> I certainly don't want to provoke anyone, but I wonder how long it will take until they hack gmail and other cloud-based services, and put all the data into the open?
Well, given the fact that gmail now allows over 7.5GB of storage per account, hackers stealing a single GB of data probably wouldn't affect that many users. Of course that doesn't make it right, but it does limit the damage somewhat.
> Imagine authoring our DNA so that it absorbs metals, converts them into a biological alloy that then becomes our skeletal and muscular system?
Are you high?
> We need this. The entire species is located (as far as we know) on just ONE planet at the moment. We are fucking around with all of our eggs in one basket; one planet killer event and we are all GONE. That and we have an entire universe to fuck with, and we all fight about retarded shit here, makes me want to "Three Stooges Slap" the entire human race to wake them up.
> Show me an articulated robot that moves around as long as humans do without totally falling apart every 3 days/months/years and we can start this discussion.
I think most planes move around at least *as far* as humans do in a lifetime without falling apart. Doesn't that count? The have embraced the "Live fast, die young" philosophy:p
Circumcision does in some studies show reduction of transmission of HIV. But why stop there? If cutting off healthy body parts to reduce AIDS is acceptable, why not remove the entire penis?
> An explorer discovers a whole freaking CONTINENT quite a long distance away. But, because you have never tried to move an entire population before, you just dismiss the idea of moving to the continent as "irrational".
You failed to mention that the other continent is millions/billions of miles away through a vacuum and has conditions so inhospitable that you cannot survive for more than a few weeks once you arrive there anyway. It is reasonable to assume that even if the volcano we live on erupts, it is still easier to live on it than on the 'continent' that was discovered.
Try again with a better analogy because yours is crap.
> A six times as large backpack isn't a gameplay advantage? Not particularly, no. The alternative weapons are pretty balanced with the default ones, and you're probably not going to use every single one of them anyway. I doubt most people use every class, I know I don't.
> Colors matching the environment and making you harder to spot isn't a gameplay advantage? We're talking about TF2 here, not some stealth shooter. The thing you can change about the look of your character is... your hat. And there is no prone position. I have never heard of anyone wearing a hat to 'blend in' with their environment, and if you had any experience playing TF2 you would realize how completely preposterous that idea really is.
> So unless you already have purchased TF2, your friends who have will have an advantage over you. And depending on their playing style, they may not even welcome you, if they have to make special considerations for your limited account's abilities.
They will not. There is NO gameplay advantage between the two account types. In fact I wish I could downgrade so I won't receive those cosmetic item drops...
If your friends don't welcome you, it's probably because they think you suck, or they don't like you.
It seems you are the retarded one. Your amazing 'solution' works only for dominant traits caused by a single gene. Of course if you had any clue about biology you would have known that, so until you do it might be best if you refrain from advocating eugenics.
> Would it be feasible to pre-render every possible scene in the game and then just throw that up based on which direction the user moves?
No, of course it wouldn't be. Let's say we have a completely featureless map that is 100m by 100m, and we track coordinates in (integer) millimeters. This gives us 100000 * 100000 = 1 billion different points we can occupy. Wait, now we can't jump, and our face is stuck at some distance above the ground. We add being prone and crouching to our positions, and the ability to jump, and, while we're at it, it would be nice if we could see our body fly around when being hit by a grenade or something, so to be on the safe side we add height to our coordinates and set our maximum height to 10m. Now we have 1000000000 * 1000 = 1 trillion possible points. For the sake of the example we'll assume the data from a single point to be 1920 * 1200 * 6 pixels (looking 6 directions: up, down, left, right, forward, and back, and if you look forward-left-up we'll just combine the pictures somehow) so at 4 bytes per pixel that is 52MB, but let's assume we can magically losslessly compress this into 1MB. Congratulations, our image lookup table now contains almost 1 exabyte of information.
Note that all the above numbers are rather conservative. Maps tend to be much bigger than 100 by 100 meters, and coordinates in games tend to be tracked much more precisely. Many games allow you to go much higher/lower than 10 meters, especially those where you can float about as a spectator (which increases the amount of points from where a player might look spectacularly). The magical compression is probably relatively reasonable as neighbouring coordinates will usually look very much alike and you can probably get away with storing the differences in many cases.
Anyway, now we have a service where every client queries a 1 exabyte database about 30 times per second. Even assuming that is feasible, now we have to superimpose the bad guys... and to do that we need to know what the environment looks like. We don't want to superimpose a bad guy over a tree if he's standing behind it, so we need the 3d model of the map so that we can decide which parts of the enemy to draw. This is starting to look a lot like rendering...
It seems your idea would be a complete disaster and it's several orders of magnitude cheaper to render scenes only when they are required (while accepting the risk of sometimes rendering the same scene multiple time).
> Like using -1 instead of 1 as "true". Thereby having all 1's set instead of a single bit which, in theory, could change.
