On a side note, much like innate homosexuality, there is little to be gained from denying the existence of gaming addiction, a fact which calls into question the motivation of those who try to deny its existence. Wait, you're trying to tell me that I couldactually innately be a Blood Elf paladin?...actually on second thoughts that is pretty much the same as being innately homosexual. Oh well... I still liek boobiez.:P
You're way too late for trading cards, that was soooo 2003.:P Anime hasn't become widespread enough to really hit the spotlight, whether it will or not, time will tell.
Right now (in Australia at least) it's the emo subculture that's destroying our youth. Two teenage girls commit suicide and it's front page news for weeks... if they'd been fugly instead of hot (in a goth-chick way), it woulda been mentioned once on page 17 then dropped. Damn media.
As for what *our* kids are going to be making us tut-tut about youth-of-today with... who knows? Probably something to do with mobile phones and either sex or violence. Kids are getting 'active' disturbingly young these days, apparently the average age in Britain is 13-14 and over here it's 15ish. Back in the 90s (when I were a lad:P ) that was unheard of./rant-over:P
You're the kind of rude, arrogant bastard that loses companies customers. Stop thinking of the people you're being paid to support as automatons, and maybe you'll grow some career scope. As a side effect you may end up with people actually liking you.
*sigh* IHBT, I know.
On-topic now, I'm surprised I haven't (yet) seen much FUD about this technology being used to identify and track people. Seems to me that it'd be the sort of thing enforcement agencies would love to bits...
I drive around 15-20,000 kms a year. That's slightly higher than average, let's say 10k kms/yr is average. At 10 kms/L that's 1000 litres of petrol per year. At current prices that's around AU$1300 per year, of which AU$390 is fuel excise and $130 is GST. So I'm paying AU$520/year in fuel tax alone - add to that the $400 or so I pay for rego and we're an order of magnitude higher than the required figures you give.:/ Of course, as with most places, that money doesn't go into the main roads.
[quote]Characters are investments the way cars are investments -- they're not. They have barriers to entry which scale geometrically to meet arbitrary standards, but as a rule, their values always decrease. At least there's a chance that a car could increase in value through scarcity, but usually only if you deprive yourself the pleasure of driving it. I have yet to hear of anyone storing a level 1 character and selling it decades later for a small fortune.[/quote]I think you misunderstand what people mean when they say 'investment'. Time invested in characters isn't like money invested in a property - characters are investments the way, say, gym memberships are investments. The reward for spending 20, 50, 100 days on a character (my highest/played time on a WoW character is around 70 days, I'd guess my total/played between all my chars is over 150 days) is not the cash you get from ebaying that character. It's the enjoyment you get from playing it, a large part of which is gained from the advancement of your character through leveling and gear upgrades. When a company significantly alters a character's class or gear to make it weaker, that destroys the results of some of the effort put in by the player to improve that character. (example - in WoW, the combined effects of the weapon normalisation nerf and the warrior enrage nerf meant that the top end damage with the game's hardest hitting weapon, obtainable only through extended raiding and farming, was reduced to the damage that, pre-nerfs, an easily available crafted weapon could dish out.) In entertainment terms, it's like getting a massive pay cut. Imagine spending a year working out three times a week, only to have the gym decide that the free weights are overpowered and surgically remove 30% of the muscle mass you've gained.
For those of us that run WoW on Windows, you can ease the pain of alt+tabbing out by going into video options and enabling full screen windowed mode. This lets you have chat/web windows in the foreground and your maximized game in the background (albeit with clipping/backbuffer errors on my PC, but it works fine on others I've tried it on) and removes the context switch delay that you get with fullscreen non-windowed mode.
You should be sent to jail! Exposing a child to:
Hentai - 6yrs
Oral sex - 10yrs
Anal sex - 14yrs
How dare you tell your kid about the dirty unholy things that perverts do?!
<insert ongoing moral outrage here... of course I'm not serious, but thousands would be. children need violence, not sex. *sigh* >
If that's how you naturally talk (or if you think that your choice of words is appropriate for a casual news site) then I can't really help you. What's wrong with simply being literate and having a good vocabulary? I'll agree that some of his grammar is somewhat stiff, but that could be due either to talking more formally than he's used to in order to better make his point, or to English being his second language. The second seems apposite given that he mentions his wife is studying for an English exam for citizenship purposes. Regardless, for some of us, discovering new and interesting words is a source of enjoyment in and of itself.
