Also, it's worth mentioning that I'm not pirating it either--that would just give them more justification for DRM.
That's almost worse, after all, if you pirated it you *might* be interested in a sequel game.
I'm the same though, DRM in games means I won't buy it, and won't pirate it. I just won't go near it, its an evolutionary dead end as far as I'm concerned, no need to go poking the sadly mutated monster, it'll only twitch longer..
Re:It maters not what the review says
on
Review: Spore
·
· Score: 1
You can shuffle back to your manager at EA and tell him I said that.
Do I sense a hint of jealousy?
Here's a thing. Back when I was an undergrad I wanted to be a games programmer. I discusses it with a lecturer, and they used EA as an example of what I could expect in the majority of jobs.
I was also looking forward to this game for ages but I'm not buying into the DRM crap.
The same thing stopped me from buying Bioshock too.
Probably a lot of other people felt the same way, because for such an apparently great game, it didn't waste much time before landing on the cheap shelves.
Actually that's what I was referring to, only I worded it badly.
I knew it was done because they needed a new product to sell to keep things going during the war years, and there were no Nazi affiliations. I didn't say Nazi though, I said Germany.
And? There was a lot of this going on, not just IBM. Coca Cola invented Fanta so they could continue to sell soft drinks in the European market during the War, Nissan were working with Nazi Germany to build their own V1/2 rockets. There are no doubt more examples.
Businesses do this, that's because they are businesses, not governments. To be frank, they probably realise that more than a few wars are started for less than honest reasons, and they likely see no reason to stop doing what they do because of it.
Why do they have so few visitors? Because the site is presented in what I have to say is a very boring fashion. Yes, I have been there.
If you know your history, and if you can carry your own commentary round in your head, then it rocks seeing a place that's so important historically, but if not then its not even slightly appealing as a location for a day trip.
When I was there I saw a lot of extremely bored kids. If they'd added in some enthusiastic guides with a flair for storytelling they would have been able to draw on enough information to keep those kids engaged, but there was only a very sedate and, to be honest, bland, tour on offer.
I'm not denying that its important to preserve this historical location, but what they really need is to make it more interesting to visitors.
Historical importance alone is not enough, it has to be fun too if they want to survive as a tourist location.
I intend to e-mail the publisher explaining that I would rather pirate it than pay them money thanks to their greed.
That would be like going into a shop and saying you plan to shoplift. They could quite easily take you to court over such a stupid statement, especially since they'd have the email you sent.
But what the hell, go ahead, it'll make interesting reading as they roast you.
The server side community is an integral part of the game. What do they need DRM for? Are they so used to annoying their customers that they just added the DRM out of habit?
Because they are too big as a company for people with a clue to make policy decisions. The DRM choice will have been made by upper management who weren't really understanding the impact it will have.
After all, they still think DRM is a good thing.
The DRM has made me certain I will not be buying this game. Its no loss anyway, there are plenty of games out there, and if the concept is good, someone else will do something similar soon enough.
How dare you corrupt my nice slashdot comment with facts!
Nasty person...
I wasn't aware of that, but I was thinking more of the impact of a loss of coastal integrity causing damage to the Islands. That's not exactly a short term thing.
But say goodbye to the Caribbean Islands before you do.
Millions of tons of sand from the Sahara are carried across the Atlantic and deposited on the Caribbean Islands every year. Start seeding more then the normal amount of clouds in the Atlantic, and you risk blocking this sand transport mechanism.
If that happens, erosion will soon destroy those Islands.
Mind you, if these hurricanes continue, they'll cease to be habitable anyway, so it may be they're screwed whatever happens.
Not exactly. We _know_ that a large part of DNA (about 40%) is junk, because it consists of simple repeating sequences (LINEs and SINEs).
It might have some indirect functions (like working as a buffer for mutations), but it's junk by itself.
There's also a fair amount of inactive genes and other junk.
No, we have no idea what a lot of it does, but its not junk, its just not fully understood. The term junk implies we know that it does nothing, but we do not know this for sure, and a lot of what we were sure was inactive now turns out to be active after all.
