Man, when I saw this on BattleBots ten years ago, driven by the makers of Biohazard, I was unimpressed, because I'd seen it on a nifty 50s horror sci fi mess as a kid. Would that I remembered what that was, so that I could call this fifty years old, instead of ten...
Occam's razor suggests that there was in fact no interplay of minds, but rather that the likelihood that any given person was off by +X was equivalent to that another person was off by -X. The experiment measures only the average of the player's skill; there is no mechanism interconnecting minds, as the people do not have any direct observation of one another's states, nor in fact any observation of their own.
If there was a private monitor on which they saw both the average and *just* their own path, then you'd start getting very, very different results.
All I see is 3d realm throwing money at a problem, but I see the lack of this type of game designer in the team.
Do you know anything about any of the people on the team? Do you even know who any of them are? Don't confuse your lack of some gliteratus to look at with a lack of there being serious talent there. Some of the best game designers I've ever met are people you've never heard of.
The first cue that they are grasping at straws is the constant changing of 3d engines.
Carmack switched engines 12 times for Doom 3. When you've done the work, let me know. That's actually quite normal in this industry.
Seriously, what does 3DRealms (?) have to gain anymore?
If you'd spent the last ten years of your life working on a game which has ridden a popularity roller coaster, you'd want to see it come to market, too. Besides, though people are right to point out that what once make Duke famous is now trite, it's worth noting that the people who pioneered a lot of game topics have been working on this for ten years.
What they had was a company with the resources to spend a decade refining their game. The engine is a perpetually receding issue; you can't refine an engine for that long, because at the end it's pathetically out of date.
But! What if the world is huge? What if the opponent AI is sophisticated? What if someone's been working on a plot and story for ten years?
I think people are panning this prematurely. Sure, they've slipped schedules in a way that would embarass government engineers. But, some of this stuff isn't permanently on regeneration watch, and that stuff - the characterisations, the theme, the story arc - that's the stuff which hasn't caught up to film and television yet, except in a few exceedingly rare instances (and even then only arguably, and those games have had players playing for almost as long as DNF has been in development - Half Life and MGS come to mind.)
This *might* be one of the greatest games we've ever seen. This might not be a Romero maneuver.
Indeed. Just remember rule #1 of Stargate: All species other than the Tau'ri (Humans from Earth) are stupid.
Except several other branches of humanity, the Asgard, the Replicators, the Nox, the Tok'Ra, the Wraith, the mimetic aliens from Foothold, the Gadmeer, Machello's people, the Furlings and certain specific individuals among the Gou'auld.
Think about it. How could a small secret organization become a major player in the universe in a matter of years?
A traditional runaway American military budget, relative obscurity and far greater resources than any of the other existing powers were ready to admit until it was too late. Remember, the Gou'auld are used to dealing with broken peoples; it didn't occur to them that in the course of several years we could acquire through exploration enough technology to stand up to them. If we were at pre-Stargate tech levels and they knew what they now knew, we would have absolutely no chance of standing up to them.
It helps that we have an ascended, half a dozen part-ancient individuals and a Harsesis child, allies in the Asgard and Tok'ra, a worker's rebellion among the Jaffa military, several ancient weapons which have last-minute staved off Jaffa attacks, knowledge of several attacks which came in early from parallel universes and/or the future, allies in further advanced Human planets which have been several times annihilated, Oma De'Sala covering our asses, the Ancient city Atlantis, several instances of discarded Gou'auld technology and so on. Remember, for two seasons we had an alien gorilla just covering our asses in the guise of Thor, and even so the Gou'auld have wiped us out in several realities, and almost succeeded in this one on multiple occasions.
Why do Goa'uld soldiers walk around in big noisy metal uniforms that make them easy to locate and easy to see
Because those uniforms are easy to locate and easy to see. You'll notice those suits only get busted out when they're trying to scare the natives, or as patrols on a few particularly egotistical Gou'auld's ships. They're megalomaniacal egotists each with the resources of several planets and thousands of years of lack of opposition. It's the same reason the Swiss Guard carries halberds; you don't think polearms are going to stop tanks, do you? It's an issue of pomp and appearance, nothing more. (This is particularly important when you're oppressing entire planets out of fear.)
yet provide no protection against even handguns?
Actually, it took us a while to start piercing that armor with heavy rifles. Moreover, multiple Gou'auld - notably Ba'al, Ne'erti and Apophis - have developed new armor with varying levels of success. Ba'al in particular has developed a super soldier which we just can't deal with yet.
How come no one else has an iris?
