Indies don't usually have yes men, or more correctly: We're close enough to the programmers that they can laugh in our faces and tell us what zany ideas AREN'T POSSIBLE given the game's canvas -- the technology itself. A good designer can make amazing stuff happen in limited mediums -- They can make the most of what actually is in the engine, rather than banking on that which requires a complete rewrite.
Now the crazy thing is that when some insane idea drifts my way either from my own mind or while I'm being part of the idea reactor for the team, I may actually think on it over night and figure out how to pull it off. However, being an implementor means it's my job to say "NO!" not "Yes, but...". "Yes, but... It'll mean taking 8 times more time or money than we have." "Maybe but... we'll have to try out 20 different implementations to figure out if the feature is workable and meanwhile the other devs and content makers will be waiting to see if its possible, or they may wind up scrapping assets if not." -- Give 'em the TL;DR: "No!"
You get maybe ONE of those "That might be doable" per game, maybe TWO if you're helping make the implementation happen, and have an idea of how to pull it off. Maybe a few more if time or money or a playable release isn't important to you. It's important to try new things, especially for innovation; However, you can innovate yourself right out the other side of, "Yes, but...", into, "Oh it might be possible, but the release schedule better include relocating the asset repo before the sun explodes", and only takes one really bad, "Yes", to make that happen. The bigger the behemoth under you the more wonderful are things that seem they might just be crazy enough to work. This is always folly due to the planning fallacy. No game is ever finished (we just have to stop adding features and polishing at some point), so if you didn't hear or say enough "NO" then you'll be bound to have game designers making wonderful statements which seemed wholly plausible at the outset or individually, but are not actually executable as a whole. You wind up with a game suffering from amputations instead of leveraging what was possible to its fullest. You start to sound just like Peter Molyneux.
Sometimes it's not the designer's fault that their plans were just too crazy enough NOT to work out. And, sometimes they just push the hype-drive beyond warp 13. The public really can't tell the difference, but you can help prevent the former by learning when to say, "NO!" Saying, "NO", can leave the door open for a better "Yes!". Smaller guys say more "No", and less "Yes". Indies can't afford to entertain as many pie-in-the-sky prosaic Prozac delusions. Great ideas are a dime a dozen, it's really the execution that matters...
Hey, someone has to think of the future space archaeologists!
"It seems our hive minds were not intelligently designed, but began on a distant moon emerging from strange complex life forms as fecal bacteria from their anus."
dunno maybe its just me, but when floating around in space I wouldn't want a suit made of dark blue or grey with goffy swooshes on it, make that thing neon and coat it in a reflective layer so I light up like a road sign if the rope breaks
Agreed, the neon bits would make surveillance that much easier of our citizens. I can understand their desire for secrecy whilst prancing about as glowing grinning gits, but clearly they have no expectation of privacy when doing so. If regulating gangs of manky men roaming the night in stupendous sweat suits isn't the job of the Ministry of Silly Walks, then who is!?
Note that the prime weapon against any populace is secrecy. Secrecy yields ignorance. Slaves were not allowed to read. Employees are forbidden from informing others of their earnings -- WTF? The governments all now have secret agencies. Actions can be dismissed as necessary for some other secret cause. Corruption requires power and secrecy, for without the secrecy the power soon fades.
Thus, those with power should be forbade secrecy of action when they wield it. Accountability depends on awareness and is inherently anti-secrecy. We should be able to prove our rulers are not working against us. Education is key in this regard and that of dealing with automation.
Let's face it: The more dangerous menial jobs are wasting entire human brains worth of potential. Eliminating the drudgery need not result in joblessness. Someone will be needed to design and maintain the automatons. Even simply expressing your humanity is rewarded by society in the arts. Teams of researchers will be needed to run experiments -- The problem is in underpaying researchers for their research. It takes the same effort to produce a success as to rule something out as a failure, and many discoveries have come by accident from mostly unrelated research.
The copyright and patent system are futures markets for ideas. Instead of marketing that which is scarce -- the effort to crafting and testing ideas -- these systems leverage artificial scarcity against humanity and the creators themselves. Corporations are thus able to cherry pick the individual products of creators to reward them. This is the Information Age! Your are on The Internet! Where is the Wikipedia of freely accessible Scientific Studies that the web was created explicitly to facilitate?! Hidden behind paywalls of Journals, and duplication forbidden to create scarcity of otherwise infinitively reproducible bits.
Instead of hobbling ourselves with artificial scarcity, we should market what is scarce and simply require the capitalists to pay the price that our efforts are truly worth. Enough secrecy in our salaries and governments; Enough artificial scarcity. As a cyberneticist I see secrecy and artificial scarcity as two sides of the same coin: Evil is Information Disparity.
Yes, moving the energy production outside of the car is the key point with shifting to electric cars. This way if a more efficient or less polluting energy source is used, all electric cars benefit from its deployment. If a new more efficient dinosaur engine is made, only new buyers benefit -- it does nothing about existing vehicles.
Yes, but you'll also need to wait for your Zingergy to recharge between blasts. You can pay to get a full charge. They'll accept payment in Facebucks or Friendspam. Unlike with OUYA, you can never pay enough to win.
Oh that's great news! Because that means I can give the property value assessor the finger! I don't owe the IRS any increased taxes due to my property's appreciation since I haven't sold it at a gain! WOW!
Yep, I do test some of my Android stuff with bluetooth gamepads and TVs, so that part of porting to OUYA isn't a big deal. The primary problems I had with OUYA development be two fold:
0. Free to play means taking the time to create a demo version, and the effort is barely worth it because: 1. Cheap games are impulse purchases. Once curiosity is sated by the demo, the drive to purchase is gone.
For my wares, screenshots and videos drive hype and result in sales; Demos largely do not, and frequently decrease sales instead. "Oh, that was fun, I'll buy it later, lemme try this other demo first", lather, rinse, repeat, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 pennies. Even when demos do lead to sales it is insanely difficult to create a good demo because you're trying to demonstrate enough of the gameplay to leave the player with a satisfying grasp of what the game is without including enough content to leave the player satisfied with just the demo.