Also, we don't even know for sure if 'inactive' genes are really inactive or not. Its fiendishly hard to tell an 'active' gene from an 'inactive' one as it is. Inactive in this case meaning that it is sufficiently different in form from what we understand as being an active gene that we believe it may be one longer in use, or we haven't detected expression from it.
In fact there is no method currently capable of telling active genes from inactive ones with greater than 80/12 accuracy.
This means that when 80% of genes, in fact the promoter element, which is what we look for, have been correctly identified, 12% of DNA which is known not to be Genes have been incorrectly identified as being Genes.
And that's with labeled data that has been carefully prepared. Even allowing for labeling errors, that's not great accuracy, although its pretty good that we can do that well.
Applying the same technique to unlabeled DNA (such as a straight end to end search of someones DNA sequence), and its likely your level of accuracy will drop even more.
Actually its been widely known that 'junk DNA' does have an active role for a long time. The big problem is identifying which bits of it are responsible for regulation/transcription.
The main problem with the public's perception, and indeed that of some scientists, is the continued use of the term 'junk DNA' when the concept it embodies has been thoroughly discredited.
For the moment a lot of work does discount area's of DNA for which there isn't enough background information, but that's more to do with the need to make progress on the bits we understand, rather than to avoid looking at the junk.
This is likely why so many people still think that Junk DNA is a thing that we actively avoid. It isn't.
Well he must do if all this junk is getting through and messing with his creations.
So anyway god, I suggest you start using spamhous's new 'creation guard' anti DNA spam list. Its the state of the art for protecting all your 'miracles of life'(tm).
I hadn't noticed any spam or banner ads, but then I use adblock, and gmail. Plus the only time I had openDNS search come up was if I typed a search term right into the address bar, which is a dumb way to do it anyway.
What I had noticed was that I'd stopped having problems getting web access in the evenings.
Saying that, I tried the DNS server you mentioned, after a quick check re validity, rebooted, and gmail notifier managed to login about a minute faster than it has of late. Which means within a few seconds of the pc starting. That had only been a problem since I started using openDNS.
I used to have huge problems with http in the evenings, really long response times or timeouts. Some evenings we couldn't browse any websites for a couple of hours, even though ssh and games worked perfectly.
I changed to OpenDNS, and haven't had any problems since, not a single night of slow websites or timeouts. I think in my case, and perhaps in yours, the ISPs DNS servers are simply being swamped.
Actually I wasn't referring to the expression time series work, that was interesting, but all it really demonstrated was that we aren't at the point of being able to do it in a useful fashion.
I was referring to the DNA pattern extraction, that requires a lot of work. I only applied it to promoters, but it has wider uses that are still being explored (including website similarity, oddly enough..). Pattern matching is required for data mining DNA, and we have only just started to get a grip on the very basics of the task.
On the whole my comment was based on the many hundreds of papers I've read on the subject, not my own work.
You're right, of course. Information posted on the internet is never archived, and the barrier to doing data analysis on collected information never lowers over time.
Ok, You're suffering from a lack of understanding regarding DNA. Let me enlighten you. DNA is not like web pages. In spite of what you may have read in the press, we have barely even started to dip our toes in the sea of data it contains.
DNA fragments archived because they are available on the web is almost entirely useless when it comes to any sort of privacy issue.
Once data, any data, loses context, its just junk of no interest. Labelled data is where its at, science wise, and good quality labelled data is hard to come by. It takes a lot of work to generate DNA datasets that have value, and no-one willing to put in the work to do this is going to be interested in googling internet archives for their DNA.
google for 'hypermotif thesis' That should get my stuff. no direct URL, sorry, I learned my lesson once before regards putting my hompage url on slashdot
Slashdot Mirror
Voight-Kampff for short.
Sadly, it appears few people got the reference.
I worry for the geeks of today, I really do. I mean, you'd think Daryl Hanna in a leotard would be enough reason to watch the film, if nothing else..
I guess also reading the book would too much...
Nope, not even then, because that means putting some even more suspect crackers code on my computer
Also, it's worth mentioning that I'm not pirating it either--that would just give them more justification for DRM.
That's almost worse, after all, if you pirated it you *might* be interested in a sequel game.
I'm the same though, DRM in games means I won't buy it, and won't pirate it. I just won't go near it, its an evolutionary dead end as far as I'm concerned, no need to go poking the sadly mutated monster, it'll only twitch longer..
