And then we can have the same great representation that the auto industry workers have, ensuring that their jobs are safe and profitable. And we can start approaching games in the same useful and productive ways that teachers approach teaching their students.
Sounds great! Where's the piece of paper for signups? I want to know so I can burn it.
A union is a monopoly by another name, and anyone who thinks that unions have anything to do with good products, good business, or sane long-term strategies is a fucking moron. Unlike auto construction or teaching*, video games can be done by tiny independent self-owned teams, and there's nothing stopping people from quitting and forming their own game studio.
* of course this is largely thanks to the teacher's union itself
People have this view of big-business as being this lumbering creature trying to save a cent everywhere they possibly can. Remove safety here, cut corners there, as long as it works for five minutes after it's sold, it's good enough. And, yes, in some ways this is justified. But on the other hand, this same technique is used everywhere - everywhere - in skyscrapers, in cargo ships, in the ridiculously complicated personal computer that you are using right now to read this.
We know how to manage risk, and we know how to manage safety. We can make things exactly as safe as we want to, assuming we're willing to pay the money.
We live in a world where we combust petrochemicals inside high-precision aluminum devices to fling multi-ton metal boxes around many times faster than we can run. When we get to our destination we purchase mass-produced foodstuffs, many of which have never been inspected by humans. We go to work in megaton cages of steel and concrete, sometimes in areas where the ground itself is known to shake with deadly force, and we sit there eating our food while sitting mere feet from copper cables carrying enough electricity to kill us a hundred times over, protected only by drywall and rubber insulation.
All of these things were provided by the lowest bidder.
And then we go home and complain about the scary new lasers and how people don't make things like they used to, damn them, they'll destroy us all, if only they didn't cut corners.
is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.
I quote the end of this paper:
"The problem has changed very little over the past 20 years," explained Shulman, referring to a 1990 Unix password study that showed a password selection pattern similar to what consumers select today. "It's time for everyone to take password security seriously; it's an important first step in data security.
He's correct, of course. The problem hasn't changed. That's because the vast majority of people don't care. We've been telling people to use good passwords for 20 years, and it hasn't worked. People don't use good passwords, people have never used good passwords, people never will use good passwords.
Maybe it's time to come up with a solution that may actually work, instead of pushing the same old obviously-failed solution yet again?
I suspect what he means by "not that much" is that it's necessary, but relatively easy compared to the rest. If you can do the hard part, you can probably do the easy part on your own.
This idea is like someone offering to help you run a marathon by telling you which way to turn at each intersection. Sure, it's critical - it's just easy.
On the other hand, I forked over $50 for a video card for a cheap video card in an old computer on mine solely to get DVI, because the crappy blurry VGA output was giving me a headache at 1280x1024. Before that, I spent fifteen minutes on my main computer trying to decide whether I wanted flickery 1600x1200x60hz, blurry 1600x1200x85hz, or slightly-flickery slightly-blurry 1600x1200x72hz. Before that, I paid $50 for a high-quality VGA cable instead of a crummy VGA cable because the crummy one was nearly unusable when I brought it home and plugged it in.
If you've got high-quality components on both sides, and a high-quality cable, and you're within the quality envelope in both refresh rate and resolution, then yep, VGA works just fine. Break any of those, and you're in downtown Headacheville, population you and the other four poor saps still using VGA.
I'm happy with my cheap DVI hardware - I've never seen it get blurry once, and I'm typing this on a 2560x1600 monitor.
But that's exactly my point. It doesn't matter how the formation occurs. If the "parent" can reproduce, in any way, from construction to repurposing to just hanging around the "child" until the child starts acting like the parent, then it counts as reproducing. It's not like I have memes sitting in my head getting pregnant - their "reproduction" is that I say something funny to someone, and he remembers it, and says it to someone else.
Evolution is in no way restricted to lifeforms that can self-reproduce. Prions have a way to duplicate their important properties - their bizarre folding - and that's all that's necessary.
(And yes, role models can be a form of reproduction.)
No, this isn't what I mean. The vast majority of devices are built by understanding the concepts involved and designing a new machine off those concepts. If we, instead, just measured a machine that already existed, then built another one to those approximate specs, over and over again, you'd see designs that were slightly "better" flourishing while designs that were slightly "worse" dying out. Thus, evolution.
