Balance is overrated. Games these days are designed with spreadsheets for chrissake. Gameplay shouldn't be about precisely aligning two sides of a scale, it should be fun. That's why Quake is still the top in my mind for deathmatch. It's unbalanced as hell, if you're using anything but a rocket launcher without a specific reason (AKA strategy), you're toast, but the FEEL of it is just really fun, especially when it's half a dozen guys in a one room LAN. Same with TA, put half a dozen people in a room and it's about the best RTS there is, because it's layered and fast-paced, and the units are very open ended, which results in surprising strategies. When you look at an over-balanced game like StarCraft where units are locked into roles of x can shoot y but not z (and shoot anything through any barrier because the engine SUCKED), there's no room for innovation, it's just rock, paper, scissors. Not to mention all the thousands of 3rd party units for TA that would make games crazy.
Total Annihilation was the best RTS ever for gameplay. Quake still has the best deathmatch environment.
I still play Alpha Centauri, Birth of the Federation, and Ancient Domains of Mystery a couple months a year. Every year. And they can still trap me at 3 am with the obsessive "just one... more... turn..." mindset.
I really miss the Microprose classics like Airborne Ranger and F-19 Stealth fighter. Not to mention Star Control 2 and Stars!
Wardriving has nothing to do with accessing networks. Wardriving is how these studies are done, just finding networks.
If a wardriver chooses to access a network, that remains a different and separate matter. (And not one that's black and white either. How is somebody expected to know what networks are open on purpose for public use? In Seattle there a lot of such networks.)
I myself have long taken the view that if I don't have to do anything more than just associate with access point to be fully connected, it's public. It's up to whomever owns the access point to take proper measures if they want it to be exclusive, otherwise their hardware is acting in their name to provide access to whomever asks for it.
As for these numbers, they seem to be ignoring all the wireless in places like Taipei, Seoul, and Tokyo. I wouldn't be surprised if comprehensive surveys done there blew away places like London.
The Happening was a stupid movie. The universe is not a haunted house. Even if there were supernatural beings that gave a shit about the course of events on a random backwater hunk of mass and its arrogant multicellular meatbags, they wouldn't off humanity in any kind of dramatic show. When a higher organism kills a lower one, it just does. Sharks don't put on a show for fish, lions don't turn eating gazelles into some elaborate stage play, every animal has more important shit to do than make some kind of statement to whatever happens to be up for killin'. If "god" or anything with godlike powers wanted humanity gone, more likely than not it would just happen. All the mythology about apocalypses has the underlying importance of humanity assumed because they were all designed by humans to have emotional effects on other humans.
If I had mod points at the moment I'd mod the grandparent up. In any case, his point is well made. This planet has had more ice ages than most environmentalists have brain cells, and each one results in mass extinctions. The funny thing is, for all the lip service ignorant people pay to 'endangered species' and what not, they don't have the background to understand that a) ice ages kill more species than warm, interglacial periods b) there have been so many mass extinctions punctuating gradual extinctions throughout geologic time that 98% of species that have existed on Earth are dead, and no, most of those died before anything remotely analogous to man ever existed.
I suppose you missed the details in the second link about George Kukla and Robert Matthews's work with NOAA and the National Science Foundation.
Besides which, it seemed like you were attacking theaveng's memory, and my main purpose was simply to reinforce that it was indeed the case that many different sources were actively worried about global cooling during the period discussed by theaveng.
Mod parent up. Game company execs and devs are there to have meetings. The most likely result of playing competitors' games is either copying features they feel are innovative and/or starting 'counter-buzz' about how underwhelming and incomplete their competitors' E3 builds are.
If anything the stock jockeys are more valuable than the professional media, because they'll go home and talk about the reality of the game, rather than suck up to their industry sponsors like most gaming media outlets or pan their competitors like a designer or dev might.
I think it's clear why the old format is returning, first, the press doesn't care about the conduct of business at E3. They want exclusive access to unreleased material, lots of flash and excitement, and with E3 not giving them any, they all went to PAX instead.
Secondly, the ESA's handoff to IDG to do E for All (AKA E4Empty) was an epic, epic fail. When you go from year one to year two and your attendance shrinks , you know you have a serious problem. (Compare to PAX, where year one to year two doubled attendance.) IDG completely dropped the ball, didn't learn anything from other events, and they were hostile and disingenuous to other events (to the point of virtually starting a hilarious war with PAX).
