I think security guards should be ready to be assertive and aggressive in securing a portal. If you're one of two guards and you've been given a post at two propped-open double doors, or any other very wide entryway, you should tell the boss to gather you up some form of corraling and queueing the incomers or else a way to partially block the entry, with a nice covered table perhaps.
Also, security guards should sign to responsibility for losses or threats incurred due to someone slipping past.
Wow, wtf, for real, why doesn't the U.S. *GOVERNMENT*, of all fucking people, places, or things, have a ready supply of information about how to fucking use your computer the real way?
I like your frame of mind. Until there's a page JUST like what you're describing, my opinion of U.S. government employees and officials as just being undereducated slackers who get elected largely because they felt like running for office and knew how to lie and/or look really pretty... now I'm going to see them (and mention to them that I see them) as people with Bill Gate's hardened cock wedged firmly into their asshole, pumping and thrusting for every dollar they get from constituents to support their re-election.
This sounds like a cross between Kevin Mitnick's "The Art of Deception" and Malcolm Gladwell's ("The Tipping Point") "The Outliers". Probably should take an interest in any of these if you take an interest in any of them.
"The red, vain soul with a high degree of vertical challenge ever so slowly slipped out of sight past the horizon, less like a setting Sun than a discovered pervert shying away from sight with the slow shuffle that only stars can make look graceful in bathrobes, his red."
With the atmospheric pressure so high, won't the H end up forming with hydroxide to make water again (or water to make hydronium), and won't the oxygen ions just get absorbed into the water?
In any case, we're building the cable out of what? If we don't mine it extraterrestrially, how big of a hicky is this project going to leave on the surface of the earth somewhere? How much is it going to cost to move all the Bagger 288 style megamachines out to that location to perform the work in a timely manner? The material to build several new ones at the site can't be spared. How much will it cost to pay off all the industrialists whose jobs depend on these materials being ready to be made into stuff people find useful in a more marginal and personal fashion? Or do we expect them all to go out of work while one company completes the cable project? Or do we expect to go global-socialist, requisition the materials in the name of the Fatherworld, and give each crying birdchick company one wormy thread of the cable to manufacture and make them responsible for ensuring it twines well with all of the other threads?
I mean really. When you get into massive projects that will require resources and cooperation on a global scale, you're already talking about Mission Impossible.
For starters, nice dirigibles you got there, asshole: ping! ping! ping! Down comes El Cable Monumento!
Or how about them near orbitals lying in wait in their fancy weather baloons, fighting turbulence sickness and hoping they don't end up way off course by the time the damn cable thing floats in their general direction because they only brought up so much oxygen and pressurizing gases? Slim pickings for any pirate with a long-range rifle and an electronically synchronized pair of drones to ease the payload back to earth in a specific location.
Or how about all that material! Just the fibers of the cable could be worth something to people, if it's such an exotic material. Hand me the nanosaw and the Francium welder! Baby needs a new pair of shoes!
How about this: I go up there, to the moon, I shoot every body up there except the ones I want to make babies with, and then I pull the ladder up behind me, throw you a finger, and start up mah moon base, and shoot down everybody who dares to even pretend they're on a trajectory to the moon from anywhere? What are you going to do, expend the REST of the resources on Earth in a strange and uniquely human bid for reclamation of the Moon? For who? Nobody's going to like you, because you're going to leave everybody poor for the rest of all time. You're going to reduce humanity to living in quonset huts and eating their own boogers as a spice on their kelp because you believe everybody should have a right to the moon, and I won the big game of King of the Hill.
Anyways, human endeavours of this sort are pathetic to even read about.
The book by that former NASA scientist, called "Moonquake", was a humongous eye-opener for me, in terms of several things:
1. is the moon even plausible as a place to stay for very long and retain one's health while keeping any semblance of normal, uninterrupted operations? -- of course, if you can excavate your entire basement with radio controlled Tonka trucks, maybe anything's possible
2. whether or not NASA is capable of doing anything beyond putting a man on the moon. they weren't capable of carrying out the shuttle mission and they don't seem interested in doing anything else besides putting a man on Mars, which we know is going to be inflated beyond any nation's ability to expend.