It's a little more complicated than that. There's basically three properties that are both necessary and sufficient for evolution to take place.
* Some sort of fitness function * Reproduction, largely based on the properties of the "parent" * Imperfect reproduction, so that variation can be introduced
Once you've got those three items, you have the potential for evolution.
That said, it should be pretty obvious that basically any frequently-duplicated structure in the physical world, whether it be made out of DNA, protein, or metal and gears, is going to have all three of those items - the third just thanks to the physical world being imperfect. Note that it's not required that it be capable of duplicating itself - if all machines were built by copying older machines, we'd get to see "machine evolution" as people tended to copy the ones that worked better and throw away the ones that didn't.
Of course it's also worth pointing out that none of these requires that the item exist in a physical sense - you can meaningfully talk about memetic evolution, societal evolution, language evolution, joke and humor evolution, so forth ad nauseum.
See, I think this is actually a sign that the 3d was done well.
I've seen movies where the 3d jumped out at me. Boing, giant monster in my face, sproing, 3d gizmos in the face, hey look at how many things we can jam in your face.
Avatar didn't do that. It wasn't a 3d tour de force, it was a movie that happened to be in 3d. Most of the time, you're right, I just didn't notice - and that was its strength. Instead of being a pile of 3d special effects, it was a movie that just happened to be deeper and realer due to the use of 3d.
It's like HDTV or, as some have mentioned, color. If you don't notice it, it's doing its job. Sometimes its job is just subtle.
It's possible they could release a dual-mode disc, where a small part of it is encoded in the old format, including firmware to upgrade to the new PS3 firmware, and then the rest is encoded in the new format. Put disc in, "please update", finish updating, bam, game is playable. The user would probably never even realize that the disc was encoded in a different format (mandatory firmware updates are pretty much the norm on modern game consoles.)
I had airport security find a Leatherman, with a nice 4-inch blade, that I'd accidentally left in my backpack. Pretty good, right?
Except that I'd lost it a year earlier and had traveled cross-country half a dozen times since then. With the same backpack. And - unless aliens found the Leatherman and jammed it in my backpack for me - the same Leatherman inside.
I was not impressed. (Though at least I found my Leatherman.)
Nobody owes anybody anything. Some choose to donate out of their own free will. Others don't. The freely-chosen donations of one person do not, in any way, imply that another person should be required to "give" in order to "match up".
If you disagree, then, well, my mom gave me a really nice roasting pan for Christmas. To match a small part of her generosity, I'll be expecting a measuring cup set from you.
My mom has been trying to start a new museum lately. One of the big projects is to set up Internet-based donations. Naturally, every state has its own laws on how donations to non-profits work. Non-profits have to be registered separately in every state (technically there is a "standard form", but the states who take it all require extra documentation as well) and tax reporting is just a gargantuan enormous burden. Too complicated for any small non-profit to ever manage.
As a result, there are companies that specialize in doing this for you. They take a small slice of the donations (something like 2%) and in exchange they manage all of the annoying reporting and legal issues involved.
It turns out that they're good at it. So good, in fact, that the Red Cross uses them because they find it cheaper and more reliable.
I see no reason whatsoever that a similar business couldn't form for internet sales tax. And, in fact, I find it almost inevitable that such a business will form once it becomes an issue. So, as for how much it will cost, and how difficult it will be to manage: well, about 2% of your revenue, if the non-profit area is any indication.
Plus the taxes that you now have to pay, of course.
If "goofing off with friends" is getting me a contract with Hollywood based on my "costs", I'd sure as hell better put a realistic price on that. Otherwise the lawyers show up a year later and ask me to please itemize my $300 costs and explain why this new film is costing so much more.
(answer: because suddenly my friends don't have time to subsidize my new film with their acting.)
I'm assuming Hollywood is not being idiotic about this and is taking that all into account, but, still, I'm curious exactly how much time it really did take and what kind of costs really were involved.
As awesome as that video is - and it is pretty damn awesome, let there be no mistake about that - I suspect that it only cost $300 if he's considering the time of himself and his friends to be worth zero. (I'm assuming the group scenes were the result of getting a bunch of buddies together.)
I'd be interested to know how many hours of his own time were spent on that.
However, it is pretty awesome and the mere fact that he can do stuff like that with his limited resources is a sign that he may well deserve that money.