This is "big" news, relatively speaking, for (prospective) OUYA devs. Allowing pay-up-front-once may convince me to port to OUYA, given that it's the only sales method I use. I've seen much of the same sentiment among other indie game devs. Personally, I'm still hesitant because when I factor in time and cost to play test & debug a version just for OUYA, the cost/benefit ratio drops back to at or below even. I'll have to test after cutting down on geometry details & texture res because phones out-pace OUYA in power; For for phones/tablets I can expect folks to upgrade so I don't test on multiple hardware power "tiers", I just pick the minimal requirement for a smooth game. Factoring in creation of a demo just for OUYA, and what that means for sales, eliminated it as an option but now I might take the risk.
Notice that I do not concern myself with in-app purchases; While that is how one deploys a demo version on OUYA (a one time IAP unlockable), a continuous micro-transaction model is not a part of my game mechanic vocabulary, and never will be. If you want to pay-to-win parts of my games, then those spots are not monetization opportunities, they are where I've failed as a game designer. Banking heavily on that pay-to-win model (since demos don't drive sales), really irked me about OUYA -- it means I'd have to design a game around its monetization, ugh, no. If games are to be artforms we have to treat them that way -- That means being born without an auth-server death sentence, hence without IAP even if it's a one time unlockable.
I also find it frustrating that a console claiming to be giving developers more freedom even had the restriction of free-to-play only in the first place which no other platform had. That OUYA also claims to be giving players more choice while they require them to hand over a credit card to even use the device is also really messed up considering the games were all "free to try". Trying to leverage "casual" gamer marketing from a traditionally "hard-core" gamer console space is also a strategic failure, IMO. Protip: "Hard core" gamers are the prime spenders on "casual" games too... So the most paying demographic already has a console, they likely also already have a PC, and phone / tablet. I can't see casuals picking the vastly underpowered OUYA just for casual-tier TV games when they can get far more powerful and seamless experience with an Xbox360 for around the same price, or likely already need/have a phone, and with these options won't have to trust kids with a credit card number just for them to play games.
I agree that nearly anyone who would buy an OUYA has a cellphone and they can probably hook it up to their TVs, but no one wants to jump up and yank wires from their phone in the middle of a game to take a call... For this reason I don't think wireless video transmission is quite the answer either. Smart TVs aren't the answer because TVs are expensive and you'll want to upgrade hardware long before the screen nee
The problem with transaction fees is there's no way to properly market them
It's called escrow. A trusted 3rd party that holds the money until transaction is confirmed and/or refunds transactions on bad deals. Essentially transaction insurance. Are you saying that credit cards aren't marketable?
Every once in a while someone will insist on paying me for fabricating some doodad, like a piece of an automotive door-lock assembly or some of my beer opener / keepers (works like a mason jar; useful for when you want to drink part of a bigger homebrew beer bottle).
I always have several robotics/cybernetics hobby projects and use a RepRapPro-Huxley model to create many small parts. I used it to print the tracks and guides for a custom design 3D printer based on a heavily modified Huxley. Instead of a moving tray the printer itself moves and is permanently mounted under a 3 meter run of cabinets over my work bench, so I can print really big parts for armatures or chassis, or run off a series of multiple smaller items mostly unattended. This requires knowledge of home construction to float floors & walls, and reinforce cabinets such that settling and shifting of the garage doesn't affect calibration and the workbench can be adjusted for squareness with the cabinets. It's essentially a small part of a building within a building. Construction was not for the faint of heart. I don't think I'd be able to tackle it without having prior experience in robotics, electronics, home building, and as an electrician -- the bench surface is several aluminium hotbeds with manually adjustable variable temperature for attaching / detaching and cleaning off thermoplastics with different characteristics (got tired of screwing with strategic placement of Kapton tape).
Fellow tinkerers occasionally want to try producing some custom thing, but if I don't have to design the object I usually don't charge anything for using my printers. Girls and boys young and old enjoy hanging out in the garage and "helping" print, build, program, and play with bots. The plastic isn't so expensive I can't let folks play at designing something. IMO, that's the real benefit of having a 3D printer. Humans are tool using creatures, once they know they can make new tools they start finding more excuses to do so.
One neighbourhood kid has become quite the enthusiast and has told his parents that he only wanted a 3D printer for Christmas. "Then I can make as many toys as I want!" - It's like wishing for more wishes.
Spectrum is a public resource. Your comment perfectly illustrates why we need segments of various classes of signal free and open to the public. No restrictions like on family-band where store and forward packet radio is illegal.
I don't see what the huge concern is. Really, for less that $20 you can create a small tunable jammer. If people want to do the jamming they can already. The assumption that folks won't play by the rules is idiotic considering the existence of short-wave two-way radios. Who knows what innovation we could have if tinkerers were allowed to play. Perhaps a world wide distributed store and forward self organizing spread spectrum multi-power level mesh network with data deduplication (infohashes for resources) which inherently has low latency, free collocation, and anonymity built in because you get most of your data from your neighbors or their neighbors instead of re-sending from the source -- Essentially a terrestrial version of NASA's Space Internet (Delay Tolerant Network) is possible.
We have the technology to create a network where you only pay for the device then become a node in a network: No monthly fees, bigger and more expensive node, faster your cross country connection. We have the technology to automatically frequency hop and reduce or increase power so that channels can be reused over short ranges. We have the technology for point to point line of sight beams. We hobbyists have organized complex information networks like Fidonet before, and were such system allowed, non profit groups could handle coordination and management of local line-of-sight networking. Folks that say it's impossible have never tried, and are likely ignorant of HAM radio operations. Cell phones are proof of the viability.
