Einstein's use of the word "god" (creator, etc) had no more in common with organised religion or personal belief in a deity than the Internet slang "OMG".
There can be no conflict because if there is a disagreement between any stance between religions and facts than facts win since they are the direct observations of the universe.
Unfortunately, that isn't the case. If it was, there would be no problem with religion and the athiests would probably shut up.
Clearly there are disagreements between religions and facts where religions win. You only have to look at education in the US science classrooms to see this -- I've seen countless YouTube videos of science teachers who have to teach evolution but they do so in a way that constantly reminds us that this is "just what the scientists tell us, and you should think for yourselves, and when we think for ourselves we know that God designed us" (paraphrased), and so on. All over the world, every day, people are throwing facts out the window because of their presupposed religious beliefs.
You can have your belief that God set up the universe and then after that everything ran like clockwork (a deistic belief), and learn about sins and other moral teachings from the Bible. But you would have to ignore everything else that religion says about the way the universe works (including miracles, answering prayers, explicit design of species, etc) if you wanted to remain compatible with science. As an engineer, perhaps you can do that, but the majority of the world's religious people cannot, and so religion and science have a problem.
Absolutely. Science doesn't pretend to explain everything. Part of good science -- in fact the most important part of science -- is knowing what we cannot yet explain.
But just because something has not been disproven (or perhaps can never be disproven) does not make it "not irrational" to believe in it. It is a giant leap of illogic to say "science cannot explain something; therefore there must be a magical sky god." Anybody who believes in the magical sky god does so with as much evidence as GP's snot goblins.
GP's point is that ever scientific advance we have ever made has required us to acknowledge that there is something which we don't know how it works. With religion involved, every step of scientific progress involves the extra step of trying to convince the religious establishment to let go of yet another of their beliefs (cf: Galileo).
You're confusing religion and morality (a part of religion). If I replace "religion" with "morals" in your post, then it makes sense. Most would argue that morals and science are pretty orthogonal -- science tells you why the world works and morals tell you how to live your life. You can imagine two mutually exclusive circles: morality and science.
But religion crosses the boundary from morality and science -- it presumes to tell us both why the world works and how to live your life. A religion with only morals isn't a religion at all, it's just a philosophy. Religions, all of them, explain how the world was created, how species were created, what happens after you die, the concept of a human soul, miracles, etc. That directly treads on the territory of science. When you have people telling you that the world is less than 10,000 years old because it says so in the Bible, how is that orthogonal to science? When people ignore overwhelming evidence that man evolved from primitive life because they "know" that God created man specially, how is that orthogonal to science? When people tell you that Jesus performed miracles like raising from the dead, or that God can interfere with the universe in response to human prayer, that is of concern to science which tells us that such things are impossible. I'm just focusing on Christianity but other religions make similar claims.
Many of the fundamental claims of religion directly contradict science, so clearly you can only believe in one or the other.
It isn't like non-religious people are particularly immune to rationalising monstrous acts of their own - see the Khmer Rouge for example.
That's a classic (flawed) anti-athiest argument. "Sure, religious people do evil deeds, but athiests do evil deeds too -- see (Hitler|Stalin|Khmer Rouge|etc)." The flaw in this argument is that when religious people do evil deeds, they are commonly (not always, but often) done in the name of the religious beliefs. For example, last month Anders Breivik shot up a bunch of people in Norway, and they found hundreds of pages of journals he'd kept saying he was a soldier representing Jesus on a mission against Islam. Just the other day, a teenage girl in Japan was killed when her parents took her to see a Buddhist monk who water boarded her in order to exorcise evil spirits -- accidental death, but a completely brutal act performed in the name of religious beliefs.
Conversely, no athiest has ever done evil deeds in the name of atheism. There have been terrible regimes run by people who do not believe in a deity, but nobody ever said "because I don't believe in a deity, I feel the need to kill people" or any such thing (at least, never to my knowledge, and if it has, it is surely dozens of orders of magnitude rarer than the daily killing in the name of religion).