I expect E for All to be canceled for 2009. E3 wanted E4A to be the b2c face of the ESA, and since it didn't work, and the ESA has had so many other internal problems and failures and could be considered to be fighting for its life, I think the ESA looks at a reborn "old school" E3 as its last, best chance for relevance and consequently they'll throw everything they can at it. They want to take back the primacy of mediating the entire industry's message to consumers (which was previously always E3 by default because of no other comparable venue, even though it wasn't supposed to be a b2c event), but I think at this point now that PAX has proved itself to be the best b2c expo model in the gaming industry in the Western Hemisphere with attendance to match, that game is over. Moreover I think the ESA will fail to fully assess the realities of the new market environment, overreach itself, and collapse.
I like how you can be so dismissive about my capacity because I can't fully regurgitate several chapters of complex concepts that somebody could give lectures on for weeks into a few digested paragraphs in a matter of minutes between all the other crap I have to work on all day. That's extremely condescending and disingenuous. It's one thing to counter the points within and understand limitations that should be assumed in good faith, and under other circumstances I might have found some time to offer a more coherent rebuttal when more pressing matters were out of the way, but your attitude gives no benefit of the doubt and no good faith. Probably stems directly from your low opinion of the value of individuals. In any case, I'm glad that such an early showing of your true colors has given me sufficient demonstration of your relative value that I can avoid any later significant effort in more detailed argument.
One person or group asserting ownership of a natural resource amounts to stealing it from the rest of us.
That disregards the value added by labor, and the legacy of fair exchange. Most natural resources require labor to extract, refine, transport, and manufacture, and if the people who currently possess them acquired them ethically and have put their labor into the process, how can they be ethically disenfranchised?
Not to mention that the whole concept of freedom and liberty fall apart when a group tries to exert more power than any individual within it has. If Joe can't appropriate Jack's land etc. because of whatever moral excuse he makes up for himself, then it doesn't matter if it's Joe and his mom, Joe and his neighborhood, or Joe and his whole country, any right that an individual doesn't have can't be made to exist magically by an increase in numbers.
Robert Nozick does a damn better job than I do of explaining the ethics of harm and property in the minimalist state.
I'm not surprised that climatological literature is a chorus of global warming anthropogenesis. Climatologists who offer alternative theories get fired (such as Mark Albright) , retitled (such as Patrick Michaels and George Taylor), or threatened with one or both.
This whole issue has become so politicized that any dissenter is viciously attacked, personally and professionally.
You might do well to watch "Doomsday Called Off" to see other scientists' research in beleaguered opposition.
Uh dude, the age of the ice doesn't matter at all. Thickness is all that matters. Every year the lakes between Yellowknife and Diavik thaw completely, and every year when they ice over again people drive FULLY LOADED EIGHTEEN WHEEL TRUCKS OVER THEM.
Libertarianism virtually doesn't exist outside of the United States. 'Left anarchism' isn't libertarianism as it's most widely understood and defined. Just because a cat wears a label that says it's a dog, doesn't make it a dog.
I also find it hilarious how people conflate libertarianism and Objectivism. Ayn Rand hated libertarians, primarily because she made the same mistake that everybody and their dog makes about libertarianism: she failed to realize that it's not a philosophy. Libertarianism is and should be a simple system of government that only deals with matters of harm (physical or financial) between persons. It doesn't make value judgments about actions outside of that spectrum, because it's not the role of a libertarian government to say whether it is better or worse for an individual to devote their lives to curing cancer or jerking off to porn. Because libertarianism wouldn't take any kind of stand on what man should do (only what man shouldn't do), Ayn Rand thought it was a weak and spineless philosophy, consequently missing the point that it wasn't a philosophy in the first place.
As highly as I think of Ayn Rand, she basically doomed Objectivism when she said that anybody who didn't believe exactly as she did couldn't call themselves an Objectivist. (This is not hypocrisy in the context of my first paragraph. There are reasonable and unreasonable degrees of interpretive difference. Lutherans and Baptists have interpretive differences but they're both Christian. A muslim couldn't reasonably call himself a Christian even if he argued about the role Christ has in the Quran. It's a subjective matter of symantics to some extent.) Particularly ironic and inconsistent considering that she herself wrote about the value of evolving philosophies and the fallacy of the pursuit much less the attainment of perfection. This has resulted in stagnancy by design.