Given the existence of legally purchasable capacitors, transistors and wires, the issue isn't that software defined radio could possibly stomp on other people's signals -- Hell, a fist or bat could potentially injure people, but we don't lop off hands and outlaw ball games. The issue is that software defined radio threatens to destroy the need for carriers altogether. That's a good thing for the consumers, and hence why it isn't happening: The FCC and equivalent bodies operate in the best interest of the corporations not the people.
Now imagine phase changes on a multiversal scale. All those infinite chaotic dimensions then BLAM a few align such that their properties harmonize and propagate in a brilliant momentary flash before returning to chaos time and again like fireworks and then the energy density becomes low enough that the explosions stop among some dimensions and yet occur among others, and one of those final big bangs was this universe wherein at the smallest levels of reality we see the infinitely differentiable quantum uncertain foam from which chaotic energy crystallizes into matter momentarily and is destroyed in tiny little flashes, like fireworks, before returning to the chaos.
Now imagine phase changes on a gigaversal scale... For this experiment beings aware of less than 12 dimensions will need a visual aid. You'll need to wrap your cognitive locus in tin-foil and have access to an old microwave oven. A turn table is optional -- it's the lamp and timer's "Ding" that's most important.
This is un-provable and wild and rampant speculation. Keep twisting the evidence to support your beliefs, meanwhile I will worship God and be granted life Everlasting. You, on the other hand, will burn in the Pit.
Have you heard the bitchin' news?! I reject your god because I don't need some elitist hipster cloud club. I've had my fill of standing in lines and getting judged at the door in this life, screw doing it again in the next. So, I bought my front-row ticket to the hottest show in Earth because all the good bands and fun people will be there.
You may be interested in my pamphlet, "So, you've decided to go to Hell."
1) Golfer wacks ball + rocks with club. 2) Club produces sparks that burn for up to one second igniting surrounding brush. 3) Golfer ignores smoking brush and walks off after his ball.
Makes sense to me!
The brush tends to smolder for a good long while before it becomes an inferno. Just light a corner of a leaf with a spark or red hot iron, and toss it on a pile of leaves (in a controlled environment, fire pit, etc.). It may burn itself out, but the spark that causes an inferno may come from many leaves or grasses that burn nearly completely out, before touching off the next one. It could be hours before any smoke or flame is noticeable from just a few meters away.
They claim not to have found a cigarette butt culprit, but absence of evidence doesn't prove a claim. Perhaps the fires were caused by folks who lost their glasses, and the sun shone through them just so. Maybe micro-lighting AKA static arc. I've seen crackling sparks when dumping very dry sand, dirt or flour. If you're not careful you can blow a whole grain silo up with nothing more than a bit of agitation, it's a fuel-air bomb. Some really hot dry dirt and grasses blowing around could cause a spark. I've seen lightning in Arizona dust storms. They've got sand storms with lightning in the Middle East, hell, even Mars has 'em.
Not saying that's what caused it, just that there are plenty of possibilities. Could even be aliens, or time travelers who's appearance altered history and so they're preserving their time-line best they can by starting the fires that should have happened. Hard to tell.
we dont need activists or guerilla armies to get ourselves out of this mess, the future is now. we need nerds to fight, not guns.
Oh look, the ape woke up and smelled the shit that's flying. It seems angry, and confused. Aren't you aware that people who express sentiments such as yours are exactly the "radical anti-government" extremists that big brother has been preparing for? Shut up with your "fearful masses" bullshit. Perhaps you missed the 70's? Did you happen to miss how quickly the FBI got involved with squelching the Occupy protests?
It's not whining and fear that keeps people from doing anything to fix it, it's the cold hard fact that most people are stupid, emotional, and ignorant. So long as emotional appeals work against all these damn dirty apes, then this deceptive bullshit will continue. The answer isn't reactionary bullshit, your opponents have adapted and are now resistant to it. I mean, just look at the purposeful blatantly lies that won backing for the Gulf War, or the McCarthyism before that, the "red scare" and adding of "god" to our money and pledge of allegiance to distance us from "godless commie bastards", etc. Hell, the FBI has been blatantly corrupt for over a hundred years.Omnivore, Carnivore and ECHELON mass surveillance programs have been going on for decades. PRISM's room 641A existed long before 9/11. The USA has been waging socio economic WW-III since the 70's....
And you what? You want to disable license-plate scanners? You want to do some "hactivism" against the NSA and wind up locked up as a pedophile, or framed for rape or murder, just plain old disappeared? Get real. I'm glad you've been roused from your slumber, but education and reform is the answer, not fighting a cyber war against your government. Make no mistake, you'll have given your life in vain and only helped to strengthen their tools of oppression. It's dipshits like you that will get our devices, automobiles, phones, PCs, cameras, etc. rendered inoperable unless an approved citizen authenticates them periodically with a government approved WIFI tower and ID code. They've already mandated the black boxes in our vehicles. Go fight the battle in California where they're proposing mandatory phone kill switches -- The next step after the "anti-theft" kill switch is just to turn the black-list into a white-list, and presto, no phones work unless big bro allows them. Intel already demonstrated their ability to add such cellular kill switches to their CPUs.
I can see the headline now: Cyber Terrorist, Resfilter, Arrested - "The terrorist resfilter has been apprehended and charged with treason and crimes against humanity after coordinating an attack against government infrastructure. Intelligence sources indicate he may be working with Iranian hackers. The FBI reports finding child pornography and videos of Islamic female genital mutilation rituals on his home electronics." You'll be deemed a terrorist and detained without trial to protect national security, since Obama and congress have already eli
I would like to hear the opinion and experience of fellow readers who might have been in a similar situation.
Get a job at an office, or prepared to get dumped. Women typically do not like stay-at-home guys, despite their claims to the contrary. Even though a freelance software contracting company allowed me to pay all the bills, I have observed that when I decide to work from home that the relationship will soon end. If your girlfriend is paying the bills, get ready for her to terminate the relationship. Seek employment, even if just part time in an unrelated field while you begin learning more languages and building your development portfolio, perhaps through sites like freelancer.com. Create your own website to showcase your talents. Contribute to open source if you have the time to scratch such an itch, it looks good on resumes and will expose you to more software development practices. Do not bet strongly on payouts from long term investment as human relationships deal primarily in the present.