Anyways. Aren't asteroids more valuable than moon-rock? why aren't we interested in robotically mining asteroids? wtf?
Because. Unless "hack into the ISS" involved "prep and advance a compatriot hacker into the ranks of a national space agency and get them accepted into and lodged in the ISS", the "person on the moon" wasn't the requisite "hacker", it was just some innocent victim of belligerence.
In this sense, "hack" as you intend to use it -- in the invasive and criminal context -- is a perversion of the form and a stereotype that the hacker community feels unjustly saddled with especially as it hurts their opportunities to research and perform hacks that are beneficial and/or harm no-one, steal nothing, and invade nothing.
In the article's sense, "hack" as it was used meant the many other possible definitions: "D.I.Y."; "without official clearance"; "not by the usual means, methods, paths, or prevalencies"; etc.
I love how peacefully calm the world is, today, without any war and nobody worries about nukes any more. Hell, this article doesn't exist. You're having this conversation with your subconcious in a prolonged dream experience.if you die in this dream, you'll return to your successful life married to a young Nancy Reagan with a nice ass. But watch out, the longer you stay in this dream state the more volatile it will become. Simple fears will become overblown out of proportion, your mind will overreact explosively, and your delusion will protect you from dying, thus prklonging the tragedy. While millions of dream surrogates are being microwaved to instananeous crisps, you'll be snugly sniveling in your bunker wringing your hands over all the mustard flavored cheese curls you'll be able to have to your greedy self. You should, i repeat, should not have eaten the mustard flavored ones. Why is it always the mustard with you! OMG bombs on the highwaaaaayyyyyyy.....
Could anybody brainstorm as to how this could be made lucrative? I don't imagine it, somehow.
1. You're on a public wifi, unsecured, and I'm sniffing your packets, and uh oh, I'm getting information about where you are located. Wait... you're right over there. I can see you. Okay, I'm smart.
2. Okay, you're far away, and somehow I hacked your network connection, and all I see is you're using Google. Or maybe I hacked you over unsecure wifi from the public bench over here. Anyways, I can see what location you're looking *at*. So... I come up to you, and I say, "Karl... Karl, are you looking at Mogadishu, Karl? You know... we, uh, we're not allowed to look at Mogadishu, Karl. It's against whatevers. So... you're FIRED, Karl. Clean out your locker, Karl!"
Is this all plausible? What is this useful for, anyway?
"I caught you looking at the world's largest beaver dam in northern Canada. I'm going to tell the boss I caught you looking at beaver on your lunch break. Guess what? He's going to totally misunderstand. He's going to fire you. I'm going to get the partnership. I might be a douche, but, you're saaaaaaaaaaaaaaack---tuh."
Or how about this:
"Hrmmmm my opponent seems to be spending a great deal of time looking at the Himalayas. Hrrmmmmm yesssss I think I have something to use against him there. Hrmmmmm the public sentiment could be turned again.... no.... well the.... his wife would not appreesh... uh.... well.... the U.S. government has a strict policy regarding.... no.... well wtf. There's something wrong with this fuck for staring at Katchenjunga all god damn day long."
I recall seeing something a few years ago about a forklift-like system attached to a stack of cargo-ship containers that took up a couple of parking spots and parked two or three cars to a stack. In Japan. Or I have a manufactured memory. I guess there are numerous ways to do it.
So many cities barely utilize their underground space for anything. The first so many feet have pipes and conduits, stuff like sewer systems, some old cities with steam pipes (which are really, really interesting,) gas and electricity, etc. But you could tear up a street and build a ramp underneath if for dozens of cars, and just pick some out-of-the-way place at either end with lots of space to build the side ramps for exit and entrance.
I think an even greater idea is to elevate any of roadspace, pedestrian space, or parking. I worked with a friend on a design for the Capitol area of downtown Lansing, Michigan that was sort of a modern "hanging gardens". A large structure supported by arches would span over several blocks of streets and support shopping, elevated walkways, and greenspace. The streets below would be able to take up more space in width, and so could allow for far more parking, and for the ramps to access underground parking as well, by doing away with the streetside pedestrian paths.
