Slashdot claims, in a headline, that "anonymous hosting is banned."
Read the little blurb, and it says that not at all. It says that if a webpage does not clearly identify the page owner, any content on it becomes the responsibility of the webmaster.
It basically ramps up the responsibilities of those who own the machine.
Makes sense to me. If child pornography is illegal, and someone posts it up on an anonymous webserver, anonymously, *someone* needs to be held responsible for getting rid of the content.
What's so wrong with that? Unless the French government is really pushy, sounds to me like it'll only become a problem for webmasters who have users that post illegal content.
Those web hosting services *can* continue, right? They'll just probably be modifying the TOS to enforce their users to supply names and contact info.
NASA folks have probably detected some bug in the Galileo code that will, in a year or so, result in them losing contact with the craft.
Due to limitations in the spacecraft's hardware, they are unable to transmit new code to patch this bug.
So, in an effort to save some face, NASA decides to tell people they're going to just destroy the thing because they don't want to risk running into a moon that might have some life on it.
Works darn well. Not only does their error get a nice coverup, but NASA gets billed as "responsible" for trying to protect life on other celestial bodies. Plus, they get to point the Hubble at the moon they decide to plow Galileo into, and attempt to calculate how big a fireball the sucker makes.
Manufacturers need to stop shrinking down resolutions to the point of unreadability, and instead work on increasing real estate.
Meaning, I want everything to appear at the nice, legible size it shows up as at 1024x768. But I want the desktop size to be like 1600x1200 (or greater).
Same number of pixels per inch, just more pixels on the entire monitor.
This seems like such an obvious problem.. does anyone know if this is being addressed, anywhere?
Windows is still incredibly vulnerable to Melissa-type exploits.
It's like a basketball game. One team runs to one end of the court, makes a shot, then the other team runs to the other end of the court and makes another shot. Back and forth, und so veiter.
Sometimes a team misses a shot, sometimes they make it in. Arguments like this annoy me as much as basketball, too, though for different reasons.;)
It shouldn't be about placing blame; it should be about fixing the problems. The article linked was generally fair, though. The line about "windows being safe" was merely inserted to ease the worries of technoweenies who would otherwise start to fear what horrible deeds their LAN is capable of.
But, of course, us folk have to get all up in arms about it because it just might maybe sorta kinda almost impact badly on the divine entity that is Linux (or Solaris too, let's not forget about them).
There's no sense of hubris about the grand design or anything about it [Quake 3], or trying to impose a story or a tale on top of all this. It's looking at a game in it's fundamental sense of what you're doing has to be fun. It's not a matter of beating the game into submission or accomplishing something, the actions have to be fun.
There has to be something that you wanna just go out and do. People don't play softball because they want to beat the game of softball; it has to be an action that's fun by itself. I think that we succeeded in a lot of ways there. We expected and did receive a lot of feedback from the incestuous core of our fanbase.
Now, while I agree with these statements at face value, and also disagree with them, I felt it was a rather interesting way to paint a picture of the difference between what Halo will be, and what Quake (is and) will be.
Carmack's 100% accurate in the first sentence in that second paragraph. A game *has* to be fun from the get-go. One needs to be able to dive in, be it via a tutorial or a skirmish mode, and be able to get something done in the game. That's what games are for; entertainment. If one has to work too hard at it, it's no longer entertainment.
He goes on to explain how a certain percentage of folks like complication; that makes sense too. At a few points in my gaming past, I've nudged into that field.
Therefore, on the surface, Carmack is 100% accurate. Yet, he's also obviously missing something. He claims that putting a story in the game is "imposing" it on the player. He suggests that it's a burden, and you have to beat the game in to submission to get the story out of the way.
I suppose that's a valid view, but look at it as a question of longevity. Humans are pretty well known for enjoying a good story; we like watching (or reading about) a protagonist battling an antagonist (of whatever form) and solving a problem. Tragedies are popular, too.
Look at it this way: What sticks in your head longer? A day watching a baseball game, or reading a good book?
Five years after the fact, I'm still pondering plot elements of Marathon. Doom, in my memories, is just a game with a lot of monsters running around that you get to shoot. Both obviously have managed to stick in my head, but I value Doom far less than Marathon.
I'm not suggesting Carmack was stating that "dear god games with stories suck and they need to die." He was actually pretty fair in his statements; he's just expressing his feelings. However, I did want to counter that by saying games that "impose" a story on us tend to be held a bit more dearly in a person's thoughts.
They just have more staying power.
It's all part of a conspiracy.
on
AI Monkey Robot
·
· Score: 1
It's clear that "robo-monkeys" have been researched before, and their usefullness in conquering "evil forces" is at leat partially explored.
BoboBot was merely a simulation and technology demo; this latest BBC article proves that governments are working to create legions of these littls beasts.