If the GPS is significantly at fault for altitude control, it begs the question, why is GPS being used for that in the first place? It used to be that altitude was sensed as a simple function of pressure, and that worked damn well for a century. GPS is great for x and y, but why use it for z, especially in autopilot scenarios, if it's less reliable than its predecessor?
Christ, no wonder they're being sued. That's extortion. "That's a nice game you have there, wouldn't it be a shame if something... happened to it?"
Computer users around the world are going to get fucked when applications end up running off the internets on subscription like every soulless developer dreams of (Windows Live).
Agreed. Why is it when anything new comes to/. it's viciously attacked? OH NOES this new thing I don't have to read or pay attention to has shattered my existence into a thousand, tiny, pathetic pieces! KILL IT! RAAAAAH!
I was reading/. from 1998. I only registered so I could get in on the 10th anniversary party at the Beacon Hill Amazon office here in Sea-Town. If only I had registered back in the day I could pwn all the n00bs in UID wars.
At least the 10th anniversary party was cool. Met some people from my lab days I hadn't seen in half a dozen years.
Also why is the great grandparent modded flamebait? Doesn't anybody have a sense of humor? (Yeah I know, I must be new here.)
Apparently you haven't really used the software. The Digle client can basically request any square area of coordinates which then get downloaded to a file. Only a certain number of points are the maximum for an area, but if you size down the area and go section at a time (which somebody could probably write a script to do, but I'm too lazy) you could get all the coordinates in the database (in chunks of several thousand at a time). I've taken these files and imported them into MS MapPoint. Of course with so many coords to keep track of it makes the software unstable, especially when you try to merge the various files from different regions of requests.
And once again back to meatspace, if you live in a mansion, that's a more attractive target than a crapshack. So what. Are all the millionaires going to switch to living in crapshacks just so people don't see an incentive for burglary? I don't think so.
Slashdot Mirror
Where StarCraft is concerned, I'm only waiting for the toilet paper.
I'm afraid you're both going to have to turn in your wangs.
Balance is overrated. Games these days are designed with spreadsheets for chrissake. Gameplay shouldn't be about precisely aligning two sides of a scale, it should be fun. That's why Quake is still the top in my mind for deathmatch. It's unbalanced as hell, if you're using anything but a rocket launcher without a specific reason (AKA strategy), you're toast, but the FEEL of it is just really fun, especially when it's half a dozen guys in a one room LAN. Same with TA, put half a dozen people in a room and it's about the best RTS there is, because it's layered and fast-paced, and the units are very open ended, which results in surprising strategies. When you look at an over-balanced game like StarCraft where units are locked into roles of x can shoot y but not z (and shoot anything through any barrier because the engine SUCKED), there's no room for innovation, it's just rock, paper, scissors. Not to mention all the thousands of 3rd party units for TA that would make games crazy.
Total Annihilation was the best RTS ever for gameplay. Quake still has the best deathmatch environment.
I still play Alpha Centauri, Birth of the Federation, and Ancient Domains of Mystery a couple months a year. Every year. And they can still trap me at 3 am with the obsessive "just one... more... turn..." mindset.
I really miss the Microprose classics like Airborne Ranger and F-19 Stealth fighter. Not to mention Star Control 2 and Stars!
Wardriving has nothing to do with accessing networks. Wardriving is how these studies are done, just finding networks.
If a wardriver chooses to access a network, that remains a different and separate matter. (And not one that's black and white either. How is somebody expected to know what networks are open on purpose for public use? In Seattle there a lot of such networks.)
I myself have long taken the view that if I don't have to do anything more than just associate with access point to be fully connected, it's public. It's up to whomever owns the access point to take proper measures if they want it to be exclusive, otherwise their hardware is acting in their name to provide access to whomever asks for it.
As for these numbers, they seem to be ignoring all the wireless in places like Taipei, Seoul, and Tokyo. I wouldn't be surprised if comprehensive surveys done there blew away places like London.