Granted, it's a somewhat "baroque", gargantuan monstrosity of an idea, but if you take it just a step further you can have all your traffic underground and your city completely camouflaged by a green hillside that follows the contours of the buildings.
Okay now I forgot wtf I am even trying to talk about.
NASA is going to need *something* to keep its skeleton staff employed. If they ever want to sell lots of space food, like, stuff you eat when you're an astronaut, please, by all means, sell some of it to me. I love that *%!&. TANG! Foil packets of dehydrated neapolitan ice cream or strawberries! MREs!
It looks to me (as another response pointed out) that this is a joint project between NASA, JPL, and Caltech. I guess you can say that if any of the three members wants to take it over, it's not as if it has left any "hands". So, that really moots my entire argument. They *could* make it something that we can all enjoy, but they'd *prefer* to use it as a way to make their college seem more lucrative to engineering minded students.
... no, it doesn't. The satellite should get full use.
I just think it would take only a couple of months to organize a nonprofit devoted to maintaining the satellite, and that those couple of months won't mean a whole lot in the long run. The satellite doesn't need to be maintained by taxes, it's already up in the air. It can be put on standby, and then taken off standby later on by its new owner with the operating manuals in hand. It's not like as soon as the project is decommissioned, that the thing suddenly drops out of the sky.
It could even give that private space travel company some incentive to hurry up and get a working vessel going that can push the satellite into higher orbit when needed.
I'm sure a nonprofit organization can receive enough benefits (donations) to maintain the bottom line while also selling slices and giving some away free.
But... you have a good point. CalTech can justify it because students will now be even more willing to pay. At least it restricts the impact on society to a smallish group.
I still believe it should be something everybody can use. I'm sure if enough people believed the same, it would receive the needed funding every year.
I think you're absolutely right; I interpreted TFA & the poster's comments the same way. It isn't storyline that is disturbing, it's a reliance on storyline as the majority of a game's content/presentation that kills the gaming, and that's disturbing (since so many, successful, low-budget game producers are doing just that, as you point out).
I think Dragon's Lair had the formula somewhat right for the most part -- it's a track ride, but, you could screw up and get a funny animation instead of progressing. However, the only "dynamic" (I use the term loosely) element to the game was that you would end up with randomly chosen sequences to get past.
This brings up a huge, huge topic: how to randomly, or procedurally, generate storyline in an open world game. Roguelike developers have struggled with this for a long time. Dwarf Fortress takes a major stab at it but it's not even a completed game, yet, and so far I don't see the random token-dropping as truly dynamic, procedurally-generated storytelling.
This is really a topic for r.g.r.d., but if you can procedurally generate engaging and interesting storyline (probably involving many dozens, and dozens, of possible "ingredients" to procedurally choose from) then you can tack it onto a procedurally generated world, and good-bye, big worlds that take forever to design and map out, and good-bye predictability. Replayability for a game of the same quality as "Zelda: Ocarina of Time", for all as sophisticated as that game is by today's standards, goes straight through the roof if you can make it a totally new world with totally new challenges and new story every time you play. People can get addicted to games like that for a lifetime.
So, right away, by pointing out that there's this whole procedural generation thing, you can dismiss the article's argument (note: original poster disagrees with the premise presented by the article.) It's just as you point out: the story isn't what's wrong. It's this reliance on story as "the meat", when players have already played a hundred challenge-less platformers already and if they wanted a good story, they'd go read a decent book.
I think when authors realize that if they can get their game across to an audience, and make sales, they can profit. Think about how many young and young-ish gamers are out there who haven't played so many games in their lifetime. Think about how mind-blowing it could be to play a really, really, really dumb and stupid platformer that has animated cutscenes and recorded human dialogue for the script. If you've never played that before, you'd be willing to plunk down five bucks for the "full version" and keep getting your cock passively sucked by the developer.
FTFA: "This would not involve compensation from Caltech," said Trent Perrotto, a NASA spokesperson. "It would be a transfer of ownership." What money?