In short, that both religious and non-religious people commit evil deeds is irrelevant. Some (many) evil deeds are motivated by religion, some are not. But no evil deeds are motivated by atheism.
It's worse than that. VFAT (FAT with long file names) is not "obvious" in the sense that a "swipe to unlock" is obvious or a linked list. It's actually quite complicated and something that even an expert in the field wouldn't be able to come up with on their own. As Wikipedia explains, if you were to come up with all of this on your own, you would have to decide that you are going to repurpose directory entries, having N directory entries before the actual file's entry forming a linked list containing 13 characters of a file name, chained together in reverse order, encoded in UTF-16 and split up among bytes 1-A, E-19 and 1C-1F, with the remaining bytes forming a unique sequence number, the bytes 0F, 00, a checksum of the original filename, 00 and 00.
In other words, this isn't a broad patent on "all file systems allowing long file names" (which would be ridiculous, trivial and obvious). It is a specific patent on the above precise arrangement of bytes which is unlikely that an expert would come up with (because it's a batshit-crazy hack). The problem with this patent is not that it's broad: it's that it's a patent on a de facto standard. By controlling the operating system of every computer on the planet, Microsoft has total control over what file systems people use. By ensuring that their operating system supports ONLY file systems on which they have patents (VFAT and NTFS), Microsoft ensures that if anybody wants to write files in a manner that can be read by 99% of computers on the planet, you have to license this patent.
The patent is total horse shit in that it is not a "useful" invention for mankind at all. In any sane world, I wouldn't have any need to a file system that operates with the precise arrangement of bytes as I described above. Purely in order to make cameras, printers, USB sticks and phones that are compatible with the majority of the world's computers, I need to violate or license this patent. This is not an "invention", this is extortion.
Pay to play as in, subscription? Or one time? Anyway... I don't have a moral issue with someone trademarking a common word. It happens all the time: "Apple", "Windows", "Wired", "Chrome" are a couple of examples in the tech sector. Trademarks are only enforceable specific to the industry and can't be descriptive of the product, so Microsoft couldn't sue a window-cleaning company called "Windows", and nor could said window-cleaning company get their own trademark on "Windows" because it is descriptive for that industry.
"Scrolls" is not descriptive in the games industry, so it is up for grabs. As far as I know, nobody has a trademark on "scrolls". There is a trademark on "Elder Scrolls", but that's different. You shouldn't be able to sue someone for trademark infringement over part of the name. This is like Facebook suing someone over the use of the word "face" or "book" (both of which they have tried).
Instead of buying Skyrim, I might instead take a look at Scrolls. Not because I'm confused, but because a) my interest in this product is now raised, and b) I don't like giving money to douchebags.
You're right, any OS by definition has the same problem -- if passwords are stored hashed on the machine and the attacker has physical access, it's game over. But there is a difference here: from what I'm reading, the OS X attacker does not require physical access. So on Linux and Windows, the two ways to get the password hashes is if you are a) the root user, or b) have physical access (boot into a Live CD, etc). On OS X, this exploit can apparently be performed by a non-root user, which means any hacker that gains remote access to your system can do so. That's much worse than an attack which requires physical access.
Another point is that an encrypted drive would render your statement partly false. If you had physical access to my laptop (Ubuntu with an encrypted home partition), you could not access my shadow file while the machine is turned on due to the security in the OS. If you rebooted my machine, you would have access to the shadow file and could get started cracking my password (nothing can prevent that). But you would not be able to change my password unless you first crack it. If you modify the shadow file and write a new password hash in there, you'll be able to log in as me, but you won't be able to decrypt my home partition, so you'll get nothing. So get cracking;)
But this is exactly why it is a problem. If they were doing something that was going to cause a lot of people to complain, it wouldn't work. Instead, it is very subtle: it is something that most people won't notice, except that it will limit everybody's choices.