This isn't related to your question exactly, but I've found magnesium supplements help (i.e. completely get rid of) my admittedly minor tinnitus. If you're not trying them, it may be worth it - I went to two specialists and neither of them mentioned it, then happened to run across a reference online and decided to give it a try.
Y'know, I remember when I was going online in my early teen years. I remember chatting with people online about all manner of things. Yeah, I went into a few cybersex chatrooms for the thrill of it, I hung out in adult discussion channels.
I learned from it.
I talked to 25-year-olds and 35-year-olds about philosophy. I spectated on public cybersex, and learned things about human behavior and desire. I watched people wiser and smarter than I was make good decisions after good decision, then fuck up, do something stupid, and recover from it.
Humanity learns from its elders. That is the way it has always been. The older ones teach the younger ones, the younger ones mull over what they've been taught and improve it, the younger ones become the older ones, the cycle continues. Why are we trying to break this? Children today are kept in the dark more than in any point in history - should we lock them in a small steel box, isolated from human interaction, until they're 18 and magically an adult?
I was emotionally mature early. Everyone I talked to said so. They said that at 16, I was wiser and smarter than a lot of their peers. And now I look back on who I was then and realize I knew nothing, but, indeed, I was still far ahead of the curve. Today, I give out advice to people, just like I was given advice to back then, and I know for a fact I've helped the lives of many people, I've given them a philosophical kickstart and pushed their lives onto good tracks.
And in twenty years, they'll be doing the same thing as I did, only even better because they'll have started from a better position, thanks to my efforts.
These recommendations are actively dangerous to the progression of humanity.
On the other hand, I moved into my current apartment - with crummy power to the point that the UPS freaks out daily (for a second or two) - and immediately started going through incandescents like water. Perhaps twelve bulbs, and I was replacing one per week.
Eventually I blew two hundred bucks on good-quality CFLs. I've had exactly one bulb fail since.
From what I've been able to tell, CFLs are by no means immune to the you-get-what-you-pay-for syndrome. They're just more expensive to start with, so people skimp on them more, and get crummy CFLs, and the CFLs die rapidly. Buy good ones: they're worth it.
The grandparent post is ignoring the relative in favor of the absolute, but you are ignoring the absolute in favor of the relative. It's important to keep both of them in mind. Yes, LEDs have pollution issues. Yes, they are much better than CFLs.
Both of those points are valid and worth considering.
Depends. I'm imagining just sending the chemical formulas across. It wouldn't be all that hard to come up with a lingua franca for chemistry - it's not like hydrogen behaves differently on Alpha Centauri or anything.
Pin down the chemistry basics, get the essential formulas, then send "oh yeah and also titanium plus these chemicals equals this other set of chemicals, add electricity and you get this, then separate and you get this". At that point it's just down to an engineering challenge to figure out that "separate" means "in a centrifuge at 2000 degrees", and in the meantime we'll be trying to pin down more words just in case our scientists can't get it across.
The goal isn't to transmit the exact right words, it's to transmit enough of the core breakthroughs that the science teams on either side can reconstruct whatever's left.
Of course we'll probably burn a few weeks trying to figure out why it isn't working before they think to mention that oh yeah their atmosphere is 22% sulfur, that might be important now that you mention it
On the other hand, it also only takes one civilization to construct self-replicating peacekeepers that could defend the galaxy at a significant fraction of the speed of light. And if those self-replicating terminators already exist, well, we're fucked as it is, so we may as well get it over with quickly.
I actually wouldn't be surprised if we are the first, or at least, the first with a good shot at reaching an interstellar society within our galaxy, simply based on the fact that any species that goes interstellar will probably expand at nearly the speed of light after doing so. The mere fact that our earth hasn't been colonized yet indicates that there may not be any interstellar species within our light cone.
The entire Wikipedia section on the production of titanium is a little under 4 kilobytes, which would take a bit over an hour to transmit at those rates. Imagine an alien species has a new ultra-efficient titanium refining process - would you wait a day to get the summary of it downloaded for your scientists? I sure as hell would.
The two-hundred-year transmission lag to go a hundred lightyears is a far bigger issue than the bandwidth.
Slashdot Mirror
And then we can have the same great representation that the auto industry workers have, ensuring that their jobs are safe and profitable. And we can start approaching games in the same useful and productive ways that teachers approach teaching their students.
