Yes, but it could at least let you distinguish between serious things like "injectors 3 and 5 are fucked" or "oil leaking into coolant, suspect blown head" and not-so-serious things like "tyre pressure slightly low on left rear tyre".
A while ago I helped a nice middle-aged lady who was sitting at the petrol station all worried because her car's "check tyre" light was on. I checked the pressures in all four of her tyres and they were fine. So this lady had sat around for a good half an hour just because her car was paranoid... not the best outcome, I'd say.
Not at all, unless you mean direct electrode stimulation of the brain. If you simply mean subverting a small section of an existing sensory channel to create a new one, then that can be done quite handily by adult brains.
Read up on sensory substitution. Still limited, but quite impressive what they've actually achieved so far.
Moreover, more than describing objects, you can color the world any way you want... want it to look medieval? It'll change the houses you see while walking down the street into huts and castles; someone riding a bike looks like they're riding a horse... and always online and always communicating with your friends.
Peter F. Hamilton's 'neural nanonics' did that in the Night's Dawn trilogy - one of the protagonists is described as using a program to make everyone around her look and sound like humanoid robots, or aliens.
I've considered corrective surgery a few times, but I found continuous-wear contact lenses to be more practical. For starters, the operation costs around 8 years' worth of lenses, and there's a fair chance that a second operation is needed later to correct for changing eyes. Secondly, there's a small but non-zero chance that something could go seriously wrong with the operation, leaving me significantly worse off or even blind. At worst, you take contacts out and the problem goes away (assuming you're not stupid enough to get a serious eye infection first). If contacts didn't work so well I'd probably have gone for the surgery, but as it is the overall cost-benefit analysis swings in favour of contacts.
That was a point Asimov (I think) made in one of his short stories - sure, there's no good reason for a plough robot, or a vacuuming robot, say, to be shaped like a human. But if the intelligent bit of the robot is the expensive bit, then it makes sense to build the robot in a humanoid shape so that it can use any equipment a human can use. Of course, that didn't take into account automation of farm machinery - these days some tractors already drive themselves by GPS with the farmer simply sitting inside as backup.
No, he built up the argument on the fact that the non-technical friend (NTF) would misinterpret a very basic technical term and end up doing something stupid as a result.
You have two options here: Either it's the NTF's fault because he's willfully ignorant of even the most basic technical terms (i.e. he's literally too ignorant to own a computer), or it's the OP's fault because he should have known what terms his NTF was familiar with, and worked around his ignorance. "Your CPU needs a new square shiny thing inside it."
The car analogy would be something along the lines of our NTF driving his car into the garage after noticing that it's hard to take off as smoothly as before, and proudly proclaiming "the brakes are grabbing, replace the brakes". My Dad used to do this all the time with our old car and it drove us mad. Luckily our garage was pretty scrupulous and would generally say "actually, no, your spark plugs are dirty, your brakes are fine."
Well you could just post it from a throwaway webmail account via something TOR-ish... but I think if you went to the effort of making an actual physical copy that was untraceable, they'd probably take it more seriously than if super_uncoverer_442321@hotmail.com sent them something claiming to uncover "super sekrit bad stuff".
That's why you print it, THEN photocopy it, maybe with a slightly smudged plastic sheet over it. Using an old non-digital copier that you picked up out of someone's rubbish or bought with cash at a 2nd hand store. Then drop it in a public postbox in a crowded place. Use gloves. Don't let any part of you that contains DNA get into the envelope.
Tis true, that any logical resources ("the mailbox", "the auction house") require centralised shared storage, but that said, the storage required is similar to any other large scale storage required by massively multiuser online apps such as facebook, google etc.
The real art is finding all the points where your game centralizes, and then coordinating the game design and the tech squad to design the game so that it doesn't require players to stress the weak points.
Words aren't pesky unless they were made up by the author.:P
Once you get past the first few chapters the problem goes away. Possibly half the difficulty I was having was that I was reading it intermittently while "waiting for code to compile" so I couldn't plough through the first few chapters as fast as I would with an actual paperback. It's not that I had trouble comprehending the narrative, it's just that it throws new names, places, and definitions at you nonstop for the first five chapters. At least once you meet up with the "foreign devils" it becomes a little more anthro-centric.
I'm up to chapter 14 now and will definitely buy the book if I can find it in paperback. Score one for free online distribution!:)
The mantra that I read somewhere and which I think describes the solution perfectly is "Fragment your world, not your playerbase". You can support any number of players in the same world without problems as long as player density doesn't rise too high. Just avoid centralising features from the game (the auction house in World of Warcraft was a prime example until they replicated it to all capital cities), or instance them off (invisibly, using something similar to WoW's zone phasing, but forcing parties to share the same zone to avoid "I'm standing right on top of you, where tf are you?" situations).
Sharding's just the easiest solution, and hence most common. It's really not necessary any more, and detracts a lot from the social side of sharded MMO games.