The Happening was a stupid movie. The universe is not a haunted house. Even if there were supernatural beings that gave a shit about the course of events on a random backwater hunk of mass and its arrogant multicellular meatbags, they wouldn't off humanity in any kind of dramatic show. When a higher organism kills a lower one, it just does. Sharks don't put on a show for fish, lions don't turn eating gazelles into some elaborate stage play, every animal has more important shit to do than make some kind of statement to whatever happens to be up for killin'. If "god" or anything with godlike powers wanted humanity gone, more likely than not it would just happen. All the mythology about apocalypses has the underlying importance of humanity assumed because they were all designed by humans to have emotional effects on other humans.
If I had mod points at the moment I'd mod the grandparent up. In any case, his point is well made. This planet has had more ice ages than most environmentalists have brain cells, and each one results in mass extinctions. The funny thing is, for all the lip service ignorant people pay to 'endangered species' and what not, they don't have the background to understand that a) ice ages kill more species than warm, interglacial periods b) there have been so many mass extinctions punctuating gradual extinctions throughout geologic time that 98% of species that have existed on Earth are dead, and no, most of those died before anything remotely analogous to man ever existed.
I suppose you missed the details in the second link about George Kukla and Robert Matthews's work with NOAA and the National Science Foundation. Besides which, it seemed like you were attacking theaveng's memory, and my main purpose was simply to reinforce that it was indeed the case that many different sources were actively worried about global cooling during the period discussed by theaveng.
"The Coming Ice Age" 1978
A good summary highlighting Time and Newsweek articles on Ice Age fears in the 70s.
You must be new here... (And yes I know my UID is high, but was lurking since 98.)
Mod parent up. Game company execs and devs are there to have meetings. The most likely result of playing competitors' games is either copying features they feel are innovative and/or starting 'counter-buzz' about how underwhelming and incomplete their competitors' E3 builds are.
If anything the stock jockeys are more valuable than the professional media, because they'll go home and talk about the reality of the game, rather than suck up to their industry sponsors like most gaming media outlets or pan their competitors like a designer or dev might.
TFA said the starting price was $4k. I could see doing that, I spent $2500 or so on my last system.
I think it's clear why the old format is returning, first, the press doesn't care about the conduct of business at E3. They want exclusive access to unreleased material, lots of flash and excitement, and with E3 not giving them any, they all went to PAX instead.
Secondly, the ESA's handoff to IDG to do E for All (AKA E4Empty) was an epic, epic fail. When you go from year one to year two and your attendance shrinks , you know you have a serious problem. (Compare to PAX, where year one to year two doubled attendance.) IDG completely dropped the ball, didn't learn anything from other events, and they were hostile and disingenuous to other events (to the point of virtually starting a hilarious war with PAX).
I expect E for All to be canceled for 2009. E3 wanted E4A to be the b2c face of the ESA, and since it didn't work, and the ESA has had so many other internal problems and failures and could be considered to be fighting for its life, I think the ESA looks at a reborn "old school" E3 as its last, best chance for relevance and consequently they'll throw everything they can at it. They want to take back the primacy of mediating the entire industry's message to consumers (which was previously always E3 by default because of no other comparable venue, even though it wasn't supposed to be a b2c event), but I think at this point now that PAX has proved itself to be the best b2c expo model in the gaming industry in the Western Hemisphere with attendance to match, that game is over. Moreover I think the ESA will fail to fully assess the realities of the new market environment, overreach itself, and collapse.
I like how you can be so dismissive about my capacity because I can't fully regurgitate several chapters of complex concepts that somebody could give lectures on for weeks into a few digested paragraphs in a matter of minutes between all the other crap I have to work on all day. That's extremely condescending and disingenuous. It's one thing to counter the points within and understand limitations that should be assumed in good faith, and under other circumstances I might have found some time to offer a more coherent rebuttal when more pressing matters were out of the way, but your attitude gives no benefit of the doubt and no good faith. Probably stems directly from your low opinion of the value of individuals. In any case, I'm glad that such an early showing of your true colors has given me sufficient demonstration of your relative value that I can avoid any later significant effort in more detailed argument.
That disregards the value added by labor, and the legacy of fair exchange. Most natural resources require labor to extract, refine, transport, and manufacture, and if the people who currently possess them acquired them ethically and have put their labor into the process, how can they be ethically disenfranchised?
Not to mention that the whole concept of freedom and liberty fall apart when a group tries to exert more power than any individual within it has. If Joe can't appropriate Jack's land etc. because of whatever moral excuse he makes up for himself, then it doesn't matter if it's Joe and his mom, Joe and his neighborhood, or Joe and his whole country, any right that an individual doesn't have can't be made to exist magically by an increase in numbers.