Sounds great! Where's the piece of paper for signups? I want to know so I can burn it.
A union is a monopoly by another name, and anyone who thinks that unions have anything to do with good products, good business, or sane long-term strategies is a fucking moron. Unlike auto construction or teaching*, video games can be done by tiny independent self-owned teams, and there's nothing stopping people from quitting and forming their own game studio.
* of course this is largely thanks to the teacher's union itself
You know what I always think is kind of weird?
People have this view of big-business as being this lumbering creature trying to save a cent everywhere they possibly can. Remove safety here, cut corners there, as long as it works for five minutes after it's sold, it's good enough. And, yes, in some ways this is justified. But on the other hand, this same technique is used everywhere - everywhere - in skyscrapers, in cargo ships, in the ridiculously complicated personal computer that you are using right now to read this.
We know how to manage risk, and we know how to manage safety. We can make things exactly as safe as we want to, assuming we're willing to pay the money.
We live in a world where we combust petrochemicals inside high-precision aluminum devices to fling multi-ton metal boxes around many times faster than we can run. When we get to our destination we purchase mass-produced foodstuffs, many of which have never been inspected by humans. We go to work in megaton cages of steel and concrete, sometimes in areas where the ground itself is known to shake with deadly force, and we sit there eating our food while sitting mere feet from copper cables carrying enough electricity to kill us a hundred times over, protected only by drywall and rubber insulation.
All of these things were provided by the lowest bidder.
And then we go home and complain about the scary new lasers and how people don't make things like they used to, damn them, they'll destroy us all, if only they didn't cut corners.
I dunno. Somehow I'm just not all that worried.
is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.
I quote the end of this paper:
He's correct, of course. The problem hasn't changed. That's because the vast majority of people don't care. We've been telling people to use good passwords for 20 years, and it hasn't worked. People don't use good passwords, people have never used good passwords, people never will use good passwords.
Maybe it's time to come up with a solution that may actually work, instead of pushing the same old obviously-failed solution yet again?
I suspect what he means by "not that much" is that it's necessary, but relatively easy compared to the rest. If you can do the hard part, you can probably do the easy part on your own.
This idea is like someone offering to help you run a marathon by telling you which way to turn at each intersection. Sure, it's critical - it's just easy.
And the fact that the source is, you know, open. I feel that's kind of a major point.
On the other hand, I forked over $50 for a video card for a cheap video card in an old computer on mine solely to get DVI, because the crappy blurry VGA output was giving me a headache at 1280x1024. Before that, I spent fifteen minutes on my main computer trying to decide whether I wanted flickery 1600x1200x60hz, blurry 1600x1200x85hz, or slightly-flickery slightly-blurry 1600x1200x72hz. Before that, I paid $50 for a high-quality VGA cable instead of a crummy VGA cable because the crummy one was nearly unusable when I brought it home and plugged it in.
If you've got high-quality components on both sides, and a high-quality cable, and you're within the quality envelope in both refresh rate and resolution, then yep, VGA works just fine. Break any of those, and you're in downtown Headacheville, population you and the other four poor saps still using VGA.
I'm happy with my cheap DVI hardware - I've never seen it get blurry once, and I'm typing this on a 2560x1600 monitor.
But that's exactly my point. It doesn't matter how the formation occurs. If the "parent" can reproduce, in any way, from construction to repurposing to just hanging around the "child" until the child starts acting like the parent, then it counts as reproducing. It's not like I have memes sitting in my head getting pregnant - their "reproduction" is that I say something funny to someone, and he remembers it, and says it to someone else.
Evolution is in no way restricted to lifeforms that can self-reproduce. Prions have a way to duplicate their important properties - their bizarre folding - and that's all that's necessary.
(And yes, role models can be a form of reproduction.)
No, this isn't what I mean. The vast majority of devices are built by understanding the concepts involved and designing a new machine off those concepts. If we, instead, just measured a machine that already existed, then built another one to those approximate specs, over and over again, you'd see designs that were slightly "better" flourishing while designs that were slightly "worse" dying out. Thus, evolution.
It's a little more complicated than that. There's basically three properties that are both necessary and sufficient for evolution to take place.