(I've assumed the GP to be male, given that he mentions a wife - apologies if I'm mistaken.;)
Run into the girls' toilets... If there's a blank void or a surprising presence of urinals, the aliens couldn't reconstruct that part of your world because you've never been there before. Obviously.
Interesting post - I just had to ask about the last bit though:
Microsoft's table does seem to add an extra twist - "dominos" which have a detectable pattern of dots on the bottom, to identify objects placed on the table. That wouldn't be using FTIR, but it is still a well known technique. Why wouldn't this be through FTIR, assuming that the domino pits were actually physically drilled into the markers? It seems to me that with physical deviations in the otherwise smooth surface of the marker, you should still get TIR at those points, correct? As in, from the underside it'd look like a dark domino-shaped area with bright dots in it? That is, assuming that the domino is small enough in relation to the thickness of the sheet that the non-F'd-TIR image is of somewhere outside the domino's influence...
There is no one-dimension axis measuring likeness to human. It almost certainly differs from person to person, and we may not be able to define it yet in words or symbols, but there must be such an axis for the simple reason that we can define one, and experimentally determine subjects' positions on said axis. A simple test asking a large, random sample of people to rate a number of subjects on a scale of 'lifeless cube'=0 to 'pure believable human'=100 should give you enough data points to get a rough 'normalized humanness' axis. Ask them to crossrate how much they like, or are disturbed by, subjects and you have yourself a scale. Obviously it's affected by ethnicity and cultural background, but for a given domain it is a measurable value.
Oblivion for example was a lot easier to swallow than either, although detail-level-wise it's between [FF:Spirits Within and EQ2]. Detail level does not equate with believable humanity. Spirits Within and EQ2 both had detailed avatars that behaved inhumanly - I haven't seen Oblivion's avatars but I would presume that they were better animated. By the way, your 'reductio ad absurdum' depends in this case on the law of excluded middle, on which topic is noted: In rhetoric, the law of excluded middle is readily misapplied, leading to the formal fallacy of the excluded middle, also known as a false dilemma. [Wikipedia]
You can't take the average and use it as the X axis for an uncanny valley graph, because even if the average is 99% right (hence the whole should be on the right side of the valley), one single detail (e.g., "omg, they're zombies") which can be disturbing on its own. Zombies are disturbing because they look like humans but act inhuman. Mainly, though, they're disturbing because they're frikkin' zombies.
The Undead in WoW are the most disturbing visually, the characters in Spirits Within are uncanny valley too, so something in between should be in the Uncanny Valley too. Yet the Wow humans and elves are considered the races that look good. Undead are generally unattractive, but human females, in particular, weird me out, it's the way they stare. Oddly they're the only race I've played that have defined irises and pupils. Speaking of which, it's damn creepy the way dead humanoid mobs continue to blink occasionally.:S
Anyway this got long and it's hometime. I'll check back.:P
When you know that someobody could be observing your every move and you don't know exactly when you are being specifically observed, your behavior will change to what you believe the observer wants. Only if the observer has the power to impose their will on you. I can stand on a street corner and say I hate the government as loudly as I want, and I don't care if they have a camera watching me. The moment they get the power to lock me up for saying I hate them is the moment that the freedom goes away, not when they put the camera up.
I read an interesting piece on two different types of surveillance society a while back. The first one had state/police cameras recording everything and everywhere, and became a totalitarian state. The second had the same cameras everywhere but they were publicly accessible. The result was that, while any public action was viewable to everyone, the accountability was applied to everyone as well. The Man could watch The People, but The People could watch The Man too. The basic theme was that we're going to end up with a surveillance society anyway, and that full public access to the surveillance net is the only way to stop it from being used by a corrupt government. (I can't remember where I read it, could be Marshall Brain's page but I can't get there from work. Anyone recognize the sound of it?)