Why shouldn't these people be allowed to put up their hateful webpages? I mean, what if eToy had been a racist group? Would that then mean that they wouldn't have deserved all the support this site gave them?
Freedom of speech should cover all topics.. even if society says the topic involved is a "bad" one.
IMO, we shouldn't argue for "our rights online" if that doesn't extend to anyone who puts a webpage up. That's the beauty of this old internet.. if you see a webpage (for example) that offends you, just make another webpage that outlines the flaws of said offensive website.
I don't support these folks at all, except for the fact that they're excersising their right to say what they want. What really offends me in all this is that the UN (actually, the UN is never referenced directly with regards to censoring racist websites, so maybe I should just say "these countries") seems to be assuming their policing the net is wanted.. or even legal.
It suggests that AI research has been "slowing down." Hello? What about that big chess machine IBM built? What about all those bots people wrote for Quake2? What about Half-Life? Now, admittedly, most of this is entertainment related, but it's still AI research, and it's getting pretty darn advanced. Q3, if you listen to Carmack, has even better bots. I mean, this guy has a cool idea, but so far, it looks like there's no client to download, his mission statement is incredibly vague, and there's really no details about how they're going to use distributed computing to enhance the project. Past that, his claim that "AI has been slowing down" seems totally wrong. Call me skeptical.
Why can't people take what was said at face value and just get on with their lives?
There was no value judgements made in the small blurb that suggested those with long uptimes are more elite. It was merely a way to suggest that, if you've nothing important going on, get the patches and install them.
People react to small twists of phrases in these news entries like they're prophecies given by god, and feel that's an invitation to nitpick details far beyond the context they were used in.
Try not to be so frigging sensitive, folks. Read the news entry, glean what it means, and forgive the guy for putting a twist of levity into his news post. If you want a soapbox where you can rant againt people who brag about uptimes, go make yer own website.
Spare us from having to read over the top of you using each news post as a springboard to rant about your peeves.
If you read every mention of "PC" in that article as "personal computer," rather than "Wintel," it's actually a pretty fair article. They never say once that "If PC's running Windows didn't exist, we wouldn't have an Internet." Nor do they imply it.
IMO, anyways.
They just tell us that having cheap, powerful hardware at home is a driving force behind the explosion of the Internet. They talk about the hardware far more than they do the software. If all our computers were still the size of entire buildings, I sure as hell wouldn't have been able to order my Sluggy shirt online one month ago.
Which seems like such an obvious point, it makes one wonder why they felt a need to write about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot claims, in a headline, that "anonymous hosting is banned."
Read the little blurb, and it says that not at all. It says that if a webpage does not clearly identify the page owner, any content on it becomes the responsibility of the webmaster.
It basically ramps up the responsibilities of those who own the machine.
Makes sense to me. If child pornography is illegal, and someone posts it up on an anonymous webserver, anonymously, *someone* needs to be held responsible for getting rid of the content.
What's so wrong with that? Unless the French government is really pushy, sounds to me like it'll only become a problem for webmasters who have users that post illegal content.
Those web hosting services *can* continue, right? They'll just probably be modifying the TOS to enforce their users to supply names and contact info.
NASA folks have probably detected some bug in the Galileo code that will, in a year or so, result in them losing contact with the craft.
Due to limitations in the spacecraft's hardware, they are unable to transmit new code to patch this bug.
So, in an effort to save some face, NASA decides to tell people they're going to just destroy the thing because they don't want to risk running into a moon that might have some life on it.
Works darn well. Not only does their error get a nice coverup, but NASA gets billed as "responsible" for trying to protect life on other celestial bodies. Plus, they get to point the Hubble at the moon they decide to plow Galileo into, and attempt to calculate how big a fireball the sucker makes.
(note to the humor impaired: piss off)
I thought I was the only one who felt this way. ;)
Manufacturers need to stop shrinking down resolutions to the point of unreadability, and instead work on increasing real estate.
Meaning, I want everything to appear at the nice, legible size it shows up as at 1024x768. But I want the desktop size to be like 1600x1200 (or greater).
Same number of pixels per inch, just more pixels on the entire monitor.
This seems like such an obvious problem.. does anyone know if this is being addressed, anywhere?
Windows is still incredibly vulnerable to Melissa-type exploits.
;)
It's like a basketball game. One team runs to one end of the court, makes a shot, then the other team runs to the other end of the court and makes another shot. Back and forth, und so veiter.
Sometimes a team misses a shot, sometimes they make it in. Arguments like this annoy me as much as basketball, too, though for different reasons.
It shouldn't be about placing blame; it should be about fixing the problems. The article linked was generally fair, though. The line about "windows being safe" was merely inserted to ease the worries of technoweenies who would otherwise start to fear what horrible deeds their LAN is capable of.