Well. Lots of Gou'auld are arrogant. That said, several Gou'auld in fact do have irises, and two Gou'auld have displayed the ability to circumvent ours. Other branches of humanity have irises. Lots of races just bury their stargates. Some races, the Ancients included, have energy-based irises.
Remember though that Ba'al and Apophis can get around irises. Why don't they have them? Because it only takes a few years to learn to get around them. They're just not that effective.
The answer is simple: everyone else is stupid! After that, the absurdly predictable behavior of the Goa'uld becomes perfectly clear.
Remember that when you're talking about system lords, you're talking about 40 individuals who are arrogant and senescent. Even then, several of those individuals have shown a propensity for more direct action, and several others such as Lord Yu and Camulus have attempted diplomatic and strategic territorial operation.
The fact of the matter is that there are five times as many minds in the Stargate Command building alone than there are among the system lords. In terms of grey matter, we've got them outnumbered a hundred to one just among the bulk of us who are aware of what's going on. Also, we're marginally smarter than most of the other races are, especially as regards engineering.
Er. The idea isn't to bring the helium down. The idea is to set up the reactor on the moon, and send the energy down as microwave or laser. That way, no transporation costs, nobody cares if the reactor blows up, nobody cares about all the rock detritus, and so on.
Impact weapons are one thing. Radioactive contamination weapons are entirely another. From space, it's easy to render a state unsuitable for agriculture.
If everyone worked together, certain countries wouldn't be able to exercise their power over other countries.
Huhu. Whoever makes it work first - where it is fusion, ethanol, whatever the Next Big Step turns out to be in energy production - is the new Middle East. That's why as their economy was collapsing around them, the post-Soviet Russians continued to dump more and more money into programs like the Tokamak reactor. That's why though they're having a hard time paying for basic infrastructure for food, they're looking at mining the moon.
For instance, the USA wouldn't be able to keep their dollar overvalued by maintaining control over a scarce energy commodity (oil).
We haven't been an exporter of oil since Houston was considered oil central. The overvaluation you're thinking of is occurring right now in Dubai, not Washington. We are absolutely hemmorraging money into the Middle East, to the tune of 12.6 million barrels a year, at a January 20 price of $68.35, which comes to a rough estimate of $861 billion annually; being free of oil would make our economy much stronger, not weaker. Our annual oil costs would have paid for both major hurricane reconstructions and the war in Iraq, beginning to end, twice over.
We haven't had control of oil since Nigeria was in our pocket and Syria/Lebanon were at war. Also, hippies aren't the dominant social group anymore. Get some new data.
and would never recover since, with a devalued dollar (in relation to foreign currencies), it wouldn't be able to import necessities like food.
Uh, the only food we import is luxury food, like citrus or Kobe beef. We have an annual food export of $1.6 billion, and an annual food import of $200 million. Please remember that comparatively few people buy food from the US because we price it so high, and even then it's an 8:1 export favor. We let almost three quarters of our arable fields lie fallow on Government subsidy to keep the prices of grain depressed; even if we had 85% of our fields wiped out and our borders nailed down, we'd be fat as pigs. The United States is in fact the single most agriculturally productive nation on Earth, and is the most agriculturally productive nation per square foot if you chop tiny island nations off of the list.
Of course, since food is such a drastically small cost compared to other things (less than 1% GDP), and since the #3 agricultural power (Mexico) is to our south, disasterously economically depressed and desperate for trade, it's pretty much a non-issue. We put more money into video games than food. Try to keep perspective.
It couldn't keep its economy afloat with its two main professions: lawyers and real estate agents.
Well, it's cute to say things like that and all, but in fact almost 20% of our economy comes from industrial and manufacturing sectors, where again we're the dominant export power by a factor of nearly three. Lawyers aren't in fact that big of a drain on society; there aren't enough of them. You should probably stop learning about your economic structures from TV dramas; they're on every show because they seem powerful and add an air of legitimacy to business aspects of shows. By comparison, in the fifteen years I've been in industry, I've only ever had to deal with them once - and then, it was a patent lawyer, who's actually generating new things for society (give all the parasite yammering you want, but what I made couldn't have been made without the temporary economic protections afforded by that person.)
Real estate agents don't generate wealth at all. They redistribute it.
If you have to rely on buzz words and jargon when communicating to the popular press, then you are saying nothing, or you don't understand what the fuck you're talking about.
Did it occur to you that it might be you, rather than the IBM researcher, who doesn't know what the IBM researcher is talking about? Pardon my being blunt, but what he was saying wasn't buzz word driven at all, and when you deal with topics this far removed from natural language, it's either communication in jargon or no communication at all.