Yes, the geeks among us will be able to either a) buy different hardware, or b) tinker with existing hardware to make it work, but that presents a number of problems: * Those of us that want to run an alternative operating system potentially have to pay more for hardware. * It could become impossible to switch a Windows 8 machine to a non-Windows-8 machine, instead requiring the purchase of new hardware. * For non-technical people, this is a major blockage for switching to an alternative operating system.
If you think about an OS like GNU/Linux as being "for geeks only" then that last point isn't such a problem. Only, that's wrong. Linux is now at the level that it can be used by non-technical people, and they deserve to benefit from its freedom just as much as geeks. Only now they have new major technical headaches preventing them from switching. They won't complain about this, they simply won't use it. So everybody loses, but nobody complains -- perfect for Microsoft.
This is exactly what's wrong with monopolies. There tend to be very few complaints because everybody uses the monopoly product. There is not much desire from the user base to switch to something else, because there is nothing else. But the user base would be advantaged if there was an alternative product, so we should not condone measures that prevent the majority of users from accessing an alternative product.
To be a good JavaScript programmer, all you really have to understand are the concepts related to objects and scope.
And the dozens of special cases involving the value of "this" in various contexts. And the difference between an object's prototype and an object's "prototype" attribute. And the various advantages and drawbacks of the three major ways to build objects and simulate classes. And the fact that iterating over an array produces not just the elements of the array in a potentially unspecified order, but also all of the methods of the array. And how to invent your own module system to avoid scope collisions. And so on... JavaScript has so many warts. It is yet another language that is easy to get started on, but requires a great deal of understanding to use properly.
Because developers all over the world are currently making a choice, hundreds of thousands of times over: do I write a) an application that will run in web browsers on every desktop and mobile device that has been manufactured in the past 5 years by every vendor, or b) an application that will require approval by Apple and run only on iOS devices, and now a separate application that will run only on Android devices?
The majority of them, for various reasons, are choosing (b), despite that being seemingly far more expensive and with the potential to reach far fewer people. Some applications simply don't work in the web browser. But for those that do, why wouldn't you choose (a)?
(Yes, I understand, the technologies HTML+CSS+JavaScript were not designed with this use case in mind, so it is "a hack" that that is what they are being used for. But does that really matter? Developing for this platform is pretty awkward, but it is so worth it, considering that you have a universal program interpreter on every device.)
Tell that to Mozilla, who ships several million units a year. At the moment it costs absolutely nothing (besides bandwidth) -- you're asking them to pay a few hundred thousand dollars a year just to support basic web standards. And that doesn't consider the free software distros who distribute Firefox / Chromium either. It isn't economically feasible for open source browsers to support this technology.
The persuader attempts to convince someone to comply with a request by first making an extremely large request that the respondent will obviously turn down, with a metaphorical slamming of a door in the persuader's face. The respondent is then more likely to accede to a second, more reasonable request than if this second request were made without the first, extreme request.... A reference point construal may explain this phenomenon, as the initial bad offer sets a reference point from which the second offer looks like an improvement.
I think it should be Angry birds score × number of feet walked, since otherwise an experienced Angry Birds player could win without moving. This way, you need to be crossing the intersections or you won't get anything.
I was bitching about World of Warcraft once -- about how I love the world but I don't like all the people I am forced to team up with just to beat a couple of crap monsters, and how it's always changing. My friend told me: "There's nothing wrong with World of Warcraft; it's just that it is not for you."
Likewise, I think Braid, Portal and probably Warco are not for you, buddy. Some games are great for multiplayer. Some games are single-player only and simply would break in the multiplayer environment (okay, Portal had pretty good multiplayer, but Braid would just be silly). Half-Life is similar: sure, both Half-Life 1 and 2 had deathmatch, but it was pretty bland and nobody remembers HL for its multiplayer. That's why Valve has basically abandoned Half-Life multiplayer, instead focusing on dedicated multiplayer games like Team Fortress. I think it's generally better for a game to either be a dedicated single player game or a dedicated multiplayer game, but not try to be both.