* Some sort of fitness function
* Reproduction, largely based on the properties of the "parent"
* Imperfect reproduction, so that variation can be introduced
Once you've got those three items, you have the potential for evolution.
That said, it should be pretty obvious that basically any frequently-duplicated structure in the physical world, whether it be made out of DNA, protein, or metal and gears, is going to have all three of those items - the third just thanks to the physical world being imperfect. Note that it's not required that it be capable of duplicating itself - if all machines were built by copying older machines, we'd get to see "machine evolution" as people tended to copy the ones that worked better and throw away the ones that didn't.
Of course it's also worth pointing out that none of these requires that the item exist in a physical sense - you can meaningfully talk about memetic evolution, societal evolution, language evolution, joke and humor evolution, so forth ad nauseum.
See, I think this is actually a sign that the 3d was done well.
I've seen movies where the 3d jumped out at me. Boing, giant monster in my face, sproing, 3d gizmos in the face, hey look at how many things we can jam in your face.
Avatar didn't do that. It wasn't a 3d tour de force, it was a movie that happened to be in 3d. Most of the time, you're right, I just didn't notice - and that was its strength. Instead of being a pile of 3d special effects, it was a movie that just happened to be deeper and realer due to the use of 3d.
It's like HDTV or, as some have mentioned, color. If you don't notice it, it's doing its job. Sometimes its job is just subtle.
Similarly, a hunk of silicon with strange electrical properties isn't a computer. And yet, the former is very useful if you want to build the latter.
Do you, like, just not understand how science works?
It's possible they could release a dual-mode disc, where a small part of it is encoded in the old format, including firmware to upgrade to the new PS3 firmware, and then the rest is encoded in the new format. Put disc in, "please update", finish updating, bam, game is playable. The user would probably never even realize that the disc was encoded in a different format (mandatory firmware updates are pretty much the norm on modern game consoles.)
I had airport security find a Leatherman, with a nice 4-inch blade, that I'd accidentally left in my backpack. Pretty good, right?
Except that I'd lost it a year earlier and had traveled cross-country half a dozen times since then. With the same backpack. And - unless aliens found the Leatherman and jammed it in my backpack for me - the same Leatherman inside.
I was not impressed. (Though at least I found my Leatherman.)
Nobody owes anybody anything. Some choose to donate out of their own free will. Others don't. The freely-chosen donations of one person do not, in any way, imply that another person should be required to "give" in order to "match up".
If you disagree, then, well, my mom gave me a really nice roasting pan for Christmas. To match a small part of her generosity, I'll be expecting a measuring cup set from you.
My mom has been trying to start a new museum lately. One of the big projects is to set up Internet-based donations. Naturally, every state has its own laws on how donations to non-profits work. Non-profits have to be registered separately in every state (technically there is a "standard form", but the states who take it all require extra documentation as well) and tax reporting is just a gargantuan enormous burden. Too complicated for any small non-profit to ever manage.
As a result, there are companies that specialize in doing this for you. They take a small slice of the donations (something like 2%) and in exchange they manage all of the annoying reporting and legal issues involved.
It turns out that they're good at it. So good, in fact, that the Red Cross uses them because they find it cheaper and more reliable.
I see no reason whatsoever that a similar business couldn't form for internet sales tax. And, in fact, I find it almost inevitable that such a business will form once it becomes an issue. So, as for how much it will cost, and how difficult it will be to manage: well, about 2% of your revenue, if the non-profit area is any indication.
Plus the taxes that you now have to pay, of course.
If "goofing off with friends" is getting me a contract with Hollywood based on my "costs", I'd sure as hell better put a realistic price on that. Otherwise the lawyers show up a year later and ask me to please itemize my $300 costs and explain why this new film is costing so much more.
(answer: because suddenly my friends don't have time to subsidize my new film with their acting.)
I'm assuming Hollywood is not being idiotic about this and is taking that all into account, but, still, I'm curious exactly how much time it really did take and what kind of costs really were involved.
As awesome as that video is - and it is pretty damn awesome, let there be no mistake about that - I suspect that it only cost $300 if he's considering the time of himself and his friends to be worth zero. (I'm assuming the group scenes were the result of getting a bunch of buddies together.)
I'd be interested to know how many hours of his own time were spent on that.
