...
... chips with integrated plastic explosives? As in, standard Mission Impossible/Inspector Gadget type stuff. If there was actually a market for such devices in the real world, wouldn't it have already been fulfilled by now?
Or... are we just now learning about this, because certain "spy-craft" methods have recently been declassified, or something of that nature? Hmmmmmm.....
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Re:An idea.
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Re:Throwing a puppy in front of the car
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Re:Doing the math...
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Re:Factions and their real world representations
Star Trek practically invented Planet of Hats. Each race encountered is distilled down to a base stereotype. Even the later series were largely falling in to this.
Also your post would have been possible to read if you had used line breaks.
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Re:Carmack said...
What I mean is that this variation is all different in the same way. If you've ever spent time flying around the Elite Dangerous universe, you'll find that once you've seen one system, you're more or less seen them all.
But this has more to do with current state of procedural generators rather than the concept of general. Try Dwarf Fortress, and you do get extremely varied environments to get your dwarfs killed in.
Only artists and animators are able to genuinely surprise you.
That is untrue. Any game with sufficiently complex mechanics will create surprising situations, through glitching if nothing else.
What humans can currently do that computers can't is recognize and combine tropes, or generic thematic elements, and adapt them to current situation. However, there is no known reason why an algorithm couldn't do so too.
An intermediate step might be to move the gameworld over from curent scripted and otherwise static model to a strategic simulation. Imagine, for example, an open-world game where the computer was playing a game of Civilization in the background and a procedural generator was responsible for rendering the results - city growth, roads, marching armies, etc - in the player-explorable environment, along with quests to affect the game either way (for example, the player could sneak into a besieged city to open the gates, or assassinate the army's general). Space Rangers does something like this: the missions you do affect how the game world develops, the war goes on in the background, and as you get stronger you become more and more important player in it.
The whole reason everyone and their dog is investing in physics engines is precisely that they can procedurally generate behaviour as it's needed, thus freeing the artist from having to guess everything the player might do (which is impossible). Procedurally generating animation is currently under development - beyond current ragdoll physics, that is - and then, of course, there's games like Victoria which are about generating alternate world histories. Then there's the ancient Neverwinter Nights Aurora toolset where the designer laid down rooms and procedural generator filled them with semi-random details.
The future of gaming is procedural generation, both because automation is the only way to keep costs under control and because the end result is superior. That doesn't mean those games won't require artists, it simply means those artists will be doing high-level design of thematic elements and interacting systems rather than hand-painting every pixel and modeling every room.
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List of things that have used it as a catchphrase
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...
(To be fair, it's a trope about the topic, not the specific phrase, so it encompasses a number of similar phrases. But do a search of that page on that exact phrase, you'll find a number of hits, not only Columbo.)
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Re:Places where everything wants to kill youI normally dislike this meme, but:
"Amazon rainforest, Australia, Middle East, Somalia, Baltimore"
Fixed that for you.
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Turking it out
In recent scifi I think this is classed as "turk" work, a unfortunate term based on the scam of the Mechanical Turk, which Amazon also adopted for one of their service offerings.
This term is used in at least the Metatropolis story anthologies by multiple authors (John Scalzi editing) and there's development on the theme in the plot of some stories (Detroit) so I don't want to give too many details.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/...
There's some parallel with "runners" from various cyberpunk scifi and gaming, too: Work for money with little formal relationship with the source of the contracts ("Mr Johnson") and a very simple professional code of ethics.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...
http://shadowrun.wikia.com/wik...Doomo chums!
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Seen this before.
The 'Christian version' is a pretty common concept.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...
It'll fail, I expect, for the same reason that most social networks fail: They depend on users to draw users, so it's very hard to get them established. For every Facebook, there are thousand Orkuts.
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Re: FP!
Electric motors are not like ICEs. Electric motors generate peak torque at stall (that's 0 rpm in case you didn't know).
According to Wolfram Alpha, the formula for torque you'd use if you've got rpm is t=Ia, with a being rpm converted to rad/s. 0rpm=0rad/s.