Five years ago, I remember being stunned when I saw Tetris -- Tetris written entirely in JavaScript. I had to right-click on the page to see that it wasn't just a Flash box. Nowadays I pretty much take it for granted that if I see an interactive website or game, there's about a 50% chance it's Flash, and 50% it's JavaScript, and I'm even getting used to seeing 3D graphics running in the browser.
Web technologies are coming a long way in a very short space of time. Now I'm no fan of JavaScript the language, and I desperately hope that it is replaced by a bytecode or NaCl or anything else. But the concept -- that we can use browser technologies to build things we only once dreamed of being native -- is getting closer very quickly. We are surely not there yet though. We're going to need new technologies to address your concerns. There will need to be a way, for example, to request the user to allow us to store several GB of data in a local cache long-term, and allow the user to manage the contents of that cache like a Steam account ("Half-Life 3 is installed in your browser cache (10.6 GB) [Remove]"). There will need to be a way to capture the mouse cursor to use as an aimer. I desperately hope there is a very good way to get C code into the browser cross-platform. And so on. But eventually, probably within 5 years, you should be able to run a AAA title in a browser using nothing but standard web technologies, and running on all devices. Or, Microsoft will have outlawed all of the other browsers under their new signing policy and we'll be in another Internet dark age.
I think the closest thing to compare it to might be The Movies -- does anybody remember that game? It was basically the same thing as The Sims only you were on a film studio, and not only did you have to manage the actors pay and happiness and so on, you also had to write, direct and edit films. The writing and editing tools were fairly advanced and you could tell any story you wanted, add voice-overs, subtitles, special effects, everything. It was hours and hours of fun, except the game didn't actually care how "nice" your film was, it just used a few crappy indicators of quality to score you. But the real fun and the real challenge was making a good film, and you could upload them online and they would be rated (basically like YouTube, but pre-YouTube). My point is that a game in which you can film and put together your own news reports could be very fun indeed even if the game isn't "scoring" you based on how good your news report is.
So maybe Warco will be to Call of Duty what The Movies was to The Sims. I hope they let you edit your news reports with as much power as you had in The Movies.
Here's the problem: everyone who is saying "ah, but geeks will always find a way to get around it and install Linux" is missing the point. Linux has always been a "geek OS" because making a user-friendly operating system (and one that is user-friendly to install) is really really hard. But the value of open computing is for everyone, not just geeks. It's just that up until recently, it's only been geeks who had access to this technology.
Well, in 2011, Linux is pretty fucking user friendly. A modern distro like Ubuntu is ridiculously easy to install and use. Now it is still a niche product, but it is accessible to anyone who wants it, geek or non-geek, and I have no hesitation recommending it to my friends and family. But now, Microsoft wants to relegate Linux back to being something that only geeks can install, and you're okay with that, because Linux is a "geek operating system". I do not want to have to tell my grandma to open a fucking case and mess around with jumpers, just to install a non-Microsoft operating system. Why should Microsoft not only have the advantage of already being installed on every computer sold, but also being the only operating system that can be installed without physically messing with the hardware inside the case?
That and I'm not sure how it's possible to break cryptographic signing. Sure, the iPhone jailbreakers do it, but as far as I understand, they do it by exploiting bugs in Apple's code which get patched with every new revision and requires a new hack every time. That doesn't sound like a feasible approach towards installing Linux into the future.
Seriously, every time he opens his mouth he sounds like a conspiracy nut but he is so fucking on the ball that almost everything he says eventually comes true. His 1997 article The Right to Read may have seemed ridiculous fourteen years ago, but reading it now it seems masterfully prophetic:
Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that.
Well maybe the GP's point is that this new law would effectively kill "prior art". Prior art is "I invented it before you filed it." If it's changing from "first to invent" to "first to file", wouldn't that suggest that it doesn't matter whether you invented it first -- you didn't file it first. amirite?