High horses aren't the status symbol they once were.
Re:is this because these are the same parents that
on
35% Of Parents Game
·
· Score: 1
Why did this get marked as a troll? This is a damned important question, and speaking as a member of the industry, I'll tell you firmly that this is a serious problem with our statistics.
What parent was saying wasn't "omgomgomgomg ESA so evil." What parent was saying was "you know, the sorts of people who actually take gaming questionnaires seriously tend to be the people who play games; by the nature of polling, wouldn't this distress the statistics?"
Please mod parent up. What he said was dead-on, and even if you disagree, it's certainly not a troll. He's not trying to start a flame war. (If I had metamoderation points right now...)
I wonder, would this have been news if it was a rock core sample?
Sorta. Really old rocks are news, but a million years isn't much for rocks. The principle holds, yes, but the time scale is entirely different. We have a few zircons from Australia which are almost 4.3 billion years old, so the number would have to be three and a half orders of magnitude bigger.
What exactly is the sense of forbidding trade in a product with whale-origin that in no way influences the whale if used?
To prevent dishonest people from going whaling, killing the animal, scumming its intestine, then going back to port and claiming to have found it washed up on an island beach. Though this is a particularly extreme example due to the cost of the material, in general it's best to set up preventative laws like these to prevent bad people from having a financial incentive to do bad things. It's the same reason we dole out pollution limits on industries that don't have pollution issues (even a web developer technically has legal limits on how much they're allowed to dump in the river, doncha know. Please, no replies about the cost of the grid; I know, and that's not the point.)
Slashdot Mirror
Man, when I saw this on BattleBots ten years ago, driven by the makers of Biohazard, I was unimpressed, because I'd seen it on a nifty 50s horror sci fi mess as a kid. Would that I remembered what that was, so that I could call this fifty years old, instead of ten...
Occam's razor suggests that there was in fact no interplay of minds, but rather that the likelihood that any given person was off by +X was equivalent to that another person was off by -X. The experiment measures only the average of the player's skill; there is no mechanism interconnecting minds, as the people do not have any direct observation of one another's states, nor in fact any observation of their own.
If there was a private monitor on which they saw both the average and *just* their own path, then you'd start getting very, very different results.
All I see is 3d realm throwing money at a problem, but I see the lack of this type of game designer in the team.
Do you know anything about any of the people on the team? Do you even know who any of them are? Don't confuse your lack of some gliteratus to look at with a lack of there being serious talent there. Some of the best game designers I've ever met are people you've never heard of.
The first cue that they are grasping at straws is the constant changing of 3d engines.
Carmack switched engines 12 times for Doom 3. When you've done the work, let me know. That's actually quite normal in this industry.
Seriously, what does 3DRealms (?) have to gain anymore?
If you'd spent the last ten years of your life working on a game which has ridden a popularity roller coaster, you'd want to see it come to market, too. Besides, though people are right to point out that what once make Duke famous is now trite, it's worth noting that the people who pioneered a lot of game topics have been working on this for ten years.
What they had was a company with the resources to spend a decade refining their game. The engine is a perpetually receding issue; you can't refine an engine for that long, because at the end it's pathetically out of date.
But! What if the world is huge? What if the opponent AI is sophisticated? What if someone's been working on a plot and story for ten years?
I think people are panning this prematurely. Sure, they've slipped schedules in a way that would embarass government engineers. But, some of this stuff isn't permanently on regeneration watch, and that stuff - the characterisations, the theme, the story arc - that's the stuff which hasn't caught up to film and television yet, except in a few exceedingly rare instances (and even then only arguably, and those games have had players playing for almost as long as DNF has been in development - Half Life and MGS come to mind.)
This *might* be one of the greatest games we've ever seen. This might not be a Romero maneuver.
Indeed. Just remember rule #1 of Stargate:
All species other than the Tau'ri (Humans from Earth) are stupid.
Except several other branches of humanity, the Asgard, the Replicators, the Nox, the Tok'Ra, the Wraith, the mimetic aliens from Foothold, the Gadmeer, Machello's people, the Furlings and certain specific individuals among the Gou'auld.
Think about it. How could a small secret organization become a major player in the universe in a matter of years?
A traditional runaway American military budget, relative obscurity and far greater resources than any of the other existing powers were ready to admit until it was too late. Remember, the Gou'auld are used to dealing with broken peoples; it didn't occur to them that in the course of several years we could acquire through exploration enough technology to stand up to them. If we were at pre-Stargate tech levels and they knew what they now knew, we would have absolutely no chance of standing up to them.