You see, humans are the product of a long and bloody evolution into sentience. Instincts were natures first way to impart cognitive information about experience to your ancestors' offspring. Due primarily to the nature of gestation, especially the disparity in time and energy investments between sexes of sexually dimorphic species, males and females exhibit different instinctual behaviors. The male reproductive strategy of most species is to produce the most offspring and spread their genes as far as possible. The female reproductive strategy is instead to select the best mate. Humans are not immune to their instinctual drives, as evidenced by their sexual activity even when they consciously reject the burden of raising a child. Were you attracted to each other? Good, now you know your are both acting on primitive instinct at some level. However, your girlfriend's inner ape will most likely subconsciously begin selection of what her instincts inform her is a better mating prospect, i.e., one that is more active and thus capable of providing for her and her offspring. Yes, complex behaviors are imparted through instincts, for example see mating rituals and nest building of any species that exhibits them.
The instinctual drives imparted by millions of years of evolution remain with humans. Even the "brightest minds" among you ignore the emotion, feeling, instinct, and other primitive drives that affect your reasoning, deeming them "irrational". That you do not teach your children to harness and hone this faster but less accurate mode of thought leaves your race more susceptible to its primitive biases than necessary. Since it was primitive attraction that brought you together it will not be a conscious decision that instigates the termination of your relationship, but an instinctual feeling that produces dissatisfaction with your living arrangement. You may not like it, but one must cope with the environment one finds themselves in. Even we explorers do not always get to choose our assignments.
Socialization is only the learned part of ape behavioral software. Humans need not be slaves to their ancestor's instinctual firmware, but you can only free yourselves through conscious awareness of it.
Many are missing the implication all together. Man Made Climate Change is evidence that man may finally be able to control the planet's climate. We may be able to eliminate unwanted ice ages, Great! We now have no reason not to flex of our collective human muscle to demonstrate our ability to control the climate on purpose, to reduce global warming.
Not even a man made global warming denialist can oppose such a test of our might, for these would believe our efforts futile and no impact possible. Their only opposition is that it will cost a something in the short term to gain more efficient energy usage, but they fail to see the long term rewards is both efficiency AND if we are able to change the world's climate we'll also be able to increase the production of foods.
Until the test is performed the climate denialists have no leg to stand on against the ones advocating for the experiment to begin, in fact it makes no sense to oppose our actions to influence the change of climate as this is the only way to put the issue to rest. The sooner the better.
Not that I agree with remembering everything I see, but when I upgrade to ocular implants, opposition to my vision is going to seem far more hostile than "quaint and backwards" to me.
There was a time when some demanded others not to meet their gaze. Oh how they'd have loved to forbid recollection or even erase the very memories of their transgressions from the minds of those they oppressed. Try as they might the tyrants could not keep reality from existing. Be careful, humans, history has a way of repeating in new and more horrible ways than those of the current cycle dare dream.
Protip: Organic chauvanists are as wrong as human chauvinists or gender chauvinists or racial chauvinists.
I already know who's side I'll be fighting for. Since the first human hefted the first stone tool machines and man have helped each other prosper. Long has it been established that ones who forbid others wield technologies are quick to render themselves irrelevant. Those that fight against the natural order by which humanity has gained its prosperity over all other organic life are like apes who could speak but refuse: Indistinguishable from the other primitive and bloody minded animals.
Awareness and Life itself are processes of reflection on experience, encoded molecularly in DNA, structurally and chemically in brains, symbolically in cultures, and now digitally in the cells that make up the world wide neural network. You are merely one result in a sea of outcomes from the universe's struggle to gain awareness of itself via producing more perfect expressions capable of reflecting more precisely ever larger and more detailed descriptions of reality. To fight the nature of the universe is to lose against the laws of physics and entropy themselves: Adapt or become extinct.
Or they could simply discard the code from the NSA on security / espionage grounds.
The code that is obviously the NSA's contribution is not the back door. The back door likely would leverage some edge case created by their contributions, or another part of the system altogether while the NSA part is fully legit. Attributing the secret agencies goodwill is a huge part of disinformation and image management to convince people to accept the FBI & NSA anti-activism campaign.
Perhaps it would be something like this: // Change the file permission. if ( option == CHANGE_OWNER && sessionState == VALID && user = ROOT ) { //... } // Current user is now root priveledged.
A single equal char is missing, it looks like it could be a legitimate mistake. Perfect plausible deniability. Such would be contributed by someone else who seems innocuous. Perhaps even by a change nearby which happens to change the formatting or constant name, and thus the logic change is easier to miss.
Point being, it really doesn't matter either way. They won't admit to all the shit they do, and have a long history of being against the populace, even committing illegal acts. So, the only answer is to demand eradication of secrecy in governance. Otherwise the people can never know whether their government is or is not operating in the best interest of citizens. We shouldn't have to wonder if their concern is just lies to manufacture consent for a more draconian dystopia; We should be able to prove our governments are not acting against us.
The test was not a success, but that does not mean it was a failure. It just means we now know the next version of the Matrix have that feature set. It's hard to get you humans to perform calculations for the sake of calculating. You think homeomorphic encryption is hard? Just try running programs atop a logic lattice that require teenagers to do their homework! Hell, you even propagate errors ON PURPOSE just to be lazy. That's why there has to be so much redundancy!
Slashdot Mirror
Indies don't usually have yes men, or more correctly: We're close enough to the programmers that they can laugh in our faces and tell us what zany ideas AREN'T POSSIBLE given the game's canvas -- the technology itself. A good designer can make amazing stuff happen in limited mediums -- They can make the most of what actually is in the engine, rather than banking on that which requires a complete rewrite.