Then, when it gets really good, you can empathise with them again (Hugo Weaving, i.e. Agent Smith, in the Matrix Sequels). Dude, I dunno how to break this to you but... Hugo Weaving isn't really an AI. He just looks like it.:P
I think you misunderstand - the Uncanny Valley isn't a myth so much as an observation. It's pretty simple to demonstrate that most people are less comfortable with things that look nearly-but-not-quite human than things that are human, or things that look completely inhuman. Take, for example, Toy Story vs. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. The first one was a 3D cartoon, and hence it was easy to identify with the caricatures of toys. The second tried to be 'photorealistic' and (due to some rushed animation) was a little off, and as a result was much harder to identify with the characters. That's not to say that with excellent mocap/animation/production, an animated model can't be accepted as human. If they are, that just means that they're good enough to appear on the 'near side' of the valley.
The composite faces you mention are likewise on the near side of the valley. Images of faces fabricated from scratch often are likewise, with current technology, due to the fact that still images contain so much less information than moving ones. Compare modern CGI faces to those of the late 90s and you'll see how they gradually got better, climbing the near slope of the valley and becoming more believable and identify-with-able.
Problem is, drunk people sometimes don't understand that they shouldn't drive, even if they would when sober. Last time I hid a friend's keys when he was drunk (I'm talking half-a-carton drunk) and wanting to drive home, it ended badly. (He tried to steal my mum's handbag then took a swing at my GF when she took it back... that night we eventually gave him his keys along with a "f**k off home, I hope you die on the way". Needless to say he's now banned from mum's house and not permitted to drink at mine.:P )
Slashdot Mirror
You mean you missed the stories about the girl who sold her body for an epic flying mount?
What are you going to do with all that petrol if you don't have technology?
You're way too late for trading cards, that was soooo 2003. :P Anime hasn't become widespread enough to really hit the spotlight, whether it will or not, time will tell.
:P ) that was unheard of. /rant-over :P
Right now (in Australia at least) it's the emo subculture that's destroying our youth. Two teenage girls commit suicide and it's front page news for weeks... if they'd been fugly instead of hot (in a goth-chick way), it woulda been mentioned once on page 17 then dropped. Damn media.
As for what *our* kids are going to be making us tut-tut about youth-of-today with... who knows? Probably something to do with mobile phones and either sex or violence. Kids are getting 'active' disturbingly young these days, apparently the average age in Britain is 13-14 and over here it's 15ish. Back in the 90s (when I were a lad
You're the kind of rude, arrogant bastard that loses companies customers. Stop thinking of the people you're being paid to support as automatons, and maybe you'll grow some career scope. As a side effect you may end up with people actually liking you.
*sigh* IHBT, I know.
On-topic now, I'm surprised I haven't (yet) seen much FUD about this technology being used to identify and track people. Seems to me that it'd be the sort of thing enforcement agencies would love to bits...
OMG SPOILER ALERT! :P
:P
Geez, now I guess I'll just let Marshall Windsor rot in jail.
It's a little different in Australia.
:/ Of course, as with most places, that money doesn't go into the main roads.
I drive around 15-20,000 kms a year. That's slightly higher than average, let's say 10k kms/yr is average. At 10 kms/L that's 1000 litres of petrol per year. At current prices that's around AU$1300 per year, of which AU$390 is fuel excise and $130 is GST. So I'm paying AU$520/year in fuel tax alone - add to that the $400 or so I pay for rego and we're an order of magnitude higher than the required figures you give.
If you want to sit I'll tax your seat
If you take a walk I'll tax your feet...
[quote]Characters are investments the way cars are investments -- they're not. They have barriers to entry which scale geometrically to meet arbitrary standards, but as a rule, their values always decrease. At least there's a chance that a car could increase in value through scarcity, but usually only if you deprive yourself the pleasure of driving it. I have yet to hear of anyone storing a level 1 character and selling it decades later for a small fortune.[/quote]I think you misunderstand what people mean when they say 'investment'. Time invested in characters isn't like money invested in a property - characters are investments the way, say, gym memberships are investments. The reward for spending 20, 50, 100 days on a character (my highest /played time on a WoW character is around 70 days, I'd guess my total /played between all my chars is over 150 days) is not the cash you get from ebaying that character. It's the enjoyment you get from playing it, a large part of which is gained from the advancement of your character through leveling and gear upgrades. When a company significantly alters a character's class or gear to make it weaker, that destroys the results of some of the effort put in by the player to improve that character. (example - in WoW, the combined effects of the weapon normalisation nerf and the warrior enrage nerf meant that the top end damage with the game's hardest hitting weapon, obtainable only through extended raiding and farming, was reduced to the damage that, pre-nerfs, an easily available crafted weapon could dish out.) In entertainment terms, it's like getting a massive pay cut. Imagine spending a year working out three times a week, only to have the gym decide that the free weights are overpowered and surgically remove 30% of the muscle mass you've gained.