It helps that we have an ascended, half a dozen part-ancient individuals and a Harsesis child, allies in the Asgard and Tok'ra, a worker's rebellion among the Jaffa military, several ancient weapons which have last-minute staved off Jaffa attacks, knowledge of several attacks which came in early from parallel universes and/or the future, allies in further advanced Human planets which have been several times annihilated, Oma De'Sala covering our asses, the Ancient city Atlantis, several instances of discarded Gou'auld technology and so on. Remember, for two seasons we had an alien gorilla just covering our asses in the guise of Thor, and even so the Gou'auld have wiped us out in several realities, and almost succeeded in this one on multiple occasions.
Why do Goa'uld soldiers walk around in big noisy metal uniforms that make them easy to locate and easy to see
Because those uniforms are easy to locate and easy to see. You'll notice those suits only get busted out when they're trying to scare the natives, or as patrols on a few particularly egotistical Gou'auld's ships. They're megalomaniacal egotists each with the resources of several planets and thousands of years of lack of opposition. It's the same reason the Swiss Guard carries halberds; you don't think polearms are going to stop tanks, do you? It's an issue of pomp and appearance, nothing more. (This is particularly important when you're oppressing entire planets out of fear.)
yet provide no protection against even handguns?
Actually, it took us a while to start piercing that armor with heavy rifles. Moreover, multiple Gou'auld - notably Ba'al, Ne'erti and Apophis - have developed new armor with varying levels of success. Ba'al in particular has developed a super soldier which we just can't deal with yet.
How come no one else has an iris?
Well. Lots of Gou'auld are arrogant. That said, several Gou'auld in fact do have irises, and two Gou'auld have displayed the ability to circumvent ours. Other branches of humanity have irises. Lots of races just bury their stargates. Some races, the Ancients included, have energy-based irises.
Remember though that Ba'al and Apophis can get around irises. Why don't they have them? Because it only takes a few years to learn to get around them. They're just not that effective.
The answer is simple: everyone else is stupid! After that, the absurdly predictable behavior of the Goa'uld becomes perfectly clear.
Remember that when you're talking about system lords, you're talking about 40 individuals who are arrogant and senescent. Even then, several of those individuals have shown a propensity for more direct action, and several others such as Lord Yu and Camulus have attempted diplomatic and strategic territorial operation.
The fact of the matter is that there are five times as many minds in the Stargate Command building alone than there are among the system lords. In terms of grey matter, we've got them outnumbered a hundred to one just among the bulk of us who are aware of what's going on. Also, we're marginally smarter than most of the other races are, especially as regards engineering.
Why? Because it's realistic. Sorta.
Time and time again security through obscurity has proven to be a fallacy.
An impossibility, one might say, but certainly not a fallacy. Fallacies are invalid supporting logic.
What they haven't yet told you is that "ghelidj" is Arabic for "I'm Not." This is actually Ra's Al Ghul.
It's actually called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, because it was primarily Edward Sapir's work.
1) cut the screen down the middle
2) cut the screen horizontally 3 times
3) ???
4) profit from 8 cores
Your attempt at a counterinterpretation fails without that pesky apostrophe. Verbing is part of this language; deal with it.
Sorry, just a little poserical pet peeve. By the way, the English language has a perfectly good adjective known by "grammarian."
You're probably operating on different scales for the word 'modern.' What grandparent post said was true as recently as the late 1980s.
But, the keys don't have that satisfying XT click.
Russia never made it (manned flight w/return) to the Moon before. What makes them think they can do it now?
Thirty years of scientific progress and the kind of budget that can generally only come from the energy sector.
Oh, and vodka.
Er. The idea isn't to bring the helium down. The idea is to set up the reactor on the moon, and send the energy down as microwave or laser. That way, no transporation costs, nobody cares if the reactor blows up, nobody cares about all the rock detritus, and so on.
Oh, be reasonable. Do you realize the size of shark we'd need for a laser that big?
Impact weapons are one thing. Radioactive contamination weapons are entirely another. From space, it's easy to render a state unsuitable for agriculture.
If everyone worked together, certain countries wouldn't be able to exercise their power over other countries.
Huhu. Whoever makes it work first - where it is fusion, ethanol, whatever the Next Big Step turns out to be in energy production - is the new Middle East. That's why as their economy was collapsing around them, the post-Soviet Russians continued to dump more and more money into programs like the Tokamak reactor. That's why though they're having a hard time paying for basic infrastructure for food, they're looking at mining the moon.
For instance, the USA wouldn't be able to keep their dollar overvalued by maintaining control over a scarce energy commodity (oil).