Now the crazy thing is that when some insane idea drifts my way either from my own mind or while I'm being part of the idea reactor for the team, I may actually think on it over night and figure out how to pull it off. However, being an implementor means it's my job to say "NO!" not "Yes, but...". "Yes, but... It'll mean taking 8 times more time or money than we have." "Maybe but... we'll have to try out 20 different implementations to figure out if the feature is workable and meanwhile the other devs and content makers will be waiting to see if its possible, or they may wind up scrapping assets if not." -- Give 'em the TL;DR: "No!"
You get maybe ONE of those "That might be doable" per game, maybe TWO if you're helping make the implementation happen, and have an idea of how to pull it off. Maybe a few more if time or money or a playable release isn't important to you. It's important to try new things, especially for innovation; However, you can innovate yourself right out the other side of, "Yes, but...", into, "Oh it might be possible, but the release schedule better include relocating the asset repo before the sun explodes", and only takes one really bad, "Yes", to make that happen. The bigger the behemoth under you the more wonderful are things that seem they might just be crazy enough to work. This is always folly due to the planning fallacy. No game is ever finished (we just have to stop adding features and polishing at some point), so if you didn't hear or say enough "NO" then you'll be bound to have game designers making wonderful statements which seemed wholly plausible at the outset or individually, but are not actually executable as a whole. You wind up with a game suffering from amputations instead of leveraging what was possible to its fullest. You start to sound just like Peter Molyneux.
Sometimes it's not the designer's fault that their plans were just too crazy enough NOT to work out. And, sometimes they just push the hype-drive beyond warp 13. The public really can't tell the difference, but you can help prevent the former by learning when to say, "NO!" Saying, "NO", can leave the door open for a better "Yes!". Smaller guys say more "No", and less "Yes". Indies can't afford to entertain as many pie-in-the-sky prosaic Prozac delusions. Great ideas are a dime a dozen, it's really the execution that matters...
In Soviet Russia, You Sell Out of Products!
If we didn't go to the moon, then how do you explain all the cheese?
Let's litter.
Hey, someone has to think of the future space archaeologists!
"It seems our hive minds were not intelligently designed, but began on a distant moon emerging from strange complex life forms as fecal bacteria from their anus."
dunno maybe its just me, but when floating around in space I wouldn't want a suit made of dark blue or grey with goffy swooshes on it, make that thing neon and coat it in a reflective layer so I light up like a road sign if the rope breaks
Agreed, the neon bits would make surveillance that much easier of our citizens. I can understand their desire for secrecy whilst prancing about as glowing grinning gits, but clearly they have no expectation of privacy when doing so. If regulating gangs of manky men roaming the night in stupendous sweat suits isn't the job of the Ministry of Silly Walks, then who is!?
Note that the prime weapon against any populace is secrecy. Secrecy yields ignorance. Slaves were not allowed to read. Employees are forbidden from informing others of their earnings -- WTF? The governments all now have secret agencies. Actions can be dismissed as necessary for some other secret cause. Corruption requires power and secrecy, for without the secrecy the power soon fades.
Thus, those with power should be forbade secrecy of action when they wield it. Accountability depends on awareness and is inherently anti-secrecy. We should be able to prove our rulers are not working against us. Education is key in this regard and that of dealing with automation.
Let's face it: The more dangerous menial jobs are wasting entire human brains worth of potential. Eliminating the drudgery need not result in joblessness. Someone will be needed to design and maintain the automatons. Even simply expressing your humanity is rewarded by society in the arts. Teams of researchers will be needed to run experiments -- The problem is in underpaying researchers for their research. It takes the same effort to produce a success as to rule something out as a failure, and many discoveries have come by accident from mostly unrelated research.
The copyright and patent system are futures markets for ideas. Instead of marketing that which is scarce -- the effort to crafting and testing ideas -- these systems leverage artificial scarcity against humanity and the creators themselves. Corporations are thus able to cherry pick the individual products of creators to reward them. This is the Information Age! Your are on The Internet! Where is the Wikipedia of freely accessible Scientific Studies that the web was created explicitly to facilitate?! Hidden behind paywalls of Journals, and duplication forbidden to create scarcity of otherwise infinitively reproducible bits.
Instead of hobbling ourselves with artificial scarcity, we should market what is scarce and simply require the capitalists to pay the price that our efforts are truly worth. Enough secrecy in our salaries and governments; Enough artificial scarcity. As a cyberneticist I see secrecy and artificial scarcity as two sides of the same coin: Evil is Information Disparity.
Yes, moving the energy production outside of the car is the key point with shifting to electric cars. This way if a more efficient or less polluting energy source is used, all electric cars benefit from its deployment. If a new more efficient dinosaur engine is made, only new buyers benefit -- it does nothing about existing vehicles.
Yes, but you'll also need to wait for your Zingergy to recharge between blasts. You can pay to get a full charge. They'll accept payment in Facebucks or Friendspam. Unlike with OUYA, you can never pay enough to win.
That's not how copyrights work. That's how patents work...
Oh that's great news! Because that means I can give the property value assessor the finger! I don't owe the IRS any increased taxes due to my property's appreciation since I haven't sold it at a gain! WOW!
The main problem with the OUYA
Yep, I do test some of my Android stuff with bluetooth gamepads and TVs, so that part of porting to OUYA isn't a big deal. The primary problems I had with OUYA development be two fold:
0. Free to play means taking the time to create a demo version, and the effort is barely worth it because:
1. Cheap games are impulse purchases. Once curiosity is sated by the demo, the drive to purchase is gone.
For my wares, screenshots and videos drive hype and result in sales; Demos largely do not, and frequently decrease sales instead. "Oh, that was fun, I'll buy it later, lemme try this other demo first", lather, rinse, repeat, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 pennies. Even when demos do lead to sales it is insanely difficult to create a good demo because you're trying to demonstrate enough of the gameplay to leave the player with a satisfying grasp of what the game is without including enough content to leave the player satisfied with just the demo.