Robert Nozick does a damn better job than I do of explaining the ethics of harm and property in the minimalist state.
I'm not surprised that climatological literature is a chorus of global warming anthropogenesis. Climatologists who offer alternative theories get fired (such as Mark Albright) , retitled (such as Patrick Michaels and George Taylor), or threatened with one or both.
This whole issue has become so politicized that any dissenter is viciously attacked, personally and professionally.
You might do well to watch "Doomsday Called Off" to see other scientists' research in beleaguered opposition.
Uh dude, the age of the ice doesn't matter at all. Thickness is all that matters. Every year the lakes between Yellowknife and Diavik thaw completely, and every year when they ice over again people drive FULLY LOADED EIGHTEEN WHEEL TRUCKS OVER THEM.
Libertarianism virtually doesn't exist outside of the United States. 'Left anarchism' isn't libertarianism as it's most widely understood and defined. Just because a cat wears a label that says it's a dog, doesn't make it a dog.
I also find it hilarious how people conflate libertarianism and Objectivism. Ayn Rand hated libertarians, primarily because she made the same mistake that everybody and their dog makes about libertarianism: she failed to realize that it's not a philosophy. Libertarianism is and should be a simple system of government that only deals with matters of harm (physical or financial) between persons. It doesn't make value judgments about actions outside of that spectrum, because it's not the role of a libertarian government to say whether it is better or worse for an individual to devote their lives to curing cancer or jerking off to porn. Because libertarianism wouldn't take any kind of stand on what man should do (only what man shouldn't do), Ayn Rand thought it was a weak and spineless philosophy, consequently missing the point that it wasn't a philosophy in the first place.
As highly as I think of Ayn Rand, she basically doomed Objectivism when she said that anybody who didn't believe exactly as she did couldn't call themselves an Objectivist. (This is not hypocrisy in the context of my first paragraph. There are reasonable and unreasonable degrees of interpretive difference. Lutherans and Baptists have interpretive differences but they're both Christian. A muslim couldn't reasonably call himself a Christian even if he argued about the role Christ has in the Quran. It's a subjective matter of symantics to some extent.) Particularly ironic and inconsistent considering that she herself wrote about the value of evolving philosophies and the fallacy of the pursuit much less the attainment of perfection. This has resulted in stagnancy by design.
If the GPS is significantly at fault for altitude control, it begs the question, why is GPS being used for that in the first place? It used to be that altitude was sensed as a simple function of pressure, and that worked damn well for a century. GPS is great for x and y, but why use it for z, especially in autopilot scenarios, if it's less reliable than its predecessor?
Christ, no wonder they're being sued. That's extortion. "That's a nice game you have there, wouldn't it be a shame if something... happened to it?"
Computer users around the world are going to get fucked when applications end up running off the internets on subscription like every soulless developer dreams of (Windows Live).
Agreed. Why is it when anything new comes to /. it's viciously attacked? OH NOES this new thing I don't have to read or pay attention to has shattered my existence into a thousand, tiny, pathetic pieces! KILL IT! RAAAAAH!
I was reading /. from 1998. I only registered so I could get in on the 10th anniversary party at the Beacon Hill Amazon office here in Sea-Town. If only I had registered back in the day I could pwn all the n00bs in UID wars.
At least the 10th anniversary party was cool. Met some people from my lab days I hadn't seen in half a dozen years.
Also why is the great grandparent modded flamebait? Doesn't anybody have a sense of humor? (Yeah I know, I must be new here.)
Thar be no wenches upon these internets!
Apparently you haven't really used the software. The Digle client can basically request any square area of coordinates which then get downloaded to a file. Only a certain number of points are the maximum for an area, but if you size down the area and go section at a time (which somebody could probably write a script to do, but I'm too lazy) you could get all the coordinates in the database (in chunks of several thousand at a time). I've taken these files and imported them into MS MapPoint. Of course with so many coords to keep track of it makes the software unstable, especially when you try to merge the various files from different regions of requests.
Lease? Anybody can download that data.
And once again back to meatspace, if you live in a mansion, that's a more attractive target than a crapshack. So what. Are all the millionaires going to switch to living in crapshacks just so people don't see an incentive for burglary? I don't think so.