We haven't been an exporter of oil since Houston was considered oil central. The overvaluation you're thinking of is occurring right now in Dubai, not Washington. We are absolutely hemmorraging money into the Middle East, to the tune of 12.6 million barrels a year, at a January 20 price of $68.35, which comes to a rough estimate of $861 billion annually; being free of oil would make our economy much stronger, not weaker. Our annual oil costs would have paid for both major hurricane reconstructions and the war in Iraq, beginning to end, twice over.
We haven't had control of oil since Nigeria was in our pocket and Syria/Lebanon were at war. Also, hippies aren't the dominant social group anymore. Get some new data.
and would never recover since, with a devalued dollar (in relation to foreign currencies), it wouldn't be able to import necessities like food.
Uh, the only food we import is luxury food, like citrus or Kobe beef. We have an annual food export of $1.6 billion, and an annual food import of $200 million. Please remember that comparatively few people buy food from the US because we price it so high, and even then it's an 8:1 export favor. We let almost three quarters of our arable fields lie fallow on Government subsidy to keep the prices of grain depressed; even if we had 85% of our fields wiped out and our borders nailed down, we'd be fat as pigs. The United States is in fact the single most agriculturally productive nation on Earth, and is the most agriculturally productive nation per square foot if you chop tiny island nations off of the list.
Of course, since food is such a drastically small cost compared to other things (less than 1% GDP), and since the #3 agricultural power (Mexico) is to our south, disasterously economically depressed and desperate for trade, it's pretty much a non-issue. We put more money into video games than food. Try to keep perspective.
It couldn't keep its economy afloat with its two main professions: lawyers and real estate agents.
Well, it's cute to say things like that and all, but in fact almost 20% of our economy comes from industrial and manufacturing sectors, where again we're the dominant export power by a factor of nearly three. Lawyers aren't in fact that big of a drain on society; there aren't enough of them. You should probably stop learning about your economic structures from TV dramas; they're on every show because they seem powerful and add an air of legitimacy to business aspects of shows. By comparison, in the fifteen years I've been in industry, I've only ever had to deal with them once - and then, it was a patent lawyer, who's actually generating new things for society (give all the parasite yammering you want, but what I made couldn't have been made without the temporary economic protections afforded by that person.)
Real estate agents don't generate wealth at all. They redistribute it.
No normal country, on
If you have to rely on buzz words and jargon when communicating to the popular press, then you are saying nothing, or you don't understand what the fuck you're talking about.
Did it occur to you that it might be you, rather than the IBM researcher, who doesn't know what the IBM researcher is talking about? Pardon my being blunt, but what he was saying wasn't buzz word driven at all, and when you deal with topics this far removed from natural language, it's either communication in jargon or no communication at all.
High horses aren't the status symbol they once were.
Why did this get marked as a troll? This is a damned important question, and speaking as a member of the industry, I'll tell you firmly that this is a serious problem with our statistics.
...)
What parent was saying wasn't "omgomgomgomg ESA so evil." What parent was saying was "you know, the sorts of people who actually take gaming questionnaires seriously tend to be the people who play games; by the nature of polling, wouldn't this distress the statistics?"
Please mod parent up. What he said was dead-on, and even if you disagree, it's certainly not a troll. He's not trying to start a flame war. (If I had metamoderation points right now
Not the parts we can get to with a steam shovel, no.
Turns out after DNA analysis the hair belonged to the great great grandson of Ted Williams. Go figure.
Yeah, you'd think it'd be his great^30 grandfather, instead. Wonder if by then his middle name was Zaphod.
Why won't the fanatics give it up?
Uh, because they're fanatics?
I wonder, would this have been news if it was a rock core sample?
Sorta. Really old rocks are news, but a million years isn't much for rocks. The principle holds, yes, but the time scale is entirely different. We have a few zircons from Australia which are almost 4.3 billion years old, so the number would have to be three and a half orders of magnitude bigger.
What exactly is the sense of forbidding trade in a product with whale-origin that in no way influences the whale if used?
To prevent dishonest people from going whaling, killing the animal, scumming its intestine, then going back to port and claiming to have found it washed up on an island beach. Though this is a particularly extreme example due to the cost of the material, in general it's best to set up preventative laws like these to prevent bad people from having a financial incentive to do bad things. It's the same reason we dole out pollution limits on industries that don't have pollution issues (even a web developer technically has legal limits on how much they're allowed to dump in the river, doncha know. Please, no replies about the cost of the grid; I know, and that's not the point.)
You really did go off the deep end there
Quit with the personal attacks. I've done no such thing.