Maybe not... surely it wouldn't be that stupid. But who knows? Anyway, I think that's what GP meant.
It was Kevin Marks on This Week in Google. I'm not sure which episode, but he's said that same idea on the last two times he's been on the show. Great idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Einstein's use of the word "god" (creator, etc) had no more in common with organised religion or personal belief in a deity than the Internet slang "OMG".
Unfortunately, that isn't the case. If it was, there would be no problem with religion and the athiests would probably shut up.
Clearly there are disagreements between religions and facts where religions win. You only have to look at education in the US science classrooms to see this -- I've seen countless YouTube videos of science teachers who have to teach evolution but they do so in a way that constantly reminds us that this is "just what the scientists tell us, and you should think for yourselves, and when we think for ourselves we know that God designed us" (paraphrased), and so on. All over the world, every day, people are throwing facts out the window because of their presupposed religious beliefs.
You can have your belief that God set up the universe and then after that everything ran like clockwork (a deistic belief), and learn about sins and other moral teachings from the Bible. But you would have to ignore everything else that religion says about the way the universe works (including miracles, answering prayers, explicit design of species, etc) if you wanted to remain compatible with science. As an engineer, perhaps you can do that, but the majority of the world's religious people cannot, and so religion and science have a problem.
Absolutely. Science doesn't pretend to explain everything. Part of good science -- in fact the most important part of science -- is knowing what we cannot yet explain.
But just because something has not been disproven (or perhaps can never be disproven) does not make it "not irrational" to believe in it. It is a giant leap of illogic to say "science cannot explain something; therefore there must be a magical sky god." Anybody who believes in the magical sky god does so with as much evidence as GP's snot goblins.
GP's point is that ever scientific advance we have ever made has required us to acknowledge that there is something which we don't know how it works. With religion involved, every step of scientific progress involves the extra step of trying to convince the religious establishment to let go of yet another of their beliefs (cf: Galileo).
You're confusing religion and morality (a part of religion). If I replace "religion" with "morals" in your post, then it makes sense. Most would argue that morals and science are pretty orthogonal -- science tells you why the world works and morals tell you how to live your life. You can imagine two mutually exclusive circles: morality and science.
But religion crosses the boundary from morality and science -- it presumes to tell us both why the world works and how to live your life. A religion with only morals isn't a religion at all, it's just a philosophy. Religions, all of them, explain how the world was created, how species were created, what happens after you die, the concept of a human soul, miracles, etc. That directly treads on the territory of science. When you have people telling you that the world is less than 10,000 years old because it says so in the Bible, how is that orthogonal to science? When people ignore overwhelming evidence that man evolved from primitive life because they "know" that God created man specially, how is that orthogonal to science? When people tell you that Jesus performed miracles like raising from the dead, or that God can interfere with the universe in response to human prayer, that is of concern to science which tells us that such things are impossible. I'm just focusing on Christianity but other religions make similar claims.
Many of the fundamental claims of religion directly contradict science, so clearly you can only believe in one or the other.
That's a classic (flawed) anti-athiest argument. "Sure, religious people do evil deeds, but athiests do evil deeds too -- see (Hitler|Stalin|Khmer Rouge|etc)." The flaw in this argument is that when religious people do evil deeds, they are commonly (not always, but often) done in the name of the religious beliefs. For example, last month Anders Breivik shot up a bunch of people in Norway, and they found hundreds of pages of journals he'd kept saying he was a soldier representing Jesus on a mission against Islam. Just the other day, a teenage girl in Japan was killed when her parents took her to see a Buddhist monk who water boarded her in order to exorcise evil spirits -- accidental death, but a completely brutal act performed in the name of religious beliefs.
Conversely, no athiest has ever done evil deeds in the name of atheism. There have been terrible regimes run by people who do not believe in a deity, but nobody ever said "because I don't believe in a deity, I feel the need to kill people" or any such thing (at least, never to my knowledge, and if it has, it is surely dozens of orders of magnitude rarer than the daily killing in the name of religion).