Aaaargh! Chapter 4 introduces a THIRD as-yet-completely-unrelated set of characters and unpronounceable place names. I can see he's trying to do a Peter F. Hamilton style "lots of plotlines converge near the end of the book" structure but god it's annoying when there's numerous words introduced in each new scene. It's only on the third read that you can even guess which are race names, faction names, personal names, or descriptions.
It's still an interesting story so far, otherwise, but it's really reinforcing the "enjoyment gained from reading a book is inversely proportional to the number of made up words" rule.
They are a community download site. Surely they could appeal to their userbase to upload any files they'd downloaded? Any content that was remotely popular would have to have copies floating around. And even then, that's assuming that the original creators of the lost assets don't have copies any more. Most of the hobby stuff I've done in the last 10 years is embedded *somewhere* in my recursive backup folder, and I doubt I'm unusual in that respect.
Re:Microsoft's Ripoff Of Sony's Skill Points
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e-penish waving.
And that's what Sean Connery thinks of online gaming.
And so I volunteered my first novel, Mother of Demons, to prove the case. And the next day Mother of Demons went up online, offered to the public for free.
Never one to turn down a read, I've read the first chapter... I'm kind of torn with this one, it's quite engaging but at the same time, there's a tornado of made-up words which makes it impossible to actually form any clear picture of the scene on the first read.
I'll probably keep reading but if I'd picked the book up in a shop and seen that many indecipherable words I would definitely not buy it. So in that way, it's a great candidate for release as a free e-book, if I like the story enough I'll want a hard copy anyway. Hell, I've re-purchased books that I've read to death purely because I want a copy for my bookshelf.
Borrow a sheet of glass from someone and use it to press the pages flat. Not so good for the binding, but doing it once shouldn't cause too much damage, and definitely less than would be caused by 50 people reading said book.
This and this are more interesting to me - the after-image of the animated pattern distorts anything you look at for a few second after you stop looking. The rotating snakes one is cool too though.:)
My Firefox does 11 times more work than Chrome. The plugins I run are worth the minor tradeoffs in performance - because it's still speedy.
Exactly. This is one of those 'correlation that does not imply causation' things. The most popular browsers are the fullest featured, most stable, most complete browsers. Being full-featured, stable and complete generally comes at a performance cost.
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Can't you just use normal tyres and carry tyre-in-a-can? Unless you *really* screw a tyre up you'll be able to limp home with that.
Yes, but it could at least let you distinguish between serious things like "injectors 3 and 5 are fucked" or "oil leaking into coolant, suspect blown head" and not-so-serious things like "tyre pressure slightly low on left rear tyre".
A while ago I helped a nice middle-aged lady who was sitting at the petrol station all worried because her car's "check tyre" light was on. I checked the pressures in all four of her tyres and they were fine. So this lady had sat around for a good half an hour just because her car was paranoid... not the best outcome, I'd say.
Simple; because the only new discoveries you HEAR about are the ones that are (at least potentially) better than what we already have.
There are new, mediocre discoveries every day but they're never heard about except in some dusty journal.
Not at all, unless you mean direct electrode stimulation of the brain. If you simply mean subverting a small section of an existing sensory channel to create a new one, then that can be done quite handily by adult brains.
Read up on sensory substitution. Still limited, but quite impressive what they've actually achieved so far.
Moreover, more than describing objects, you can color the world any way you want... want it to look medieval? It'll change the houses you see while walking down the street into huts and castles; someone riding a bike looks like they're riding a horse... and always online and always communicating with your friends.
Peter F. Hamilton's 'neural nanonics' did that in the Night's Dawn trilogy - one of the protagonists is described as using a program to make everyone around her look and sound like humanoid robots, or aliens.
I've considered corrective surgery a few times, but I found continuous-wear contact lenses to be more practical. For starters, the operation costs around 8 years' worth of lenses, and there's a fair chance that a second operation is needed later to correct for changing eyes. Secondly, there's a small but non-zero chance that something could go seriously wrong with the operation, leaving me significantly worse off or even blind. At worst, you take contacts out and the problem goes away (assuming you're not stupid enough to get a serious eye infection first). If contacts didn't work so well I'd probably have gone for the surgery, but as it is the overall cost-benefit analysis swings in favour of contacts.
That was a point Asimov (I think) made in one of his short stories - sure, there's no good reason for a plough robot, or a vacuuming robot, say, to be shaped like a human. But if the intelligent bit of the robot is the expensive bit, then it makes sense to build the robot in a humanoid shape so that it can use any equipment a human can use. Of course, that didn't take into account automation of farm machinery - these days some tractors already drive themselves by GPS with the farmer simply sitting inside as backup.
No, he built up the argument on the fact that the non-technical friend (NTF) would misinterpret a very basic technical term and end up doing something stupid as a result.
You have two options here: Either it's the NTF's fault because he's willfully ignorant of even the most basic technical terms (i.e. he's literally too ignorant to own a computer), or it's the OP's fault because he should have known what terms his NTF was familiar with, and worked around his ignorance. "Your CPU needs a new square shiny thing inside it."