For those of us that run WoW on Windows, you can ease the pain of alt+tabbing out by going into video options and enabling full screen windowed mode. This lets you have chat/web windows in the foreground and your maximized game in the background (albeit with clipping/backbuffer errors on my PC, but it works fine on others I've tried it on) and removes the context switch delay that you get with fullscreen non-windowed mode.
You should be sent to jail! Exposing a child to:
Hentai - 6yrs
Oral sex - 10yrs
Anal sex - 14yrs
How dare you tell your kid about the dirty unholy things that perverts do?!
<insert ongoing moral outrage here... of course I'm not serious, but thousands would be. children need violence, not sex. *sigh* >
(I've assumed the GP to be male, given that he mentions a wife - apologies if I'm mistaken.
Run into the girls' toilets... If there's a blank void or a surprising presence of urinals, the aliens couldn't reconstruct that part of your world because you've never been there before. Obviously.
I hear they're used to great effect at Microsoft.
Make it brown. Real is brown. And dark.
Add some full screen glow.
Some more full screen glow.
More glow!
More glow!!
MORE GLOW!!!
Head asplodes.
Anyway this got long and it's hometime. I'll check back.
I read an interesting piece on two different types of surveillance society a while back. The first one had state/police cameras recording everything and everywhere, and became a totalitarian state. The second had the same cameras everywhere but they were publicly accessible. The result was that, while any public action was viewable to everyone, the accountability was applied to everyone as well. The Man could watch The People, but The People could watch The Man too. The basic theme was that we're going to end up with a surveillance society anyway, and that full public access to the surveillance net is the only way to stop it from being used by a corrupt government. (I can't remember where I read it, could be Marshall Brain's page but I can't get there from work. Anyone recognize the sound of it?)
I think you misunderstand - the Uncanny Valley isn't a myth so much as an observation. It's pretty simple to demonstrate that most people are less comfortable with things that look nearly-but-not-quite human than things that are human, or things that look completely inhuman. Take, for example, Toy Story vs. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. The first one was a 3D cartoon, and hence it was easy to identify with the caricatures of toys. The second tried to be 'photorealistic' and (due to some rushed animation) was a little off, and as a result was much harder to identify with the characters. That's not to say that with excellent mocap/animation/production, an animated model can't be accepted as human. If they are, that just means that they're good enough to appear on the 'near side' of the valley.
The composite faces you mention are likewise on the near side of the valley. Images of faces fabricated from scratch often are likewise, with current technology, due to the fact that still images contain so much less information than moving ones. Compare modern CGI faces to those of the late 90s and you'll see how they gradually got better, climbing the near slope of the valley and becoming more believable and identify-with-able.
Alive without breath, as cold as death
Never thirsty, ever drinking
All in mail, never clinking
You can't be satisfied with merely *making* a grilled cheese sandwich.
You have to win it!
Dunno about you, but each of MY hands has four fingers.
:P
I know, I know, (-1, Pedantic).
Problem is, drunk people sometimes don't understand that they shouldn't drive, even if they would when sober. Last time I hid a friend's keys when he was drunk (I'm talking half-a-carton drunk) and wanting to drive home, it ended badly. (He tried to steal my mum's handbag then took a swing at my GF when she took it back... that night we eventually gave him his keys along with a "f**k off home, I hope you die on the way". Needless to say he's now banned from mum's house and not permitted to drink at mine. :P )
This way seems more subtle... expensive though.
Boys from South Park? Nah... should be able to get a lvl 3 Orc warrior to go around hitting 'em with a blackjack. They'll be back to work soon enough.
Best. Quest. EVER.