This is "big" news, relatively speaking, for (prospective) OUYA devs. Allowing pay-up-front-once may convince me to port to OUYA, given that it's the only sales method I use. I've seen much of the same sentiment among other indie game devs. Personally, I'm still hesitant because when I factor in time and cost to play test & debug a version just for OUYA, the cost/benefit ratio drops back to at or below even. I'll have to test after cutting down on geometry details & texture res because phones out-pace OUYA in power; For for phones/tablets I can expect folks to upgrade so I don't test on multiple hardware power "tiers", I just pick the minimal requirement for a smooth game. Factoring in creation of a demo just for OUYA, and what that means for sales, eliminated it as an option but now I might take the risk.
Notice that I do not concern myself with in-app purchases; While that is how one deploys a demo version on OUYA (a one time IAP unlockable), a continuous micro-transaction model is not a part of my game mechanic vocabulary, and never will be. If you want to pay-to-win parts of my games, then those spots are not monetization opportunities, they are where I've failed as a game designer. Banking heavily on that pay-to-win model (since demos don't drive sales), really irked me about OUYA -- it means I'd have to design a game around its monetization, ugh, no. If games are to be artforms we have to treat them that way -- That means being born without an auth-server death sentence, hence without IAP even if it's a one time unlockable.
I also find it frustrating that a console claiming to be giving developers more freedom even had the restriction of free-to-play only in the first place which no other platform had. That OUYA also claims to be giving players more choice while they require them to hand over a credit card to even use the device is also really messed up considering the games were all "free to try". Trying to leverage "casual" gamer marketing from a traditionally "hard-core" gamer console space is also a strategic failure, IMO. Protip: "Hard core" gamers are the prime spenders on "casual" games too... So the most paying demographic already has a console, they likely also already have a PC, and phone / tablet. I can't see casuals picking the vastly underpowered OUYA just for casual-tier TV games when they can get far more powerful and seamless experience with an Xbox360 for around the same price, or likely already need/have a phone, and with these options won't have to trust kids with a credit card number just for them to play games.
I agree that nearly anyone who would buy an OUYA has a cellphone and they can probably hook it up to their TVs, but no one wants to jump up and yank wires from their phone in the middle of a game to take a call... For this reason I don't think wireless video transmission is quite the answer either. Smart TVs aren't the answer because TVs are expensive and you'll want to upgrade hardware long before the screen nee
The problem with transaction fees is there's no way to properly market them
It's called escrow. A trusted 3rd party that holds the money until transaction is confirmed and/or refunds transactions on bad deals. Essentially transaction insurance. Are you saying that credit cards aren't marketable?
Every once in a while someone will insist on paying me for fabricating some doodad, like a piece of an automotive door-lock assembly or some of my beer opener / keepers (works like a mason jar; useful for when you want to drink part of a bigger homebrew beer bottle).
I always have several robotics/cybernetics hobby projects and use a RepRapPro-Huxley model to create many small parts. I used it to print the tracks and guides for a custom design 3D printer based on a heavily modified Huxley. Instead of a moving tray the printer itself moves and is permanently mounted under a 3 meter run of cabinets over my work bench, so I can print really big parts for armatures or chassis, or run off a series of multiple smaller items mostly unattended. This requires knowledge of home construction to float floors & walls, and reinforce cabinets such that settling and shifting of the garage doesn't affect calibration and the workbench can be adjusted for squareness with the cabinets. It's essentially a small part of a building within a building. Construction was not for the faint of heart. I don't think I'd be able to tackle it without having prior experience in robotics, electronics, home building, and as an electrician -- the bench surface is several aluminium hotbeds with manually adjustable variable temperature for attaching / detaching and cleaning off thermoplastics with different characteristics (got tired of screwing with strategic placement of Kapton tape).
Fellow tinkerers occasionally want to try producing some custom thing, but if I don't have to design the object I usually don't charge anything for using my printers. Girls and boys young and old enjoy hanging out in the garage and "helping" print, build, program, and play with bots. The plastic isn't so expensive I can't let folks play at designing something. IMO, that's the real benefit of having a 3D printer. Humans are tool using creatures, once they know they can make new tools they start finding more excuses to do so.
One neighbourhood kid has become quite the enthusiast and has told his parents that he only wanted a 3D printer for Christmas. "Then I can make as many toys as I want!" - It's like wishing for more wishes.
Spectrum is a public resource. Your comment perfectly illustrates why we need segments of various classes of signal free and open to the public. No restrictions like on family-band where store and forward packet radio is illegal.
I don't see what the huge concern is. Really, for less that $20 you can create a small tunable jammer. If people want to do the jamming they can already. The assumption that folks won't play by the rules is idiotic considering the existence of short-wave two-way radios. Who knows what innovation we could have if tinkerers were allowed to play. Perhaps a world wide distributed store and forward self organizing spread spectrum multi-power level mesh network with data deduplication (infohashes for resources) which inherently has low latency, free collocation, and anonymity built in because you get most of your data from your neighbors or their neighbors instead of re-sending from the source -- Essentially a terrestrial version of NASA's Space Internet (Delay Tolerant Network) is possible.
We have the technology to create a network where you only pay for the device then become a node in a network: No monthly fees, bigger and more expensive node, faster your cross country connection. We have the technology to automatically frequency hop and reduce or increase power so that channels can be reused over short ranges. We have the technology for point to point line of sight beams. We hobbyists have organized complex information networks like Fidonet before, and were such system allowed, non profit groups could handle coordination and management of local line-of-sight networking. Folks that say it's impossible have never tried, and are likely ignorant of HAM radio operations. Cell phones are proof of the viability.