The car analogy would be something along the lines of our NTF driving his car into the garage after noticing that it's hard to take off as smoothly as before, and proudly proclaiming "the brakes are grabbing, replace the brakes". My Dad used to do this all the time with our old car and it drove us mad. Luckily our garage was pretty scrupulous and would generally say "actually, no, your spark plugs are dirty, your brakes are fine."
"Period." is not a sentence.
You've never lived with a woman, have you?
Wouldn't blind testing of romantic relationships involve a lot more touching and feeling? ;)
Well you could just post it from a throwaway webmail account via something TOR-ish... but I think if you went to the effort of making an actual physical copy that was untraceable, they'd probably take it more seriously than if super_uncoverer_442321@hotmail.com sent them something claiming to uncover "super sekrit bad stuff".
That's why you print it, THEN photocopy it, maybe with a slightly smudged plastic sheet over it. Using an old non-digital copier that you picked up out of someone's rubbish or bought with cash at a 2nd hand store. Then drop it in a public postbox in a crowded place. Use gloves. Don't let any part of you that contains DNA get into the envelope.
Did I miss any identifying factors?
Tis true, that any logical resources ("the mailbox", "the auction house") require centralised shared storage, but that said, the storage required is similar to any other large scale storage required by massively multiuser online apps such as facebook, google etc.
The real art is finding all the points where your game centralizes, and then coordinating the game design and the tech squad to design the game so that it doesn't require players to stress the weak points.
Words aren't pesky unless they were made up by the author. :P
:)
Once you get past the first few chapters the problem goes away. Possibly half the difficulty I was having was that I was reading it intermittently while "waiting for code to compile" so I couldn't plough through the first few chapters as fast as I would with an actual paperback. It's not that I had trouble comprehending the narrative, it's just that it throws new names, places, and definitions at you nonstop for the first five chapters. At least once you meet up with the "foreign devils" it becomes a little more anthro-centric.
I'm up to chapter 14 now and will definitely buy the book if I can find it in paperback. Score one for free online distribution!
The mantra that I read somewhere and which I think describes the solution perfectly is "Fragment your world, not your playerbase". You can support any number of players in the same world without problems as long as player density doesn't rise too high. Just avoid centralising features from the game (the auction house in World of Warcraft was a prime example until they replicated it to all capital cities), or instance them off (invisibly, using something similar to WoW's zone phasing, but forcing parties to share the same zone to avoid "I'm standing right on top of you, where tf are you?" situations).
Sharding's just the easiest solution, and hence most common. It's really not necessary any more, and detracts a lot from the social side of sharded MMO games.
Aaaargh! Chapter 4 introduces a THIRD as-yet-completely-unrelated set of characters and unpronounceable place names. I can see he's trying to do a Peter F. Hamilton style "lots of plotlines converge near the end of the book" structure but god it's annoying when there's numerous words introduced in each new scene. It's only on the third read that you can even guess which are race names, faction names, personal names, or descriptions.
It's still an interesting story so far, otherwise, but it's really reinforcing the "enjoyment gained from reading a book is inversely proportional to the number of made up words" rule.
Make sure you have offsite backups
They are a community download site. Surely they could appeal to their userbase to upload any files they'd downloaded? Any content that was remotely popular would have to have copies floating around. And even then, that's assuming that the original creators of the lost assets don't have copies any more. Most of the hobby stuff I've done in the last 10 years is embedded *somewhere* in my recursive backup folder, and I doubt I'm unusual in that respect.
e-penish waving.
And that's what Sean Connery thinks of online gaming.
And so I volunteered my first novel, Mother of Demons, to prove the case. And the next day Mother of Demons went up online, offered to the public for free.
Never one to turn down a read, I've read the first chapter... I'm kind of torn with this one, it's quite engaging but at the same time, there's a tornado of made-up words which makes it impossible to actually form any clear picture of the scene on the first read.
I'll probably keep reading but if I'd picked the book up in a shop and seen that many indecipherable words I would definitely not buy it. So in that way, it's a great candidate for release as a free e-book, if I like the story enough I'll want a hard copy anyway. Hell, I've re-purchased books that I've read to death purely because I want a copy for my bookshelf.
I agree. GPP is a gosh-darned cunt.
Borrow a sheet of glass from someone and use it to press the pages flat. Not so good for the binding, but doing it once shouldn't cause too much damage, and definitely less than would be caused by 50 people reading said book.
Yes. :(
This and this are more interesting to me - the after-image of the animated pattern distorts anything you look at for a few second after you stop looking. The rotating snakes one is cool too though. :)
Leave 'im alone, 'e's had a hard day!
My Firefox does 11 times more work than Chrome. The plugins I run are worth the minor tradeoffs in performance - because it's still speedy.
Exactly. This is one of those 'correlation that does not imply causation' things. The most popular browsers are the fullest featured, most stable, most complete browsers. Being full-featured, stable and complete generally comes at a performance cost.