When bits start changing, reliability goes right out of the window. Sure there is a rather unlikely chance that some boolean value in RAM gets hit by a cosmic ray, and in your scheme this would result in an invalid value always, rather than an invalid value most of the time, while sometimes flipping the boolean value from true to false or back. Of course once we deem it likely that booleans can spontaneously change, testing for them "if (invalid(someboolean))" becomes completely pointless, because the testing itself introduces a boolean value, which we just established is unreliable. Besides, perhaps they like to but multiple boolean values in a single word, which works if it's encoded as a single bit, and not so much as when it's encoded as "all 1s". This is all assuming only boolean values get changed. Once you start flipping bits in loop counters, stack pointers, instruction pointers, you're fucked.
Your plan sounds interesting at first but I'm afraid it would prevent very few (if any) bugs, and modifying a compiler to use -1 for true rather than 1 may well introduce *more* bugs (especially when interacting with other code that may or may not have been written in c++).
More importantly, why should I give a fuck about the survival of the human race when I (and all my friends and family and all hypothetical offspring I may have at that time) will be dead?
Assuming we all believe that book is completely reliable and true, it still doesn't tell us anything about how the universe works. Surely even the most devout Christian would have to admit that when it comes to examining the building blocks of the (physical) universe, a particle accelerator such as the LHC is more useful than a bible?
IQ doesn't measure absolute intelligence, it measures the intelligence of an individual compared to the rest of the population. The average IQ is 100, by definition, and the notion of everyone getting "+30 IQ" is ridiculous, and there is exactly one way to accomplish it: redefine the average to be 130 instead of 100.
> You state this as matter of fact when it is still in the realm of matter of opinion. The fact of the matter is that Universal Health Care is in the best interest of the ill at the expense of the healthy. In some instances, contagious diseases for example, the treatment/quarantining of the ill is in the best interests of both the ill and the healthy but in others, lung cancer caused by smoking for example, is only in the best interest of the ill at the expense of the healthy.
Where I live the average smoker pays more in taxes than he or she costs through smoking-related health problems. Your objection assumes no tax on cigarettes. More generally, activities that significantly increase ones chances of requiring medical attention could be taxed by some amount that approximately compensates for those extra medical costs, thereby creating a system that is fair (on average).
> The problem with people having a right to health care is that must also be accompanied with a responsibility to try as best as possible to keep yourself healthy to be in the best interests of all. The act of forcing you to live up to that responsibility will encroach on your other rights (religion, expression, choice, etc.) so it cannot and should not be done and as a result you cannot have a right to health care.
Presumably the free health care is paid through taxes, so given the fact that a person is contributing to the system, I see no reason why that person would feel guilty about making use of that health care assuming they have made a reasonable effort to be healthy. Which isn't the same as trying your best as possible to keep healthy (although if everybody did that, the taxes required to pay the health care would go down for everyone). Technically we could all live in plastic containers, and nobody would ever catch and/or spread an infectious disease from that point, but most people don't consider those who catch a cold to be negligent even though it could theoretically have been prevented (if only that person were trying his or her best as possible to keep healthy). I think it likely that trying at all times to stay as healthy as possible might actually be more expensive (both for the individual and society) than to merely make a reasonable effort and failing every now and then.
> Think of it this way; you may be able to ethically compel someone to help another (i.e. save their life) if it costs them nothing (other than an insignificant/inconsequential amount of their time) but you cannot ethically compel someone to do so if it actually costs them something as it is depriving them of their property (which is an existing, higher-order right) against their will. Universal Health Care attempts to foist this deprivation of property to a country-wide scale while trying to hide the fact that it is doing so. It is wrong (opinion).
I don't know where you're from, but in my country I am required by law to make a reasonable effort to help others who are in immediate danger, provided lending assistance would not put myself in significant danger. If I see a toddler drown in a 4-feet deep pool, I doubt "but entering the water would have ruined my beautiful new shoes!" would be considered a valid reason not to attempt a rescue, and I would very much be considered at least partially responsible for that child's untimely demise, and I prefer it that way. It seems rather callous to me that you consider your property to be more important than the life of another human being.
Why? Your right not to have your stuff taken from you is no more self-evident than the right to sufficient food. Indeed for long periods in our history it was perfectly normal for the people in charge to take what they wanted from those they ruled.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not an egg. If the whole basket breaks, who will be around to miss them? Nobody! Which makes the 'eggs-in-basket' analogy rather inaccurate.
The black hole will still be there.
> I certainly don't want to provoke anyone, but I wonder how long it will take until they hack gmail and other cloud-based services, and put all the data into the open?
Well, given the fact that gmail now allows over 7.5GB of storage per account, hackers stealing a single GB of data probably wouldn't affect that many users. Of course that doesn't make it right, but it does limit the damage somewhat.