At 0rpm, for all possible values of I, torque will be 0Nm (Newton-meters).
So, according to what you just said, the peak torque of an electric motor is 0Nm.
I've got an offended gearhead across the room who is trying to figure out what you might mean, and confirmed when I asked: offer an electric engine that, when compared to an internal combustion engine of similar cost (including cost to run), comes out better in its output stats and in energy efficiency..and gearheads will want it, especially if it's coming out better.
I am told that this is safe to say overall about any kind of engine when it comes to gearheads--it could be a magic box that runs on nonsensoleum and they won't care if it works better and they can fix it.
This isn't a complaint, it's just simple facts: Most of us want a car with sufficient range and pickup, and the best car we can get for our money. (And no, renting when I want a longer range isn't feasible. My experience with rental cars is that this depends on if they've got a car, and the fleet is a lovely selection of poor handling. Though there is a dealership locally that'll rent me any Chevy...)
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Re:Broken Screens Ahoy
Cellphones need a CPU meter.
Android already has in the Developer Options. However, it's too verbose for real users. Face it, lots of mainstream sites invite Joe Blows out there to use developer mode without being developers... you'd think Android would give you something like a [battery] bar meter instead of a handle-name dump that spills over with writing eclipsing your screen and is quite distracting until summarily turned off. And before you justify the 'developer mode' moniker as expected to be "just that" here's Exhibit A 'Process Stats' has a non-mandatory description that it's "*Geeky* stats about running processes". This is little more than a Android's pre-developer-mode task manager which that was originally available to all, and is ONE MORE REASON why a curious Joe Blow power user would be poking around looking for Google-abducted features
Back on topic: speaking of force, "Show touch data" has a PRS indicator next to screen coords that react to my how hard my "Fource touch" is. I'm not sure why Apple's is news now that I see this story. Without reading the article I'll guess App devs (at least on iOS) don't really expect or use this data. To expand on what some other commenters said earlier, I can see Morgan's Law at moving UX developers to tear us a new one... they are already hard at work hiding everything behind nonsense icons, arrows and long-press menus, and we have the IE7, Google Chrome/Android and Office Ribbon to thank for that. GUIs nowadays feel like you're playing a pesky point-and-click Room Escape game where each wrong button press likely hides a death trap, or at least your productivity dies in an unnecessary learning curve. Tomorrow's GUIs might just force us to add "press everywhere again, but hard" doubling the count of things we must to unlock hidden options.
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Re:Coming to a neck near you ...
Surely the more obvious reference is the Hitman series? Though it's hardly an original trope
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Re:Who are the fascists??
If you believe anything Hitler said, because he said it, you're almost certainly wrong.
Hm. That's veering into Hitler Ate Sugar territory. Just because Hitler was a bad man doesn't mean every word out of his mouth was a lie. And in this case, I think tsotha is right - "National Socialism" is a pretty good technical description of "Fascism".
Bear in mind that the name "Fascism" comes from the symbol of the fasces - a bundle of sticks bound together. The message is: "Individually we are weak, but together we are strong." Fascism is, therefore, essentially a collectivist ideology - the nation becomes strong through joining together. And Hitler was very much all about suppressing the freedom of the individual in order to strengthen the nation.
The difference between National Socialism and conventional ("International"?) socialism is not the structure, it's the goals - fascists collectivise in order to be strong, socialists collectivise in order to help the weak. But to somebody who thinks about politics as essentially a question of the relationship between the individual and the state, there's very little difference between the two forms.
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Re:Of course it bombed
Worse, it has a 25 year old woman playing a kid as the main actor. I don't understand why Hollywood won't cast teenagers to play teenagers.
A number of reasons, child labor laws being one of them.
It's why twins are so popular in sitcoms. You can get two actors to convincingly play a young character while not exceeding the number of hours you're allowed to shoot with a young actor.There are a lot of other reasons as well, and TV Tropes's Dawson Casting
gives a pretty good breakdown of why this happens.
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How to ALMOST die on Mars (multiple times)
The Martian, by Andrew Weir.