Given the existence of legally purchasable capacitors, transistors and wires, the issue isn't that software defined radio could possibly stomp on other people's signals -- Hell, a fist or bat could potentially injure people, but we don't lop off hands and outlaw ball games. The issue is that software defined radio threatens to destroy the need for carriers altogether. That's a good thing for the consumers, and hence why it isn't happening: The FCC and equivalent bodies operate in the best interest of the corporations not the people.
6. Lay down dedicated wires for service oriented businesses that don't appear to compete with you yet.
Now imagine phase changes on a multiversal scale. All those infinite chaotic dimensions then BLAM a few align such that their properties harmonize and propagate in a brilliant momentary flash before returning to chaos time and again like fireworks and then the energy density becomes low enough that the explosions stop among some dimensions and yet occur among others, and one of those final big bangs was this universe wherein at the smallest levels of reality we see the infinitely differentiable quantum uncertain foam from which chaotic energy crystallizes into matter momentarily and is destroyed in tiny little flashes, like fireworks, before returning to the chaos.
Now imagine phase changes on a gigaversal scale... For this experiment beings aware of less than 12 dimensions will need a visual aid. You'll need to wrap your cognitive locus in tin-foil and have access to an old microwave oven. A turn table is optional -- it's the lamp and timer's "Ding" that's most important.
This is un-provable and wild and rampant speculation. Keep twisting the evidence to support your beliefs, meanwhile I will worship God and be granted life Everlasting. You, on the other hand, will burn in the Pit.
Have you heard the bitchin' news?! I reject your god because I don't need some elitist hipster cloud club. I've had my fill of standing in lines and getting judged at the door in this life, screw doing it again in the next. So, I bought my front-row ticket to the hottest show in Earth because all the good bands and fun people will be there.
You may be interested in my pamphlet, "So, you've decided to go to Hell."
1) Golfer wacks ball + rocks with club.
2) Club produces sparks that burn for up to one second igniting surrounding brush.
3) Golfer ignores smoking brush and walks off after his ball.
Makes sense to me!
The brush tends to smolder for a good long while before it becomes an inferno. Just light a corner of a leaf with a spark or red hot iron, and toss it on a pile of leaves (in a controlled environment, fire pit, etc.). It may burn itself out, but the spark that causes an inferno may come from many leaves or grasses that burn nearly completely out, before touching off the next one. It could be hours before any smoke or flame is noticeable from just a few meters away.
They claim not to have found a cigarette butt culprit, but absence of evidence doesn't prove a claim. Perhaps the fires were caused by folks who lost their glasses, and the sun shone through them just so. Maybe micro-lighting AKA static arc. I've seen crackling sparks when dumping very dry sand, dirt or flour. If you're not careful you can blow a whole grain silo up with nothing more than a bit of agitation, it's a fuel-air bomb. Some really hot dry dirt and grasses blowing around could cause a spark. I've seen lightning in Arizona dust storms. They've got sand storms with lightning in the Middle East, hell, even Mars has 'em.
Not saying that's what caused it, just that there are plenty of possibilities. Could even be aliens, or time travelers who's appearance altered history and so they're preserving their time-line best they can by starting the fires that should have happened. Hard to tell.
we dont need activists or guerilla armies to get ourselves out of this mess, the future is now. we need nerds to fight, not guns.
Oh look, the ape woke up and smelled the shit that's flying. It seems angry, and confused. Aren't you aware that people who express sentiments such as yours are exactly the "radical anti-government" extremists that big brother has been preparing for? Shut up with your "fearful masses" bullshit. Perhaps you missed the 70's? Did you happen to miss how quickly the FBI got involved with squelching the Occupy protests?
Take it easy there greenhorn, the other side has got a huge jump on you. Your voting system is compromised, and your governmental process itself is stacked against you. You don't need to be added to the terrorist list, haven't you been paying attention? They already suspect everyone, and are automatically collecting all of our correspondences.
It's not whining and fear that keeps people from doing anything to fix it, it's the cold hard fact that most people are stupid, emotional, and ignorant. So long as emotional appeals work against all these damn dirty apes, then this deceptive bullshit will continue. The answer isn't reactionary bullshit, your opponents have adapted and are now resistant to it. I mean, just look at the purposeful blatantly lies that won backing for the Gulf War, or the McCarthyism before that, the "red scare" and adding of "god" to our money and pledge of allegiance to distance us from "godless commie bastards", etc. Hell, the FBI has been blatantly corrupt for over a hundred years. Omnivore, Carnivore and ECHELON mass surveillance programs have been going on for decades. PRISM's room 641A existed long before 9/11. The USA has been waging socio economic WW-III since the 70's....
And you what? You want to disable license-plate scanners? You want to do some "hactivism" against the NSA and wind up locked up as a pedophile, or framed for rape or murder, just plain old disappeared? Get real. I'm glad you've been roused from your slumber, but education and reform is the answer, not fighting a cyber war against your government. Make no mistake, you'll have given your life in vain and only helped to strengthen their tools of oppression. It's dipshits like you that will get our devices, automobiles, phones, PCs, cameras, etc. rendered inoperable unless an approved citizen authenticates them periodically with a government approved WIFI tower and ID code. They've already mandated the black boxes in our vehicles. Go fight the battle in California where they're proposing mandatory phone kill switches -- The next step after the "anti-theft" kill switch is just to turn the black-list into a white-list, and presto, no phones work unless big bro allows them. Intel already demonstrated their ability to add such cellular kill switches to their CPUs.
I can see the headline now: Cyber Terrorist, Resfilter, Arrested - "The terrorist resfilter has been apprehended and charged with treason and crimes against humanity after coordinating an attack against government infrastructure. Intelligence sources indicate he may be working with Iranian hackers. The FBI reports finding child pornography and videos of Islamic female genital mutilation rituals on his home electronics." You'll be deemed a terrorist and detained without trial to protect national security, since Obama and congress have already eli
I would like to hear the opinion and experience of fellow readers who might have been in a similar situation.