> Imagine authoring our DNA so that it absorbs metals, converts them into a biological alloy that then becomes our skeletal and muscular system?
Are you high?
> We need this. The entire species is located (as far as we know) on just ONE planet at the moment. We are fucking around with all of our eggs in one basket; one planet killer event and we are all GONE. That and we have an entire universe to fuck with, and we all fight about retarded shit here, makes me want to "Three Stooges Slap" the entire human race to wake them up.
Oh, it seems you are.
> Show me an articulated robot that moves around as long as humans do without totally falling apart every 3 days/months/years and we can start this discussion.
I think most planes move around at least *as far* as humans do in a lifetime without falling apart. Doesn't that count? The have embraced the "Live fast, die young" philosophy :p
Surely no *real* Christian would be having unprotected sex with multiple partners, making any reduction in the spread of STDs meaningless? :p
Circumcision does in some studies show reduction of transmission of HIV. But why stop there? If cutting off healthy body parts to reduce AIDS is acceptable, why not remove the entire penis?
> An explorer discovers a whole freaking CONTINENT quite a long distance away. But, because you have never tried to move an entire population before, you just dismiss the idea of moving to the continent as "irrational".
You failed to mention that the other continent is millions/billions of miles away through a vacuum and has conditions so inhospitable that you cannot survive for more than a few weeks once you arrive there anyway. It is reasonable to assume that even if the volcano we live on erupts, it is still easier to live on it than on the 'continent' that was discovered.
Try again with a better analogy because yours is crap.
> A six times as large backpack isn't a gameplay advantage?
Not particularly, no. The alternative weapons are pretty balanced with the default ones, and you're probably not going to use every single one of them anyway. I doubt most people use every class, I know I don't.
> Colors matching the environment and making you harder to spot isn't a gameplay advantage?
We're talking about TF2 here, not some stealth shooter. The thing you can change about the look of your character is... your hat. And there is no prone position. I have never heard of anyone wearing a hat to 'blend in' with their environment, and if you had any experience playing TF2 you would realize how completely preposterous that idea really is.
> So unless you already have purchased TF2, your friends who have will have an advantage over you. And depending on their playing style, they may not even welcome you, if they have to make special considerations for your limited account's abilities.
They will not. There is NO gameplay advantage between the two account types. In fact I wish I could downgrade so I won't receive those cosmetic item drops...
If your friends don't welcome you, it's probably because they think you suck, or they don't like you.
Wouldn't that just force him to commit increasingly serious crimes to get the health care he needs?
It seems you are the retarded one. Your amazing 'solution' works only for dominant traits caused by a single gene. Of course if you had any clue about biology you would have known that, so until you do it might be best if you refrain from advocating eugenics.
That wasn't shocking.
> Would it be feasible to pre-render every possible scene in the game and then just throw that up based on which direction the user moves?
No, of course it wouldn't be. Let's say we have a completely featureless map that is 100m by 100m, and we track coordinates in (integer) millimeters. This gives us 100000 * 100000 = 1 billion different points we can occupy. Wait, now we can't jump, and our face is stuck at some distance above the ground. We add being prone and crouching to our positions, and the ability to jump, and, while we're at it, it would be nice if we could see our body fly around when being hit by a grenade or something, so to be on the safe side we add height to our coordinates and set our maximum height to 10m. Now we have 1000000000 * 1000 = 1 trillion possible points. For the sake of the example we'll assume the data from a single point to be 1920 * 1200 * 6 pixels (looking 6 directions: up, down, left, right, forward, and back, and if you look forward-left-up we'll just combine the pictures somehow) so at 4 bytes per pixel that is 52MB, but let's assume we can magically losslessly compress this into 1MB. Congratulations, our image lookup table now contains almost 1 exabyte of information.
Note that all the above numbers are rather conservative. Maps tend to be much bigger than 100 by 100 meters, and coordinates in games tend to be tracked much more precisely. Many games allow you to go much higher/lower than 10 meters, especially those where you can float about as a spectator (which increases the amount of points from where a player might look spectacularly). The magical compression is probably relatively reasonable as neighbouring coordinates will usually look very much alike and you can probably get away with storing the differences in many cases.
Anyway, now we have a service where every client queries a 1 exabyte database about 30 times per second. Even assuming that is feasible, now we have to superimpose the bad guys... and to do that we need to know what the environment looks like. We don't want to superimpose a bad guy over a tree if he's standing behind it, so we need the 3d model of the map so that we can decide which parts of the enemy to draw. This is starting to look a lot like rendering...
It seems your idea would be a complete disaster and it's several orders of magnitude cheaper to render scenes only when they are required (while accepting the risk of sometimes rendering the same scene multiple time).
> Like using -1 instead of 1 as "true". Thereby having all 1's set instead of a single bit which, in theory, could change.