You can shuffle back to your manager at EA and tell him I said that.
Do I sense a hint of jealousy?
Here's a thing. Back when I was an undergrad I wanted to be a games programmer. I discusses it with a lecturer, and they used EA as an example of what I could expect in the majority of jobs.
I did a Ph.D instead...
I was also looking forward to this game for ages but I'm not buying into the DRM crap.
The same thing stopped me from buying Bioshock too.
Probably a lot of other people felt the same way, because for such an apparently great game, it didn't waste much time before landing on the cheap shelves.
Please explain how I can legally play Spore without the rootkit.
You can't, its that simple, the cracks are all in breach of the license. Its unlikely you'd find one that let you play online still.
The DRM means I will never buy it anyway.
Shame really, but I'm not putting that DRM crap on my system.
Actually that's what I was referring to, only I worded it badly.
I knew it was done because they needed a new product to sell to keep things going during the war years, and there were no Nazi affiliations. I didn't say Nazi though, I said Germany.
You'd think Steam could afford that -- just disable the game on that account, then you know they're actually no longer playing it.
Eh? That's retarded. By that logic you could buy a steam game, play it through then ask for your money back because you've played it now.
And? There was a lot of this going on, not just IBM. Coca Cola invented Fanta so they could continue to sell soft drinks in the European market during the War, Nissan were working with Nazi Germany to build their own V1/2 rockets. There are no doubt more examples.
Businesses do this, that's because they are businesses, not governments. To be frank, they probably realise that more than a few wars are started for less than honest reasons, and they likely see no reason to stop doing what they do because of it.
Why do they have so few visitors? Because the site is presented in what I have to say is a very boring fashion. Yes, I have been there.
If you know your history, and if you can carry your own commentary round in your head, then it rocks seeing a place that's so important historically, but if not then its not even slightly appealing as a location for a day trip.
When I was there I saw a lot of extremely bored kids. If they'd added in some enthusiastic guides with a flair for storytelling they would have been able to draw on enough information to keep those kids engaged, but there was only a very sedate and, to be honest, bland, tour on offer.
I'm not denying that its important to preserve this historical location, but what they really need is to make it more interesting to visitors.
Historical importance alone is not enough, it has to be fun too if they want to survive as a tourist location.
I intend to e-mail the publisher explaining that I would rather pirate it than pay them money thanks to their greed.
That would be like going into a shop and saying you plan to shoplift. They could quite easily take you to court over such a stupid statement, especially since they'd have the email you sent.
But what the hell, go ahead, it'll make interesting reading as they roast you.
The server side community is an integral part of the game. What do they need DRM for? Are they so used to annoying their customers that they just added the DRM out of habit?
Because they are too big as a company for people with a clue to make policy decisions. The DRM choice will have been made by upper management who weren't really understanding the impact it will have.
After all, they still think DRM is a good thing.
The DRM has made me certain I will not be buying this game. Its no loss anyway, there are plenty of games out there, and if the concept is good, someone else will do something similar soon enough.
How dare you corrupt my nice slashdot comment with facts!
Nasty person...
I wasn't aware of that, but I was thinking more of the impact of a loss of coastal integrity causing damage to the Islands. That's not exactly a short term thing.
01001001 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01101111 01101110 01100101 00100000 01110111 01100101 01101100 01100011 01101111 01101101 01100101 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01101111 01110000 01100101 01101110 00100000 01110011 01101111 01110101 01110010 01100011 01100101 00100000 01110010 01101111 01100010 01101111 01110100 00100000 01101111 01110110 01100101 01110010 01101100 01101111 01110010 01100100 01110011
Where will the ships get the salt water from?
Duh, they'll outsource Saline collection to India, obviously.
But say goodbye to the Caribbean Islands before you do.
Millions of tons of sand from the Sahara are carried across the Atlantic and deposited on the Caribbean Islands every year. Start seeding more then the normal amount of clouds in the Atlantic, and you risk blocking this sand transport mechanism.
If that happens, erosion will soon destroy those Islands.
Mind you, if these hurricanes continue, they'll cease to be habitable anyway, so it may be they're screwed whatever happens.