In short, that both religious and non-religious people commit evil deeds is irrelevant. Some (many) evil deeds are motivated by religion, some are not. But no evil deeds are motivated by atheism.
It's worse than that. VFAT (FAT with long file names) is not "obvious" in the sense that a "swipe to unlock" is obvious or a linked list. It's actually quite complicated and something that even an expert in the field wouldn't be able to come up with on their own. As Wikipedia explains, if you were to come up with all of this on your own, you would have to decide that you are going to repurpose directory entries, having N directory entries before the actual file's entry forming a linked list containing 13 characters of a file name, chained together in reverse order, encoded in UTF-16 and split up among bytes 1-A, E-19 and 1C-1F, with the remaining bytes forming a unique sequence number, the bytes 0F, 00, a checksum of the original filename, 00 and 00.
In other words, this isn't a broad patent on "all file systems allowing long file names" (which would be ridiculous, trivial and obvious). It is a specific patent on the above precise arrangement of bytes which is unlikely that an expert would come up with (because it's a batshit-crazy hack). The problem with this patent is not that it's broad: it's that it's a patent on a de facto standard. By controlling the operating system of every computer on the planet, Microsoft has total control over what file systems people use. By ensuring that their operating system supports ONLY file systems on which they have patents (VFAT and NTFS), Microsoft ensures that if anybody wants to write files in a manner that can be read by 99% of computers on the planet, you have to license this patent.
The patent is total horse shit in that it is not a "useful" invention for mankind at all. In any sane world, I wouldn't have any need to a file system that operates with the precise arrangement of bytes as I described above. Purely in order to make cameras, printers, USB sticks and phones that are compatible with the majority of the world's computers, I need to violate or license this patent. This is not an "invention", this is extortion.
Pay to play as in, subscription? Or one time? Anyway ... I don't have a moral issue with someone trademarking a common word. It happens all the time: "Apple", "Windows", "Wired", "Chrome" are a couple of examples in the tech sector. Trademarks are only enforceable specific to the industry and can't be descriptive of the product, so Microsoft couldn't sue a window-cleaning company called "Windows", and nor could said window-cleaning company get their own trademark on "Windows" because it is descriptive for that industry.
"Scrolls" is not descriptive in the games industry, so it is up for grabs. As far as I know, nobody has a trademark on "scrolls". There is a trademark on "Elder Scrolls", but that's different. You shouldn't be able to sue someone for trademark infringement over part of the name. This is like Facebook suing someone over the use of the word "face" or "book" (both of which they have tried).
Instead of buying Skyrim, I might instead take a look at Scrolls. Not because I'm confused, but because a) my interest in this product is now raised, and b) I don't like giving money to douchebags.
You're right, any OS by definition has the same problem -- if passwords are stored hashed on the machine and the attacker has physical access, it's game over. But there is a difference here: from what I'm reading, the OS X attacker does not require physical access. So on Linux and Windows, the two ways to get the password hashes is if you are a) the root user, or b) have physical access (boot into a Live CD, etc). On OS X, this exploit can apparently be performed by a non-root user, which means any hacker that gains remote access to your system can do so. That's much worse than an attack which requires physical access.
Another point is that an encrypted drive would render your statement partly false. If you had physical access to my laptop (Ubuntu with an encrypted home partition), you could not access my shadow file while the machine is turned on due to the security in the OS. If you rebooted my machine, you would have access to the shadow file and could get started cracking my password (nothing can prevent that). But you would not be able to change my password unless you first crack it. If you modify the shadow file and write a new password hash in there, you'll be able to log in as me, but you won't be able to decrypt my home partition, so you'll get nothing. So get cracking ;)
But this is exactly why it is a problem. If they were doing something that was going to cause a lot of people to complain, it wouldn't work. Instead, it is very subtle: it is something that most people won't notice, except that it will limit everybody's choices.