It's not all that much of a "win". The satellite, which could be something everybody in America gets a chance to use, is going to become the private property of not several, not a network or a special organization devoted to the satellite, but just one single university. A very expensive university in California. Why should they get it? Why not MIT? "Why not" a hundred other universities and colleges? It shouldn't be given to Caltech. They should wait, it's not like the thing is falling out of the sky, and somebody should set up a nonprofit organization for the purpose of utilizing the satellite. Credentialed members of the public should be able to either buy survey time or sign up for free observation time. It shouldn't be locked away in Caltech land.
*shrug* In the approximations of many users, slashdot isn't even any longer "news for nerds" nor "stuff that matters". Would it be surprising if they are now so desperate for quality content that they've resorted to attempting to get rid of the "bad" in the hopes that what remains looks like the "good"?
There are numerous problems with that idea. For instance, you can't just load and unload cars freely. The car hauler has to park the cars onto the carrier furthest-in first, and drive them off in reverse order. There's no way to get a car out from behind the other cars without moving them all. You end up with (albeit periodic and momentary) a need for enough space to accommodate almost all the cars, after all.
You could modify the car carrier, but how? You can't have some ramp poking out from the side, it would potentially obstruct traffic. I don't see how it would work.
unlike an automated and autonomous traffic camera, a camera fixed to a bus with a human driver behind the wheel can be seen as an extension of the driver the same way the bus can. the camera hanging from the power lines over the intersection doesn't invite reprisal, but knowing what bus number was on that route at the time the picture was taken and therefore knowing what driver was present when you got busted does invite reprisal. i think it's a bad idea.
Slashdot Mirror
"Social networks and the maker movement are the perfect intersection of where the kids of today are"
Who writes this crap? It's like somebody yelled cheeseburger and I got there and they hand fed me a potato chip.
What kind of autistic parents want their kid to grow and develope in some electronic cocoon? What's really driving this:
A) fear of legacies not surviving the technologized future
B) fear that at the rate forests are being consumed, there won't be any such thing as campgrounds in the future
C) just straight fucking autism
I think security guards should be ready to be assertive and aggressive in securing a portal. If you're one of two guards and you've been given a post at two propped-open double doors, or any other very wide entryway, you should tell the boss to gather you up some form of corraling and queueing the incomers or else a way to partially block the entry, with a nice covered table perhaps.
Also, security guards should sign to responsibility for losses or threats incurred due to someone slipping past.
Nice score, good man! Wow, really! A one hundred!
The guy in the sleeper car chewing watermelon, in "The Man Who Would Be King", invented e-mail. Well, guess what, I caught him stealing your watch!
Wow, wtf, for real, why doesn't the U.S. *GOVERNMENT*, of all fucking people, places, or things, have a ready supply of information about how to fucking use your computer the real way?
I like your frame of mind. Until there's a page JUST like what you're describing, my opinion of U.S. government employees and officials as just being undereducated slackers who get elected largely because they felt like running for office and knew how to lie and/or look really pretty... now I'm going to see them (and mention to them that I see them) as people with Bill Gate's hardened cock wedged firmly into their asshole, pumping and thrusting for every dollar they get from constituents to support their re-election.
This sounds like a cross between Kevin Mitnick's "The Art of Deception" and Malcolm Gladwell's ("The Tipping Point") "The Outliers". Probably should take an interest in any of these if you take an interest in any of them.
"The red, vain soul with a high degree of vertical challenge ever so slowly slipped out of sight past the horizon, less like a setting Sun than a discovered pervert shying away from sight with the slow shuffle that only stars can make look graceful in bathrobes, his red."
With the atmospheric pressure so high, won't the H end up forming with hydroxide to make water again (or water to make hydronium), and won't the oxygen ions just get absorbed into the water?