When bits start changing, reliability goes right out of the window. Sure there is a rather unlikely chance that some boolean value in RAM gets hit by a cosmic ray, and in your scheme this would result in an invalid value always, rather than an invalid value most of the time, while sometimes flipping the boolean value from true to false or back. Of course once we deem it likely that booleans can spontaneously change, testing for them "if (invalid(someboolean))" becomes completely pointless, because the testing itself introduces a boolean value, which we just established is unreliable.
Besides, perhaps they like to but multiple boolean values in a single word, which works if it's encoded as a single bit, and not so much as when it's encoded as "all 1s".
This is all assuming only boolean values get changed. Once you start flipping bits in loop counters, stack pointers, instruction pointers, you're fucked.
Your plan sounds interesting at first but I'm afraid it would prevent very few (if any) bugs, and modifying a compiler to use -1 for true rather than 1 may well introduce *more* bugs (especially when interacting with other code that may or may not have been written in c++).
> Just remember lots of people will remember your name if your the first person to walk on mars, and never come home.
Let me be the first to say "Yay...".
That makes sense, I'd forgotten all about gravity. Thanks for the explanation :)
> Would you rather be one of the faceless masses on earth, or one of the pioneers who sacrificed to free mankind from earth?
Definitely one of the faceless masses.
More importantly, why should I give a fuck about the survival of the human race when I (and all my friends and family and all hypothetical offspring I may have at that time) will be dead?
> We could get to Mercury with solar sails and land with hydrogen rockets.
You can fly towards the sun with solar sails? How does that work?
That seems rather redundant, given that the post he replied to made the exact same point.
Assuming we all believe that book is completely reliable and true, it still doesn't tell us anything about how the universe works. Surely even the most devout Christian would have to admit that when it comes to examining the building blocks of the (physical) universe, a particle accelerator such as the LHC is more useful than a bible?
IQ doesn't measure absolute intelligence, it measures the intelligence of an individual compared to the rest of the population. The average IQ is 100, by definition, and the notion of everyone getting "+30 IQ" is ridiculous, and there is exactly one way to accomplish it: redefine the average to be 130 instead of 100.
> You state this as matter of fact when it is still in the realm of matter of opinion. The fact of the matter is that Universal Health Care is in the best interest of the ill at the expense of the healthy. In some instances, contagious diseases for example, the treatment/quarantining of the ill is in the best interests of both the ill and the healthy but in others, lung cancer caused by smoking for example, is only in the best interest of the ill at the expense of the healthy.
Where I live the average smoker pays more in taxes than he or she costs through smoking-related health problems. Your objection assumes no tax on cigarettes. More generally, activities that significantly increase ones chances of requiring medical attention could be taxed by some amount that approximately compensates for those extra medical costs, thereby creating a system that is fair (on average).
> The problem with people having a right to health care is that must also be accompanied with a responsibility to try as best as possible to keep yourself healthy to be in the best interests of all. The act of forcing you to live up to that responsibility will encroach on your other rights (religion, expression, choice, etc.) so it cannot and should not be done and as a result you cannot have a right to health care.
Presumably the free health care is paid through taxes, so given the fact that a person is contributing to the system, I see no reason why that person would feel guilty about making use of that health care assuming they have made a reasonable effort to be healthy. Which isn't the same as trying your best as possible to keep healthy (although if everybody did that, the taxes required to pay the health care would go down for everyone). Technically we could all live in plastic containers, and nobody would ever catch and/or spread an infectious disease from that point, but most people don't consider those who catch a cold to be negligent even though it could theoretically have been prevented (if only that person were trying his or her best as possible to keep healthy). I think it likely that trying at all times to stay as healthy as possible might actually be more expensive (both for the individual and society) than to merely make a reasonable effort and failing every now and then.
> Think of it this way; you may be able to ethically compel someone to help another (i.e. save their life) if it costs them nothing (other than an insignificant/inconsequential amount of their time) but you cannot ethically compel someone to do so if it actually costs them something as it is depriving them of their property (which is an existing, higher-order right) against their will. Universal Health Care attempts to foist this deprivation of property to a country-wide scale while trying to hide the fact that it is doing so. It is wrong (opinion).
I don't know where you're from, but in my country I am required by law to make a reasonable effort to help others who are in immediate danger, provided lending assistance would not put myself in significant danger. If I see a toddler drown in a 4-feet deep pool, I doubt "but entering the water would have ruined my beautiful new shoes!" would be considered a valid reason not to attempt a rescue, and I would very much be considered at least partially responsible for that child's untimely demise, and I prefer it that way. It seems rather callous to me that you consider your property to be more important than the life of another human being.
Why? Your right not to have your stuff taken from you is no more self-evident than the right to sufficient food. Indeed for long periods in our history it was perfectly normal for the people in charge to take what they wanted from those they ruled.