Yes, the geeks among us will be able to either a) buy different hardware, or b) tinker with existing hardware to make it work, but that presents a number of problems:
* Those of us that want to run an alternative operating system potentially have to pay more for hardware.
* It could become impossible to switch a Windows 8 machine to a non-Windows-8 machine, instead requiring the purchase of new hardware.
* For non-technical people, this is a major blockage for switching to an alternative operating system.
If you think about an OS like GNU/Linux as being "for geeks only" then that last point isn't such a problem. Only, that's wrong. Linux is now at the level that it can be used by non-technical people, and they deserve to benefit from its freedom just as much as geeks. Only now they have new major technical headaches preventing them from switching. They won't complain about this, they simply won't use it. So everybody loses, but nobody complains -- perfect for Microsoft.
This is exactly what's wrong with monopolies. There tend to be very few complaints because everybody uses the monopoly product. There is not much desire from the user base to switch to something else, because there is nothing else. But the user base would be advantaged if there was an alternative product, so we should not condone measures that prevent the majority of users from accessing an alternative product.
And the dozens of special cases involving the value of "this" in various contexts. And the difference between an object's prototype and an object's "prototype" attribute. And the various advantages and drawbacks of the three major ways to build objects and simulate classes. And the fact that iterating over an array produces not just the elements of the array in a potentially unspecified order, but also all of the methods of the array. And how to invent your own module system to avoid scope collisions. And so on... JavaScript has so many warts. It is yet another language that is easy to get started on, but requires a great deal of understanding to use properly.
Because developers all over the world are currently making a choice, hundreds of thousands of times over: do I write a) an application that will run in web browsers on every desktop and mobile device that has been manufactured in the past 5 years by every vendor, or b) an application that will require approval by Apple and run only on iOS devices, and now a separate application that will run only on Android devices?
The majority of them, for various reasons, are choosing (b), despite that being seemingly far more expensive and with the potential to reach far fewer people. Some applications simply don't work in the web browser. But for those that do, why wouldn't you choose (a)?
(Yes, I understand, the technologies HTML+CSS+JavaScript were not designed with this use case in mind, so it is "a hack" that that is what they are being used for. But does that really matter? Developing for this platform is pretty awkward, but it is so worth it, considering that you have a universal program interpreter on every device.)
Tell that to Mozilla, who ships several million units a year. At the moment it costs absolutely nothing (besides bandwidth) -- you're asking them to pay a few hundred thousand dollars a year just to support basic web standards. And that doesn't consider the free software distros who distribute Firefox / Chromium either. It isn't economically feasible for open source browsers to support this technology.
This technique is so common that there's a name for it: The Door-in-the-face technique.
I think it should be Angry birds score × number of feet walked, since otherwise an experienced Angry Birds player could win without moving. This way, you need to be crossing the intersections or you won't get anything.
I was bitching about World of Warcraft once -- about how I love the world but I don't like all the people I am forced to team up with just to beat a couple of crap monsters, and how it's always changing. My friend told me: "There's nothing wrong with World of Warcraft; it's just that it is not for you."
Likewise, I think Braid, Portal and probably Warco are not for you, buddy. Some games are great for multiplayer. Some games are single-player only and simply would break in the multiplayer environment (okay, Portal had pretty good multiplayer, but Braid would just be silly). Half-Life is similar: sure, both Half-Life 1 and 2 had deathmatch, but it was pretty bland and nobody remembers HL for its multiplayer. That's why Valve has basically abandoned Half-Life multiplayer, instead focusing on dedicated multiplayer games like Team Fortress. I think it's generally better for a game to either be a dedicated single player game or a dedicated multiplayer game, but not try to be both.
Five years ago, I remember being stunned when I saw Tetris -- Tetris written entirely in JavaScript. I had to right-click on the page to see that it wasn't just a Flash box. Nowadays I pretty much take it for granted that if I see an interactive website or game, there's about a 50% chance it's Flash, and 50% it's JavaScript, and I'm even getting used to seeing 3D graphics running in the browser.