*pfffffttttttt* *coughouchgouch* far OOUUUTTTTT--
In any case, we're building the cable out of what? If we don't mine it extraterrestrially, how big of a hicky is this project going to leave on the surface of the earth somewhere? How much is it going to cost to move all the Bagger 288 style megamachines out to that location to perform the work in a timely manner? The material to build several new ones at the site can't be spared. How much will it cost to pay off all the industrialists whose jobs depend on these materials being ready to be made into stuff people find useful in a more marginal and personal fashion? Or do we expect them all to go out of work while one company completes the cable project? Or do we expect to go global-socialist, requisition the materials in the name of the Fatherworld, and give each crying birdchick company one wormy thread of the cable to manufacture and make them responsible for ensuring it twines well with all of the other threads?
I mean really. When you get into massive projects that will require resources and cooperation on a global scale, you're already talking about Mission Impossible.
For starters, nice dirigibles you got there, asshole: ping! ping! ping! Down comes El Cable Monumento!
Or how about them near orbitals lying in wait in their fancy weather baloons, fighting turbulence sickness and hoping they don't end up way off course by the time the damn cable thing floats in their general direction because they only brought up so much oxygen and pressurizing gases? Slim pickings for any pirate with a long-range rifle and an electronically synchronized pair of drones to ease the payload back to earth in a specific location.
Or how about all that material! Just the fibers of the cable could be worth something to people, if it's such an exotic material. Hand me the nanosaw and the Francium welder! Baby needs a new pair of shoes!
How about this: I go up there, to the moon, I shoot every body up there except the ones I want to make babies with, and then I pull the ladder up behind me, throw you a finger, and start up mah moon base, and shoot down everybody who dares to even pretend they're on a trajectory to the moon from anywhere? What are you going to do, expend the REST of the resources on Earth in a strange and uniquely human bid for reclamation of the Moon? For who? Nobody's going to like you, because you're going to leave everybody poor for the rest of all time. You're going to reduce humanity to living in quonset huts and eating their own boogers as a spice on their kelp because you believe everybody should have a right to the moon, and I won the big game of King of the Hill.
Anyways, human endeavours of this sort are pathetic to even read about.
... and no more drugs for you!
The book by that former NASA scientist, called "Moonquake", was a humongous eye-opener for me, in terms of several things:
1. is the moon even plausible as a place to stay for very long and retain one's health while keeping any semblance of normal, uninterrupted operations? -- of course, if you can excavate your entire basement with radio controlled Tonka trucks, maybe anything's possible
2. whether or not NASA is capable of doing anything beyond putting a man on the moon. they weren't capable of carrying out the shuttle mission and they don't seem interested in doing anything else besides putting a man on Mars, which we know is going to be inflated beyond any nation's ability to expend.
Anyways. Aren't asteroids more valuable than moon-rock? why aren't we interested in robotically mining asteroids? wtf?
Because. Unless "hack into the ISS" involved "prep and advance a compatriot hacker into the ranks of a national space agency and get them accepted into and lodged in the ISS", the "person on the moon" wasn't the requisite "hacker", it was just some innocent victim of belligerence.
In this sense, "hack" as you intend to use it -- in the invasive and criminal context -- is a perversion of the form and a stereotype that the hacker community feels unjustly saddled with especially as it hurts their opportunities to research and perform hacks that are beneficial and/or harm no-one, steal nothing, and invade nothing.
In the article's sense, "hack" as it was used meant the many other possible definitions: "D.I.Y."; "without official clearance"; "not by the usual means, methods, paths, or prevalencies"; etc.
Oh, you're right.
I love how peacefully calm the world is, today, without any war and nobody worries about nukes any more. Hell, this article doesn't exist. You're having this conversation with your subconcious in a prolonged dream experience.if you die in this dream, you'll return to your successful life married to a young Nancy Reagan with a nice ass. But watch out, the longer you stay in this dream state the more volatile it will become. Simple fears will become overblown out of proportion, your mind will overreact explosively, and your delusion will protect you from dying, thus prklonging the tragedy. While millions of dream surrogates are being microwaved to instananeous crisps, you'll be snugly sniveling in your bunker wringing your hands over all the mustard flavored cheese curls you'll be able to have to your greedy self. You should, i repeat, should not have eaten the mustard flavored ones. Why is it always the mustard with you! OMG bombs on the highwaaaaayyyyyyy.....