However, it is pretty awesome and the mere fact that he can do stuff like that with his limited resources is a sign that he may well deserve that money.
This isn't related to your question exactly, but I've found magnesium supplements help (i.e. completely get rid of) my admittedly minor tinnitus. If you're not trying them, it may be worth it - I went to two specialists and neither of them mentioned it, then happened to run across a reference online and decided to give it a try.
Y'know, I remember when I was going online in my early teen years. I remember chatting with people online about all manner of things. Yeah, I went into a few cybersex chatrooms for the thrill of it, I hung out in adult discussion channels.
I learned from it.
I talked to 25-year-olds and 35-year-olds about philosophy. I spectated on public cybersex, and learned things about human behavior and desire. I watched people wiser and smarter than I was make good decisions after good decision, then fuck up, do something stupid, and recover from it.
Humanity learns from its elders. That is the way it has always been. The older ones teach the younger ones, the younger ones mull over what they've been taught and improve it, the younger ones become the older ones, the cycle continues. Why are we trying to break this? Children today are kept in the dark more than in any point in history - should we lock them in a small steel box, isolated from human interaction, until they're 18 and magically an adult?
I was emotionally mature early. Everyone I talked to said so. They said that at 16, I was wiser and smarter than a lot of their peers. And now I look back on who I was then and realize I knew nothing, but, indeed, I was still far ahead of the curve. Today, I give out advice to people, just like I was given advice to back then, and I know for a fact I've helped the lives of many people, I've given them a philosophical kickstart and pushed their lives onto good tracks.
And in twenty years, they'll be doing the same thing as I did, only even better because they'll have started from a better position, thanks to my efforts.
These recommendations are actively dangerous to the progression of humanity.
But did anyone else read that as "but [the government] still will search for ways to fight Internet privacy"?
On the other hand, I moved into my current apartment - with crummy power to the point that the UPS freaks out daily (for a second or two) - and immediately started going through incandescents like water. Perhaps twelve bulbs, and I was replacing one per week.
Eventually I blew two hundred bucks on good-quality CFLs. I've had exactly one bulb fail since.
From what I've been able to tell, CFLs are by no means immune to the you-get-what-you-pay-for syndrome. They're just more expensive to start with, so people skimp on them more, and get crummy CFLs, and the CFLs die rapidly. Buy good ones: they're worth it.
The grandparent post is ignoring the relative in favor of the absolute, but you are ignoring the absolute in favor of the relative. It's important to keep both of them in mind. Yes, LEDs have pollution issues. Yes, they are much better than CFLs.
Both of those points are valid and worth considering.
Depends. I'm imagining just sending the chemical formulas across. It wouldn't be all that hard to come up with a lingua franca for chemistry - it's not like hydrogen behaves differently on Alpha Centauri or anything.
Pin down the chemistry basics, get the essential formulas, then send "oh yeah and also titanium plus these chemicals equals this other set of chemicals, add electricity and you get this, then separate and you get this". At that point it's just down to an engineering challenge to figure out that "separate" means "in a centrifuge at 2000 degrees", and in the meantime we'll be trying to pin down more words just in case our scientists can't get it across.
The goal isn't to transmit the exact right words, it's to transmit enough of the core breakthroughs that the science teams on either side can reconstruct whatever's left.
Of course we'll probably burn a few weeks trying to figure out why it isn't working before they think to mention that oh yeah their atmosphere is 22% sulfur, that might be important now that you mention it
On the other hand, it also only takes one civilization to construct self-replicating peacekeepers that could defend the galaxy at a significant fraction of the speed of light. And if those self-replicating terminators already exist, well, we're fucked as it is, so we may as well get it over with quickly.
I actually wouldn't be surprised if we are the first, or at least, the first with a good shot at reaching an interstellar society within our galaxy, simply based on the fact that any species that goes interstellar will probably expand at nearly the speed of light after doing so. The mere fact that our earth hasn't been colonized yet indicates that there may not be any interstellar species within our light cone.
The entire Wikipedia section on the production of titanium is a little under 4 kilobytes, which would take a bit over an hour to transmit at those rates. Imagine an alien species has a new ultra-efficient titanium refining process - would you wait a day to get the summary of it downloaded for your scientists? I sure as hell would.
The two-hundred-year transmission lag to go a hundred lightyears is a far bigger issue than the bandwidth.