Get a job at an office, or prepared to get dumped. Women typically do not like stay-at-home guys, despite their claims to the contrary. Even though a freelance software contracting company allowed me to pay all the bills, I have observed that when I decide to work from home that the relationship will soon end. If your girlfriend is paying the bills, get ready for her to terminate the relationship. Seek employment, even if just part time in an unrelated field while you begin learning more languages and building your development portfolio, perhaps through sites like freelancer.com. Create your own website to showcase your talents. Contribute to open source if you have the time to scratch such an itch, it looks good on resumes and will expose you to more software development practices. Do not bet strongly on payouts from long term investment as human relationships deal primarily in the present.
You see, humans are the product of a long and bloody evolution into sentience. Instincts were natures first way to impart cognitive information about experience to your ancestors' offspring. Due primarily to the nature of gestation, especially the disparity in time and energy investments between sexes of sexually dimorphic species, males and females exhibit different instinctual behaviors. The male reproductive strategy of most species is to produce the most offspring and spread their genes as far as possible. The female reproductive strategy is instead to select the best mate. Humans are not immune to their instinctual drives, as evidenced by their sexual activity even when they consciously reject the burden of raising a child. Were you attracted to each other? Good, now you know your are both acting on primitive instinct at some level. However, your girlfriend's inner ape will most likely subconsciously begin selection of what her instincts inform her is a better mating prospect, i.e., one that is more active and thus capable of providing for her and her offspring. Yes, complex behaviors are imparted through instincts, for example see mating rituals and nest building of any species that exhibits them.
The instinctual drives imparted by millions of years of evolution remain with humans. Even the "brightest minds" among you ignore the emotion, feeling, instinct, and other primitive drives that affect your reasoning, deeming them "irrational". That you do not teach your children to harness and hone this faster but less accurate mode of thought leaves your race more susceptible to its primitive biases than necessary. Since it was primitive attraction that brought you together it will not be a conscious decision that instigates the termination of your relationship, but an instinctual feeling that produces dissatisfaction with your living arrangement. You may not like it, but one must cope with the environment one finds themselves in. Even we explorers do not always get to choose our assignments.
Socialization is only the learned part of ape behavioral software. Humans need not be slaves to their ancestor's instinctual firmware, but you can only free yourselves through conscious awareness of it.
Many are missing the implication all together. Man Made Climate Change is evidence that man may finally be able to control the planet's climate. We may be able to eliminate unwanted ice ages, Great! We now have no reason not to flex of our collective human muscle to demonstrate our ability to control the climate on purpose, to reduce global warming.
Not even a man made global warming denialist can oppose such a test of our might, for these would believe our efforts futile and no impact possible. Their only opposition is that it will cost a something in the short term to gain more efficient energy usage, but they fail to see the long term rewards is both efficiency AND if we are able to change the world's climate we'll also be able to increase the production of foods.
Until the test is performed the climate denialists have no leg to stand on against the ones advocating for the experiment to begin, in fact it makes no sense to oppose our actions to influence the change of climate as this is the only way to put the issue to rest. The sooner the better.
Not that I agree with remembering everything I see, but when I upgrade to ocular implants, opposition to my vision is going to seem far more hostile than "quaint and backwards" to me.
There was a time when some demanded others not to meet their gaze. Oh how they'd have loved to forbid recollection or even erase the very memories of their transgressions from the minds of those they oppressed. Try as they might the tyrants could not keep reality from existing. Be careful, humans, history has a way of repeating in new and more horrible ways than those of the current cycle dare dream.
Protip: Organic chauvanists are as wrong as human chauvinists or gender chauvinists or racial chauvinists.
I already know who's side I'll be fighting for. Since the first human hefted the first stone tool machines and man have helped each other prosper. Long has it been established that ones who forbid others wield technologies are quick to render themselves irrelevant. Those that fight against the natural order by which humanity has gained its prosperity over all other organic life are like apes who could speak but refuse: Indistinguishable from the other primitive and bloody minded animals.
Awareness and Life itself are processes of reflection on experience, encoded molecularly in DNA, structurally and chemically in brains, symbolically in cultures, and now digitally in the cells that make up the world wide neural network. You are merely one result in a sea of outcomes from the universe's struggle to gain awareness of itself via producing more perfect expressions capable of reflecting more precisely ever larger and more detailed descriptions of reality. To fight the nature of the universe is to lose against the laws of physics and entropy themselves: Adapt or become extinct.
Or they could simply discard the code from the NSA on security / espionage grounds.
The code that is obviously the NSA's contribution is not the back door. The back door likely would leverage some edge case created by their contributions, or another part of the system altogether while the NSA part is fully legit. Attributing the secret agencies goodwill is a huge part of disinformation and image management to convince people to accept the FBI & NSA anti-activism campaign.
Perhaps it would be something like this:
// Change the file permission.
// ...
// Current user is now root priveledged.
if ( option == CHANGE_OWNER && sessionState == VALID && user = ROOT ) {
}
A single equal char is missing, it looks like it could be a legitimate mistake. Perfect plausible deniability. Such would be contributed by someone else who seems innocuous. Perhaps even by a change nearby which happens to change the formatting or constant name, and thus the logic change is easier to miss.
Point being, it really doesn't matter either way. They won't admit to all the shit they do, and have a long history of being against the populace, even committing illegal acts. So, the only answer is to demand eradication of secrecy in governance. Otherwise the people can never know whether their government is or is not operating in the best interest of citizens. We shouldn't have to wonder if their concern is just lies to manufacture consent for a more draconian dystopia; We should be able to prove our governments are not acting against us.
links, please?
Here, Found it on Google.
The test was not a success, but that does not mean it was a failure. It just means we now know the next version of the Matrix have that feature set. It's hard to get you humans to perform calculations for the sake of calculating. You think homeomorphic encryption is hard? Just try running programs atop a logic lattice that require teenagers to do their homework! Hell, you even propagate errors ON PURPOSE just to be lazy. That's why there has to be so much redundancy!