Could anybody brainstorm as to how this could be made lucrative? I don't imagine it, somehow.
1. You're on a public wifi, unsecured, and I'm sniffing your packets, and uh oh, I'm getting information about where you are located. Wait... you're right over there. I can see you. Okay, I'm smart.
2. Okay, you're far away, and somehow I hacked your network connection, and all I see is you're using Google. Or maybe I hacked you over unsecure wifi from the public bench over here. Anyways, I can see what location you're looking *at*. So... I come up to you, and I say, "Karl... Karl, are you looking at Mogadishu, Karl? You know... we, uh, we're not allowed to look at Mogadishu, Karl. It's against whatevers. So... you're FIRED, Karl. Clean out your locker, Karl!"
Is this all plausible? What is this useful for, anyway?
"I caught you looking at the world's largest beaver dam in northern Canada. I'm going to tell the boss I caught you looking at beaver on your lunch break. Guess what? He's going to totally misunderstand. He's going to fire you. I'm going to get the partnership. I might be a douche, but, you're saaaaaaaaaaaaaaack---tuh."
Or how about this:
"Hrmmmm my opponent seems to be spending a great deal of time looking at the Himalayas. Hrrmmmmm yesssss I think I have something to use against him there. Hrmmmmm the public sentiment could be turned again.... no.... well the.... his wife would not appreesh... uh.... well.... the U.S. government has a strict policy regarding.... no.... well wtf. There's something wrong with this fuck for staring at Katchenjunga all god damn day long."
I recall seeing something a few years ago about a forklift-like system attached to a stack of cargo-ship containers that took up a couple of parking spots and parked two or three cars to a stack. In Japan. Or I have a manufactured memory. I guess there are numerous ways to do it.
So many cities barely utilize their underground space for anything. The first so many feet have pipes and conduits, stuff like sewer systems, some old cities with steam pipes (which are really, really interesting,) gas and electricity, etc. But you could tear up a street and build a ramp underneath if for dozens of cars, and just pick some out-of-the-way place at either end with lots of space to build the side ramps for exit and entrance.
I think an even greater idea is to elevate any of roadspace, pedestrian space, or parking. I worked with a friend on a design for the Capitol area of downtown Lansing, Michigan that was sort of a modern "hanging gardens". A large structure supported by arches would span over several blocks of streets and support shopping, elevated walkways, and greenspace. The streets below would be able to take up more space in width, and so could allow for far more parking, and for the ramps to access underground parking as well, by doing away with the streetside pedestrian paths.
Granted, it's a somewhat "baroque", gargantuan monstrosity of an idea, but if you take it just a step further you can have all your traffic underground and your city completely camouflaged by a green hillside that follows the contours of the buildings.
Okay now I forgot wtf I am even trying to talk about.
NASA is going to need *something* to keep its skeleton staff employed. If they ever want to sell lots of space food, like, stuff you eat when you're an astronaut, please, by all means, sell some of it to me. I love that *%!&. TANG! Foil packets of dehydrated neapolitan ice cream or strawberries! MREs!
It looks to me (as another response pointed out) that this is a joint project between NASA, JPL, and Caltech. I guess you can say that if any of the three members wants to take it over, it's not as if it has left any "hands". So, that really moots my entire argument. They *could* make it something that we can all enjoy, but they'd *prefer* to use it as a way to make their college seem more lucrative to engineering minded students.
... no, it doesn't. The satellite should get full use.
I just think it would take only a couple of months to organize a nonprofit devoted to maintaining the satellite, and that those couple of months won't mean a whole lot in the long run. The satellite doesn't need to be maintained by taxes, it's already up in the air. It can be put on standby, and then taken off standby later on by its new owner with the operating manuals in hand. It's not like as soon as the project is decommissioned, that the thing suddenly drops out of the sky.
It could even give that private space travel company some incentive to hurry up and get a working vessel going that can push the satellite into higher orbit when needed.
I'm sure a nonprofit organization can receive enough benefits (donations) to maintain the bottom line while also selling slices and giving some away free.