Not exactly. We _know_ that a large part of DNA (about 40%) is junk, because it consists of simple repeating sequences (LINEs and SINEs).
It might have some indirect functions (like working as a buffer for mutations), but it's junk by itself.
There's also a fair amount of inactive genes and other junk.
No, we have no idea what a lot of it does, but its not junk, its just not fully understood. The term junk implies we know that it does nothing, but we do not know this for sure, and a lot of what we were sure was inactive now turns out to be active after all.
Also, we don't even know for sure if 'inactive' genes are really inactive or not. Its fiendishly hard to tell an 'active' gene from an 'inactive' one as it is. Inactive in this case meaning that it is sufficiently different in form from what we understand as being an active gene that we believe it may be one longer in use, or we haven't detected expression from it.
In fact there is no method currently capable of telling active genes from inactive ones with greater than 80/12 accuracy.
This means that when 80% of genes, in fact the promoter element, which is what we look for, have been correctly identified, 12% of DNA which is known not to be Genes have been incorrectly identified as being Genes.
And that's with labeled data that has been carefully prepared. Even allowing for labeling errors, that's not great accuracy, although its pretty good that we can do that well.
Applying the same technique to unlabeled DNA (such as a straight end to end search of someones DNA sequence), and its likely your level of accuracy will drop even more.
Actually its been widely known that 'junk DNA' does have an active role for a long time. The big problem is identifying which bits of it are responsible for regulation/transcription.
The main problem with the public's perception, and indeed that of some scientists, is the continued use of the term 'junk DNA' when the concept it embodies has been thoroughly discredited.
For the moment a lot of work does discount area's of DNA for which there isn't enough background information, but that's more to do with the need to make progress on the bits we understand, rather than to avoid looking at the junk.
This is likely why so many people still think that Junk DNA is a thing that we actively avoid. It isn't.
Well he must do if all this junk is getting through and messing with his creations.
So anyway god, I suggest you start using spamhous's new 'creation guard' anti DNA spam list. Its the state of the art for protecting all your 'miracles of life'(tm).
I hadn't noticed any spam or banner ads, but then I use adblock, and gmail. Plus the only time I had openDNS search come up was if I typed a search term right into the address bar, which is a dumb way to do it anyway.
What I had noticed was that I'd stopped having problems getting web access in the evenings.
Saying that, I tried the DNS server you mentioned, after a quick check re validity, rebooted, and gmail notifier managed to login about a minute faster than it has of late. Which means within a few seconds of the pc starting. That had only been a problem since I started using openDNS.
So its you for the win I guess.
I've also found DNS to be slow for some reason.
Try OpenDNS.
I used to have huge problems with http in the evenings, really long response times or timeouts. Some evenings we couldn't browse any websites for a couple of hours, even though ssh and games worked perfectly.
I changed to OpenDNS, and haven't had any problems since, not a single night of slow websites or timeouts. I think in my case, and perhaps in yours, the ISPs DNS servers are simply being swamped.
Actually I wasn't referring to the expression time series work, that was interesting, but all it really demonstrated was that we aren't at the point of being able to do it in a useful fashion.
I was referring to the DNA pattern extraction, that requires a lot of work. I only applied it to promoters, but it has wider uses that are still being explored (including website similarity, oddly enough..). Pattern matching is required for data mining DNA, and we have only just started to get a grip on the very basics of the task.
On the whole my comment was based on the many hundreds of papers I've read on the subject, not my own work.
You're right, of course. Information posted on the internet is never archived, and the barrier to doing data analysis on collected information never lowers over time.
Ok, You're suffering from a lack of understanding regarding DNA. Let me enlighten you. DNA is not like web pages. In spite of what you may have read in the press, we have barely even started to dip our toes in the sea of data it contains.
DNA fragments archived because they are available on the web is almost entirely useless when it comes to any sort of privacy issue.
Once data, any data, loses context, its just junk of no interest. Labelled data is where its at, science wise, and good quality labelled data is hard to come by. It takes a lot of work to generate DNA datasets that have value, and no-one willing to put in the work to do this is going to be interested in googling internet archives for their DNA.
google for 'hypermotif thesis'
That should get my stuff. no direct URL, sorry, I learned my lesson once before regards putting my hompage url on slashdot