Web technologies are coming a long way in a very short space of time. Now I'm no fan of JavaScript the language, and I desperately hope that it is replaced by a bytecode or NaCl or anything else. But the concept -- that we can use browser technologies to build things we only once dreamed of being native -- is getting closer very quickly. We are surely not there yet though. We're going to need new technologies to address your concerns. There will need to be a way, for example, to request the user to allow us to store several GB of data in a local cache long-term, and allow the user to manage the contents of that cache like a Steam account ("Half-Life 3 is installed in your browser cache (10.6 GB) [Remove]"). There will need to be a way to capture the mouse cursor to use as an aimer. I desperately hope there is a very good way to get C code into the browser cross-platform. And so on. But eventually, probably within 5 years, you should be able to run a AAA title in a browser using nothing but standard web technologies, and running on all devices. Or, Microsoft will have outlawed all of the other browsers under their new signing policy and we'll be in another Internet dark age.
I think the closest thing to compare it to might be The Movies -- does anybody remember that game? It was basically the same thing as The Sims only you were on a film studio, and not only did you have to manage the actors pay and happiness and so on, you also had to write, direct and edit films. The writing and editing tools were fairly advanced and you could tell any story you wanted, add voice-overs, subtitles, special effects, everything. It was hours and hours of fun, except the game didn't actually care how "nice" your film was, it just used a few crappy indicators of quality to score you. But the real fun and the real challenge was making a good film, and you could upload them online and they would be rated (basically like YouTube, but pre-YouTube). My point is that a game in which you can film and put together your own news reports could be very fun indeed even if the game isn't "scoring" you based on how good your news report is.
So maybe Warco will be to Call of Duty what The Movies was to The Sims. I hope they let you edit your news reports with as much power as you had in The Movies.
Does every game need a multiplayer? Braid and Portal (1) for example were fine on their own.
Here's the problem: everyone who is saying "ah, but geeks will always find a way to get around it and install Linux" is missing the point. Linux has always been a "geek OS" because making a user-friendly operating system (and one that is user-friendly to install) is really really hard. But the value of open computing is for everyone, not just geeks. It's just that up until recently, it's only been geeks who had access to this technology.
Well, in 2011, Linux is pretty fucking user friendly. A modern distro like Ubuntu is ridiculously easy to install and use. Now it is still a niche product, but it is accessible to anyone who wants it, geek or non-geek, and I have no hesitation recommending it to my friends and family. But now, Microsoft wants to relegate Linux back to being something that only geeks can install, and you're okay with that, because Linux is a "geek operating system". I do not want to have to tell my grandma to open a fucking case and mess around with jumpers, just to install a non-Microsoft operating system. Why should Microsoft not only have the advantage of already being installed on every computer sold, but also being the only operating system that can be installed without physically messing with the hardware inside the case?
So I'll be required to break international copyright law to install a non-Microsoft operating system?
That and I'm not sure how it's possible to break cryptographic signing. Sure, the iPhone jailbreakers do it, but as far as I understand, they do it by exploiting bugs in Apple's code which get patched with every new revision and requires a new hack every time. That doesn't sound like a feasible approach towards installing Linux into the future.
Seriously, every time he opens his mouth he sounds like a conspiracy nut but he is so fucking on the ball that almost everything he says eventually comes true. His 1997 article The Right to Read may have seemed ridiculous fourteen years ago, but reading it now it seems masterfully prophetic:
Do you mean Alderaan?
Well maybe the GP's point is that this new law would effectively kill "prior art". Prior art is "I invented it before you filed it." If it's changing from "first to invent" to "first to file", wouldn't that suggest that it doesn't matter whether you invented it first -- you didn't file it first. amirite?
Maybe not ... surely it wouldn't be that stupid. But who knows? Anyway, I think that's what GP meant.
It was Kevin Marks on This Week in Google. I'm not sure which episode, but he's said that same idea on the last two times he's been on the show. Great idea.