But... you have a good point. CalTech can justify it because students will now be even more willing to pay. At least it restricts the impact on society to a smallish group.
I still believe it should be something everybody can use. I'm sure if enough people believed the same, it would receive the needed funding every year.
I think you're absolutely right; I interpreted TFA & the poster's comments the same way. It isn't storyline that is disturbing, it's a reliance on storyline as the majority of a game's content/presentation that kills the gaming, and that's disturbing (since so many, successful, low-budget game producers are doing just that, as you point out).
I think Dragon's Lair had the formula somewhat right for the most part -- it's a track ride, but, you could screw up and get a funny animation instead of progressing. However, the only "dynamic" (I use the term loosely) element to the game was that you would end up with randomly chosen sequences to get past.
This brings up a huge, huge topic: how to randomly, or procedurally, generate storyline in an open world game. Roguelike developers have struggled with this for a long time. Dwarf Fortress takes a major stab at it but it's not even a completed game, yet, and so far I don't see the random token-dropping as truly dynamic, procedurally-generated storytelling.
This is really a topic for r.g.r.d., but if you can procedurally generate engaging and interesting storyline (probably involving many dozens, and dozens, of possible "ingredients" to procedurally choose from) then you can tack it onto a procedurally generated world, and good-bye, big worlds that take forever to design and map out, and good-bye predictability. Replayability for a game of the same quality as "Zelda: Ocarina of Time", for all as sophisticated as that game is by today's standards, goes straight through the roof if you can make it a totally new world with totally new challenges and new story every time you play. People can get addicted to games like that for a lifetime.
So, right away, by pointing out that there's this whole procedural generation thing, you can dismiss the article's argument (note: original poster disagrees with the premise presented by the article.) It's just as you point out: the story isn't what's wrong. It's this reliance on story as "the meat", when players have already played a hundred challenge-less platformers already and if they wanted a good story, they'd go read a decent book.
I think when authors realize that if they can get their game across to an audience, and make sales, they can profit. Think about how many young and young-ish gamers are out there who haven't played so many games in their lifetime. Think about how mind-blowing it could be to play a really, really, really dumb and stupid platformer that has animated cutscenes and recorded human dialogue for the script. If you've never played that before, you'd be willing to plunk down five bucks for the "full version" and keep getting your cock passively sucked by the developer.
FTFA: "This would not involve compensation from Caltech," said Trent Perrotto, a NASA spokesperson. "It would be a transfer of ownership." What money?
It's not all that much of a "win". The satellite, which could be something everybody in America gets a chance to use, is going to become the private property of not several, not a network or a special organization devoted to the satellite, but just one single university. A very expensive university in California. Why should they get it? Why not MIT? "Why not" a hundred other universities and colleges? It shouldn't be given to Caltech. They should wait, it's not like the thing is falling out of the sky, and somebody should set up a nonprofit organization for the purpose of utilizing the satellite. Credentialed members of the public should be able to either buy survey time or sign up for free observation time. It shouldn't be locked away in Caltech land.
*shrug* In the approximations of many users, slashdot isn't even any longer "news for nerds" nor "stuff that matters". Would it be surprising if they are now so desperate for quality content that they've resorted to attempting to get rid of the "bad" in the hopes that what remains looks like the "good"?
There are numerous problems with that idea. For instance, you can't just load and unload cars freely. The car hauler has to park the cars onto the carrier furthest-in first, and drive them off in reverse order. There's no way to get a car out from behind the other cars without moving them all. You end up with (albeit periodic and momentary) a need for enough space to accommodate almost all the cars, after all.
You could modify the car carrier, but how? You can't have some ramp poking out from the side, it would potentially obstruct traffic. I don't see how it would work.
unlike an automated and autonomous traffic camera, a camera fixed to a bus with a human driver behind the wheel can be seen as an extension of the driver the same way the bus can. the camera hanging from the power lines over the intersection doesn't invite reprisal, but knowing what bus number was on that route at the time the picture was taken and therefore knowing what driver was present when you got busted does invite reprisal. i think it's a bad idea.