But, of course, us folk have to get all up in arms about it because it just might maybe sorta kinda almost impact badly on the divine entity that is Linux (or Solaris too, let's not forget about them).
*tbbbtptptps*
There has to be something that you wanna just go out and do. People don't play softball because they want to beat the game of softball; it has to be an action that's fun by itself. I think that we succeeded in a lot of ways there. We expected and did receive a lot of feedback from the incestuous core of our fanbase.
Now, while I agree with these statements at face value, and also disagree with them, I felt it was a rather interesting way to paint a picture of the difference between what Halo will be, and what Quake (is and) will be.
Carmack's 100% accurate in the first sentence in that second paragraph. A game *has* to be fun from the get-go. One needs to be able to dive in, be it via a tutorial or a skirmish mode, and be able to get something done in the game. That's what games are for; entertainment. If one has to work too hard at it, it's no longer entertainment.
He goes on to explain how a certain percentage of folks like complication; that makes sense too. At a few points in my gaming past, I've nudged into that field.
Therefore, on the surface, Carmack is 100% accurate. Yet, he's also obviously missing something. He claims that putting a story in the game is "imposing" it on the player. He suggests that it's a burden, and you have to beat the game in to submission to get the story out of the way.
I suppose that's a valid view, but look at it as a question of longevity. Humans are pretty well known for enjoying a good story; we like watching (or reading about) a protagonist battling an antagonist (of whatever form) and solving a problem. Tragedies are popular, too.
Look at it this way: What sticks in your head longer? A day watching a baseball game, or reading a good book?
Five years after the fact, I'm still pondering plot elements of Marathon. Doom, in my memories, is just a game with a lot of monsters running around that you get to shoot. Both obviously have managed to stick in my head, but I value Doom far less than Marathon.
I'm not suggesting Carmack was stating that "dear god games with stories suck and they need to die." He was actually pretty fair in his statements; he's just expressing his feelings. However, I did want to counter that by saying games that "impose" a story on us tend to be held a bit more dearly in a person's thoughts.
They just have more staying power.
It's clear that "robo-monkeys" have been researched before, and their usefullness in conquering "evil forces" is at leat partially explored.
BoboBot was merely a simulation and technology demo; this latest BBC article proves that governments are working to create legions of these littls beasts.
Halo.
'Nuff said.
(though Oni would be welcome, too)
Why shouldn't these people be allowed to put up their hateful webpages? I mean, what if eToy had been a racist group? Would that then mean that they wouldn't have deserved all the support this site gave them?
Freedom of speech should cover all topics.. even if society says the topic involved is a "bad" one.
IMO, we shouldn't argue for "our rights online" if that doesn't extend to anyone who puts a webpage up. That's the beauty of this old internet.. if you see a webpage (for example) that offends you, just make another webpage that outlines the flaws of said offensive website.
I don't support these folks at all, except for the fact that they're excersising their right to say what they want. What really offends me in all this is that the UN (actually, the UN is never referenced directly with regards to censoring racist websites, so maybe I should just say "these countries") seems to be assuming their policing the net is wanted.. or even legal.
It suggests that AI research has been "slowing down." Hello? What about that big chess machine IBM built? What about all those bots people wrote for Quake2? What about Half-Life? Now, admittedly, most of this is entertainment related, but it's still AI research, and it's getting pretty darn advanced. Q3, if you listen to Carmack, has even better bots. I mean, this guy has a cool idea, but so far, it looks like there's no client to download, his mission statement is incredibly vague, and there's really no details about how they're going to use distributed computing to enhance the project. Past that, his claim that "AI has been slowing down" seems totally wrong. Call me skeptical.
Why can't people take what was said at face value and just get on with their lives?
There was no value judgements made in the small blurb that suggested those with long uptimes are more elite. It was merely a way to suggest that, if you've nothing important going on, get the patches and install them.
People react to small twists of phrases in these news entries like they're prophecies given by god, and feel that's an invitation to nitpick details far beyond the context they were used in.
Try not to be so frigging sensitive, folks. Read the news entry, glean what it means, and forgive the guy for putting a twist of levity into his news post. If you want a soapbox where you can rant againt people who brag about uptimes, go make yer own website.
Spare us from having to read over the top of you using each news post as a springboard to rant about your peeves.
If you read every mention of "PC" in that article as "personal computer," rather than "Wintel," it's actually a pretty fair article. They never say once that "If PC's running Windows didn't exist, we wouldn't have an Internet." Nor do they imply it.
IMO, anyways.
They just tell us that having cheap, powerful hardware at home is a driving force behind the explosion of the Internet. They talk about the hardware far more than they do the software. If all our computers were still the size of entire buildings, I sure as hell wouldn't have been able to order my Sluggy shirt online one month ago.
Which seems like such an obvious point, it makes one wonder why they felt a need to write about it.